Advance Magento FAQ Extension Features

The Advance FAQ Management Extension is developed by FME Extension. This extension enables your users to view the most frequently asked questions. Todays’ world is very fast everybody want each and every thing quickly. When users want to purchase any product,  many questions come in their mind. They want answers right on the spot. Now they don’t have to email or call you for asking such questions. This FAQ Magento Extension by FME helps users to get their answers  on the FAQ page.

This extension enables admin to create catagories/topics for FAQ. Questions and their answers can be created and assigned to these topics. You can set out the position/order of questions as you require.  By changing the orders you can set most frequently asked questions on the tops. You can enable or disable accordion style . If accordion style is enabled you can set which questions to be opened up automatically  within a topic.

Another  feature of this FAQ Magento Extension is that your customers can rate the FAQ.  Admin has the option that either registered or guest users can rate FAQ. You can enable or disable  FAQ  Block and FAQ Search block. If you enable “Read More” link it will take your customers to a new page and will list all FAQ related to that topic. With all these features this extension is very  comprehensive and  useful solution for your store to host FAQ.

You can also find reviews on Magento FAQ Extension at Magento Commerce.

Online Bookings and Reservations Made Easy

It is always important for business travelers and vacationer to reserve their rooms early to be able to receive best room prices. These days, it is much easier to book your room in advance, so there should be no need to arrive at your destination and still be looking for a place to stay. By using FMEs Booking and Reservation Extension you will be able to select the exact room type and the amenities that you desire to make your hotel stay comfortable and enjoyable.

Using this extension you will be able to know that if there is any customer who wants to have an appointment with you or he is looking for booking any room. it will give you edge of ordering your daily routine. This FME extension is especially for those vendors who offer online bookable services for their customers. In the online reservation system there is less chance of losing your customers.

If you don’t have a staff to look after your appointments or your managers were not on duty when some customers came in for booking room or to have an appointment with you, what will happen? Your customers will wait for your Manager? Or they will leave?  The answer to all three questions is yes. Your customers will leave and will go to somewhere else. The best solution for getting rid of this manual work is to have FME Magento Reservation system Extension. You can put all your information regarding your hotel management room prices discounts and all other feature that you are giving to your customers

Online Marketing and Product Labels

If you have worked hard to produce some great products according to the requirements of your customers. The next step is to inform them about your products. You would be eager to let them know how well your products are as compared to the competitors. This certainly is accomplished by marketing effectively. There are several techniques that can be used to deliver updates to customers such as email marketing, telephonic advertisement, Ads, social media etc.

The base line of all online marketing starts with SEO. You must have a SEO friendly site or a blog. A separate and effective landing page for products must be created to drive traffic to your site. It should have a unique URL, properly coded, photos, Meta tags, unique content and title tags. Having all these in place ensures that your site will come up in search engines effectively.

Another way of marketing is email marketing. You can send special deals designed only for email receivers. It also increases trust and good relations with customers.  Online marketing involves Google AdWords, PPC, social media, forums, blogging etc. Online advertisement allows you to influence customers in very effective manner.

Above mentioned strategies are all related to market your product, but you can adopt certain strategies that be used to advertise the product itself such as by using product labels. Labels are very effective in telling customers what the product is about or any sales offer quickly and concisely. Combining all these great strategies ensures more chances of catching customers.   If your store is based on one of the leading eCommerce platforms like Magento, osCart etc you can easily find plugins for product labels. Because Magento is the leader of all, there are many great Magento free and paid plugins already in the market to advertise your products…..

Product Labels Pro Magento Extension – Create your Custom Labels

Product labels are one of the very strong marketing tools that most of the internet marketers use today. They give quick information to customers and encourage them to buy your products. A flashy image on your product can advertise its quality, uniqueness, “why choose it” or any of its other attributes. It allows you to compete with established competitors. According to Amber Waves (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website), %66.5 billion was spend just on packaging in 2005 just to do better marketing exceeding the amount the industry spent on advertising.

Definitely packaging is not something that can be done for eCommerce but the concepts of marketing are important. Product Labels Pro Magento Extension uses this great strategy without any cost to help increase sales by catching visitor’s attention with your own uploaded images and your custom defined text.  Let us see some of the ways Product Labels pro can encourage customers to buy your product,

1 Consumer Choice:  It is the most effective way of informing customers about different choices they can make. They can discriminate among products hat which one better suits their needs. Therefore your product must be labeled in a way that it can attract more and more customers.

2. Economy Friendly: You don’t have to spend any amount on packaging and labeling physically. Place any type of Magento sale labels, special prices labels, new products labels or whatever by creating custom images and text. You are free to choose any size and form, put stunning effects to give your customers a pleasurable browsing experience.

3. Continuous improvement and competition: Product labels will also serve as a metric for product improvement. If a vendor uses any promotion like product labels, naturally competition will grow and other vendors will try to take lead by making improved products.

4. Outlining Key Features: Labels can serve the purpose of defining key features of the product for which a group of people has been looking for in a brief and quick view. So without wasting any time customers quickly understand if the product suits their needs.

5. Promotion: as stated above, most of the labels are utilized for running effective marketing campaigns e.g. a label with text “50 % off” will attract more clients than a product without label.

But choosing a right label is extremely important; it should be user-friendly, and   adequately informational.  You should find below information in order to effectively use labels,

1.       Information your customers will find useful

2.       Suitable colors and content

3.       Effective promotional appeals that can attract customers

4.       Where to put your labels

5.       Do you want to use text, image or both as a product label?

6.       Would you like to have multiple labels on category and listing pages?

7.       Do you want your labels to be automatically applied on products based on certain conditions (when talking about eCommerce).

Products labels Pro Extension allows you to do more than that with its rich backend functionality. It allows you to create countless rules with comprehensive set of conditions to apply them on products. Based on these rules, labels will automatically be applied. So no worries for you, this plugin gets the work done for you amazingly.

Magento Modules and Widgets

If you use IPhone, Android or any other handset you might have heard something about widgets. These are small programs built for some specific purpose e.g. to display whether updates on you cell phone or desktop pc, showing calendar etc. In case you already have a similar widget then you can create a new one with more customized settings.  So Widgets are just like extensions except that these are not as huge as Magento Modules can be. 

When we are dealing with Magento we have to understand its terminology which sometimes appear difficult to novice users. Let me introduce you to a term called “Frontend Block”. Basically what this means is that the frontend of your Magento is divided into several types of blocks such as structural or content blocks. You can refer to my other post “Basics of Magento Module” to understand these in detail.  In easy words you can say frontend is split-up into separate sections. Each section has its own configuration and can contain sub-sections etc e.g. I create two blocks on my home page, in the first block I place social icons and in the second I place any other link.

Widgets are the same frontend blocks as we discussed above. The benefit is that you don’t have to deal with XML files and tough folder hierarchy typically when you develop Magento extensions but widgets come with predefined backed configuration which allows you to easily setup widgets and place them anywhere on any page.

Features:

·         Helps you promote your products by putting any promotional content on product pages

·         Besides creating complex modules, just use simple widgets for subscriptions, chatting etc.

·         Add flash elements

·         Allows you to easily add image sliders, banners on any page etc.

How can widgets work for you?

–       Whether it be reviews, promotions, bookmarking, social links, images, new products, recent blocks or any category widgets work perfectly everywhere

So widgets are pretty important little tools which can quickly and efficiently fill up your requirements. You would not like to develop a complete plugin just to place a text besides the price of a product. In these situations widgets are helpful and very handy tools. In the next post we will see how to implement a widget in Magento……

Benefits of using Brands with Magento extension

If you are a business man or you are looking to start a new business, you might have been dreaming to get up the level of big famous store like Wall Mart etc. Several important factors contribute to make your efforts fruitful in making your business successful. One of such element is the branding of your business. You are not likely to sell anything without a brand name.  Branding is the core on which you struggle is based. It puts peculiar and persistent impressions on customers. It links your customers to your loyalty, quality, perceptions and much more.

These concepts apply to both types of businesses, eCommerce and physical stores. Let us see how Brands Magento Shop by Brands Extension can be utilized to build a rock solid success strategy.

Recognizable:

Brands help customers easily remember and recognize your products quality, commitment and they will never be in doubt on where to look for these products.  Brands can also be marketed personally by using special clothing that matches brand color scheme or simply use special color scheme as brand identity. Now customer can search these brands easily on your store.

Converting non-customers:

Naturally if your brand is spread around everywhere online, non customers are likely to recommend or use it at some time in future even if they don’t have any knowledge of your products.

Loyalty:

This is the psychological factor that is developed when people who use your products get positive experience with it. If they like it they will certainly recommend it to others, increasing your customers. Thousands of people will even participate in any event organized by the brand they love or you can see how some people like to tattoo on their body for their loved brands. For these types of customers, having brands available on your site are vital, they will spend more time on searching for products of these brands.

Customizable picing:

If you have developed your brand name with good reputation, customers will pay for any price. If you have more than $1 million to spend, you might look for good house, a sports car, an airplane or something like that, but imagine Brian Seigel in 2000 purchased T206 Honus Wagner card for $1.1 million, plus a 15 percent buyer’s fee.  So your brand can lift your business up beyond your imaginations. Online store already enjoy benefits of reduced pricing because they don’t have to spend too much like on physical stores decoration etc. So the usage of Brands Magento Plugins will definitely help your online store in a much better way. 

Extending business benefits:

Good brand can extend your business benefits to new products. Even your affiliations with somebody can benefit them and also increase your business. Placing your brand logo in marketing campaigns anywhere on net will attract customers towards your store.

Company equity:

You can delegate the legal rights of marketing any product to another company and can gain millions of dollars from this scheme. If your online brand has been established, you can utilize the benefits of this scheme allowing more and more people to reach out to your products.

Lower marketing expenses:

Your brand markets itself once established; you don’t need to put any extra efforts on convincing potential clients to buy your products.  Your brand serves the same purpose.

Easy decision making for purchasing a product:

When customers are confused on which type of products to buy, they will end up in choosing the brand that is more popular.

So now you know the benefits of brands, there must be a way customers can search any product with the help of brand such as Adidas, Cannon, and Apple etc. They cannot browse thousands of products just to look out for a particular product. Instead they would like to click on brand name to get their desired results.  Shop by Brand does the same thing. It allows your customers to search products in very flexible manner. It lists all the brands alphabetically in which case customer can click each alphabet to view all brands and select their product.

We will discuss about how this plugin can be used effectively to get your results in next posts……

Media gallery products video Extension

FME brings its valued Online Magento Store owners an extravagant Magento Media Gallery packed with various features that will help you attract new customers and create loyalty among the existing. Give your products and your Online Magento Store a face-lift by adding Videos for products or create a video gallery page for the store. Still doubtful about the fact that videos can be capable of inducing leads and ultimately converting them into sales? Well you’re in for a surprise because making and deploying videos has become a piece of cake now!

An Internet video can be created within a few minutes or a few hours if you are using the right software. Upload the video by using our Media Gallery Extension or upload it to Youtube and just enter the link from the Admin. Thus, your clients do not have to do anything apart from sitting back and watching the videos about your site and your product’s message with just a click. Watching and listening has always been more convenient and preferred than reading and it usually takes less time.
Our quality addons awards you the power to display your message to you clients without the need for them to read any content comprehensively. As time tells us, people and the Internet have advanced from reading, to listening, to watching, just like we did with newspapers to radio to TV.

However, the most crucial advantage of marketing through videos is the visibility you get off it. Not only is it more convenient to publicize on free video sharing websites like YouTube, but it can also be virally sent around the web without fearing that it loses its potentiality to get traffic to your Online Store. The social sharing or viral aspect is also its key features of the magento extensions…..

Increase Your Traffic With Photo Gallery Magento Plugins

While driving you might see sign boards at the corner of streets communicating you about what action you need to take next. Interesting point is that most of these sign boards are just images, use of textual information is very little.  Images can reveal the information which text cannot. By using images you are able to express emotions, ideas which are difficult otherwise.  Similarly if your website does not have high class images in place, the chances are most people would not like to visit it again.  Whether it is a blog, press release or anything else, use of multimedia is vital.

Especially if you are planning to build an eCommerce site, you main goal is to attract more customers and it can’t be achieved without putting multimedia affects in your site.  If you are using Magento as your eCommerce platform you must find out suitable Magento extensions for this purpose.  Let us see one of such plugin that can fill up this gap. Yes we are talking about Photo Gallery and Product Gallery.  See below the features of this module,

PHOTO GALLERY FEATURES

• Create albums to display images in effective manner
• Completely configurable albums such as name, date, order/position
• Multi-Store support
• Assign an album to any product
• Elegant style which is convenient to to customize with separated HTML/CSS

PHOTO GALLERY BLOCKS FEATURES

• Create configurable custom blocks which are WYSIWYG enabled
• Use unique identified for blocks
• Each block can be filled with images
• JQueary effects
• Three different themes of JQuery for blocks are provided

CONFIGURATION FEATURES

• Customize titles of gallery
• Custom URLs, SEO URL suffix for the extension
• Pagination enabled
• Flexible settings for LightBox configuration

Well the above stated features of Gallery  module are really beneficial to bring fruitful results. Galleries can be used for many important reasons such as if you want to present your portfolio, artwork, event images etc. It serves great many purposes. It also allows people to stick to a centralized place where they can view all images instead of moving to different pages.

Manage Jobs with Magento Plugins

Benefits of online business are very obvious to almost everyone. Internet is not just about selling products online, many other services are being utilized by using it. One such example is Human Resource services. Online job posting, resume management and online hiring are very common now. Even telephonic interviews by using internet are conducted instead of personal interviews. Therefore the market for products serving these needs is rich and growing faster.

Magento as an eCommerce platform serves the need of every business that is running online. It has a rich market scattered with dozens of products for each business type. We are concerned now with Magento Jobs Recruitment Extension providing solutions for Human resources and we find Open Jobs Manager a great utility because of its features.

 This Magento Addon provides 6 smart configuration sections to manage your jobs. You can define job types, their locations, departments and much more. Each job has a section from where you will be able to manage applications received against it. This section provides required information for applicants like Name, Email, Application date, Phone and resume. Also another wonderful feature without which an application is considered to be incomplete has been provided and that is social integration. You can now publish any job to Facebook, Twitter and Linked-in.

 Features:

• Create, edit, enable/disable Job type, location, departments
• SEO friendly URL for Job’s detail page
• Set Meta title, meta keywords and meta description for each job’s detail page
• View applicants from Job’s edit page
• Download CV and view details of applicant right from jobs management section
• Post job to your FaceBook wall from Job’s edit page
• Tweet Job on twitter from job’s edit page
• Share Job on LinkedIn from Jobs edit page
• View applicants count on Jobs grid
• Job listing page image can be set from configuration
• Can change the label of Jobs in top links and bottom links
• URL suffix can be configured from system configuration
• Can configure the number of jobs to display per page
• Can Filter jobs by location
• Can Order jobs by Department, date etc.
• Quickly apply for a job from a dropdown menu………..

Using Magento Modules for testimonials

Nothing can be more convincing than what testimonials can prove to be. They are the real feedback from people who have used any product and not of any sales person who will try to exaggerate the situation. Since web is a place where people tend to think differently than what would they do in physical stores, the selection and placement of testimonials on your site is very important. You would like to place them on a perfect place to get them working.

Advance Magento Testimonials Extension is a great utility to incorporate testimonials on your website. Let us see below its features,

MULTI STORE TESTIMONIALS FEATURES

• SEO Friendly features such as Meta information, custom URLs (routers)
• Order your Testimonials from the admin panel.
• Control the count of testimonials displayed on the main testimonials page
• You can disable the read more link so that there will only be the main testimonials page.
• Show/hide testimonials picture
• Select from up to 4 themes already integrated
• Integrated with Email Settings
• Mark a testimonial as featured
• Controlled through Configurations that each testimonials can have its own page

ADD TESTIMONIALS

• You can allow (Guests, Logged In, None) to post testimonials
• Have testimonials post automatically or once the admin has approved.
• Add testimonials form window can be configured to open in a popup, slide or new page.
• Show/Hide the following fields (Company Name, Contact Name, Contact Email, Website, Contact Photo, Shot Description)
• Ability to add 4 Custom fields (Other than the default fields)

TESTIMONIALS BLOCK: 

• You can show/hide the block
• Show featured or random testimonials
• Able to edit the Block Title, display count, and the read more link
• Choose from the Slider effects (fade, scroll), and control the duration
• Show/hide Pagination.

OTHER FEATURES

• No additional JavaScript added. Magento default prototype library used
• Open Source
• Easy to customize
• Easy to install, easy to upgrade, just copy to use

With all these great features mentioned above and without any further explanation, this module will definitely prove to be a fruitful tool to have on board.

For more magento modules – http://www.fmeextensions.com/