Top Magento challenges and how to deal with them

Magento is one of the most popular platforms for medium and big eCommerce businesses, and for a lot of reasons. Being one of the most flexible eCommerce solutions, it allows you practically any kind of integrations and adding any features that come to your mind.

While working with Magento, you may stumble upon different challenges and being prepared for them will save you lots of time.

Let’s dive in some of the most common ones and how to solve them!

1. Developing custom features vs using extensions provided by a third party

There are over 2,787 extensions for Magento so if you have an idea for a feature, first check on the Magento marketplace.

Magento test the quality of the extension’s code and safety. Magento developers contribute extensions to the marketplace, but you can also find some great modules available only on the websites of extension providers. Use trusted extension providers such as Aheadworks, Mirasvit, Amasty, Mageworx.

The secret is that if you change your mind and decide not to use the extension, you can get a refund. Keep in mind that not all companies allow such “returns” so check the conditions before you make a purchase.

If you can not find the right module in the marketplace, the next option would be to build it on your own. Customisation of an existing plugin may cost you more than the development from scratch.

Your project manager will estimate the amount of time needed for the development and installation and you will be able to estimate the projected return on this investment.

2. Slow loading

Slow loading is one of the biggest killers of your revenue. This may lead to cart abandonment, higher bounce rates, missing page components and as a result – decrease in sales.

You can check the issues by yourself enabling the Magento Compilation function and partnering with a reliable hosting provider. However, most often, the problems lie much deeper and the processes that slow down the website may be optimized only by a professional. You can visit PageSpeed Insights and ask your dedicated team to fix the problems mentioned there.

After the optimization, you can check the results by running the PageSpeed Insights test again.

3. Poor ranking of the website

Make sure you creat search engine friendly URLs for your Magento site.

Do not forget to enable the Search Engine Optimization in your Magento store, it takes just a couple of minutes but helps a lot.

Enabling the filter in product search, Magento will change the link by default and make it less friendly.

Installing the right extension will let you save the link unchanged no matter how many filters a visitor enabled in their search on your store.

• Google Site Maps

Being one of the “must-have” SEO features for a store, Google Site Maps allow you to structure all pages on your website and made them easily crawlable by Google. You can generate a compliant sitemap with the URLs for category pages, product pages and CMS pages following these instructions.

Hint: Google Site Maps in Magento are supported by Yahoo! and Microsoft bing as well.

• Managing your site redirects

Imagine you have to change a product page’s URL for a promo. In this case, you will need to link the old URLs to the new ones using the admin panel (a quick guide on how to from the Magento documentation).

4. Fixing shopping cart rules that aren’t working

Price rules that get applied when the product is added to cart are called shopping cart rules. Catalogue price rules let you show all the offers straight on the product pages.

Shopping cart rules are the rules that let you apply your customers special offers:

• Discounts on specific products or purchases over a certain value
• Free shipping on products from specific categories
• Discounts on particular shipping or payment method
• Coupon codes
• “Second product for free” promotion
• And many more

The easiest way to check if your shopping cart rules are working is to actually try to use the coupon codes or make specific orders.

If your rules are not working the way you designed them to, the reason may be:

• You have not set up the correct rules. Hint: if you would like to set up a rule for orders of more than 1 product, you should use “= or more than 1” but never “more than 0”.
• There is some customization getting in the way.

5. Magento updates and security

You should regularly check the patches and run security updates for your store. MageReport is a great resource for this.

Most news about security updates is announced on the websites of the Magento communities.

The time needed to install a patch depends on the amount and the quality of customizations in your store. For example, if you have to change the core files, it will take anywhere between 1 and 15 hours. Often this may be included in your Magento Support package and you will not have to pay for it extra.

Tip: Check your store using MageReports to avoid security flaws every couple of weeks.

6.  Magento support

If you want to be sure that your store is set-up well, secure and running 24/7, you should partner with a dedicated support team.

If you want to sleep peacefully at night knowing that your website will be up all the time, go for 24/7 support packages. These offers may include monitoring and emergency support only or some hours of development as well. Usually, you will get access to the 24/7 helpdesk and ready to react as soon as a problem occurs.

The best option would be if you choose the same company to manage all website development and support activities. Otherwise, you may face misunderstanding between these companies and much more time needed to fix the problem.

The simpler functionality of the website, the more stable your website is. The more sales you have, the more losses you may suffer and that’s why support becomes crucial.

7. Inventory management

One of the interesting features is “Alert me” – notifying customers when a product is available for sale again. Basic analytics shows you the best sellers, but for everything that is more sophisticated, you will require additional modules.

Keep in mind that the Magento platform does not allow you to work with multi-storing by default. If you would like to show the rest of the products on the different warehouses you need to use an extension.

Some of the most interesting inventory management possibilities are:

• Automatically assign the preferred shipping warehouse depending on the location of the customer
• Bulk update of stock levels and statuses in just a few clicks
• Track your product movement through storage and shipment
• Warehouse management: edit the list of warehouses, assign a person responsible for each one and manage their permissions
• Get low stock alerts and set your own rules for notifications
• Forecast stock levels for certain products

To wrap up

While being one of the most popular eCommerce solutions, Magento gives its users lots of possibilities in terms of customizations and integrations.

However, Magento is a complicated solution, making some simple operations difficult to control and manage for inexperienced users.

Some Magento challenges can be easily solved by changing the configurations in the admin panel while others require collaboration with a certified Magento developer.

This article has been contributed by Mary Borysova

Mary is a CMO at OpsWay. Mary builds the bridge between eCommerce businesses and website developers. When not creating the OpsWay eCommerce ecosystem, she travels and enjoys sunset runs.