LYONSCG ECOMMERCE ACCELERATOR (LEA) FOR MAGENTO Discussion of Features Eric Marsh July 2015
1 AN INNOVATIVE ecommerce SOLUTION The LYONSCG ecommerce Accelerator (LEA) for Magento was developed for small to mid-market companies who are new to ecommerce or who are challenged by the complexity, scope and time-frame when it comes to building the typical online store. This innovative solution includes everything needed to get started in ecommerce a package of Magento software, pre-selected integrations, and select services from LYONSCG that delivers a fully responsive site, for an affordable fixed cost with a fast time-to-market. Based on LYONSCG s experience with Magento, we ve spent over 1000 hours developing this robust package. We wanted to give you an overview of how LEA for Magento addresses the special needs of small to mid-market companies. Usability: How your customer finds products on your site and gets easily through the purchase process Performance: How fast does your site respond to user interaction and how the site performs when a great number of users are actively using the site Integrations: How LEA works with your existing systems for order management, product management and distribution Administration: How we enhanced the administration of Magento to make running the e-commerce site simpler and less time consuming Data Migration: How we can help make the switch from an existing platform onto LEA as painless as possible Development: How we incorporated best practices that enhance and improve the workflow as well as help the support team maintain site performance.
2 USABILITY Your primary objective is to make purchasing easy for online customers. Usability plays a critical role in increasing conversions. Ajax Add to Cart When a user is adding a product to their cart, no matter what page they are on, the product is added without a page refresh. LEA provides instant feedback that processing is happening and then displays the minicart with the new product added. There is no question in the shopper s mind that the product they clicked on is getting added to their basket and reduces the potential frustration and responsiveness of the site, even on a slow mobile connection. Persistent Cart Having a cart which saves its content between sessions only used to exist for logged in users. We took that existing functionality and extended it so all users, logged in or not, can have an even better continuity between shopping or browsing sessions. Many shoppers will leave products in their carts with the thought that they will come back later and purchase them. Traditionally, after a certain number of hours, the contents of the guest shopper s cart will be erased. With LEA, the contents of the cart will be saved on that user s device indefinitely. A product that was added to their cart on their iphone or laptop on Monday will still be available for them to purchase a week later allowing an otherwise lost opportunity to convert. Improved Image Zoom The traditional Magento image zoom does not have many configuration options. We have replaced it with an image zoom that has many configuration options, including the very popular inner-zoom option. Advanced layered navigation We have implemented a best of breed advanced navigation which provides many advantages over the default Magento navigation, including Multi-select Color swatches More
3 2 Different Options for Mega Menus We have two built in options for mega menus on the desktop. Depending on the complexity and depth of the product category, we find that one of these options will work for most clients. By allowing your shoppers to see the full depth of the product catalog, users will be able to find exactly the products they are looking for with fewer clicks and less guessing. Fly-out Left Navigation for Mobile We have built a custom fly-out left hand navigation for use on mobile and tablet devices. Using the hamburger icon as a cue to the user, a full length menu is displayed with options for expanding into sub-categories. Store Locator Sometimes a customer is just looking for the closest brick and mortar location so they can visit one of your stores, or to check if the store is open. We have a built in Google Maps based store locator which provides a quick way for a user to find a store and locate the relevant information. Each store has its own dedicate page which can contain store hours, phone numbers and any other special information that might assist a user. Add This LEA implements the AddThis extension to facilitate easy sharing of your sites content with their social networks. In addition, AddThis provides an easy to understand interface to track shares and likes. Quick View It seems that every site is using a quick view these days, and with good reason. By clicking on the QuickView link for a product, the user is shown a much larger image with configuration options, basic information, and the ability to add to the cart. The ability to get product detail information faster leads to faster add s to the cart. Solr Search LEA implements Solr search out of the box, which is a best of breed search engine for your product catalog. Magento offers weighting options for different attributes so term matches in the name of the product will rank higher than a term match in the 3rd paragraph of the product description. Solr also offers suggested terms and did you mean? suggestions. Adjusted Breakpoints LEA has standardized on a set of responsive breakpoints which provide the best user experience on devices of today and tomorrow. Ajax Compare List and Recently Viewed If your user is a comparison shopper, they will get improved performance and immediate feedback when adding products to the compare list. The recently viewed list also populates asynchronously, providing faster response times to the user. PERFORMANCE Faster page speeds are positively correlated with two major benefits, both of which generally lead to more ecommerce revenue: First, faster websites have a higher conversion rate, meaning more of the people who come to the store make a purchase. And second, faster websites increase site traffic, meaning that a faster site attracts more people into the store. LEA can help improve site performance.
4 Best of Class Varnish Implementation One major drawback of a typical Magento/Varnish implementation is that once a user logs in, that user loses all of the performance improvements that Varnish provides. The LEA implementation provides all users the excellent performance that one would expect from a site cached with Varnish. CSS & JS Minimization and Compression Sending fewer bytes over to a user and making fewer overall requests, especially to users on slow mobile connections, is a very simple and effective way to speed up a site. We have implemented both minimization (removing all unnecessary data from files) and compression (combining small files together) across the LEA implementation. We are saving over a dozen separate requests and reducing the overall size of the CSS and JS by at least 50%. Lazy Load Images Part of browser performance is ordering when certain content is downloaded vs, other content. For example, it is important that CSS is downloaded first so the page can start to be rendered earlier. Product images however, can be delayed and provide an even better user experience. In addition, LEA is just going to download the product images that it needs to render the page, not all of the product images available in the category. Sending only the images that are required both speeds up the rendering of the page, and saves the mobile user bandwidth. INTEGRATIONS Integrating an ecommerce solution with other systems including CRM, ERP, web analytics, email platform and more can interfere with customer service efficiency and satisfaction. LEA for Magento helps make 3 rd- party integrations seamless. Text File Based sftp Pull and Push Options for Integrations LEA has a robust import/export framework for handing flat file based integrations with 3rd party systems. LEA can pull files from remote systems to do an import, for example, via sftp and place an output file in a different directory on another machine for post processing. All of the plumbing is done, all we might need to do is some custom coding to adapt if there is custom file format for the integration. Pre-defined File Formats To streamline the integration process further, we have provided several standard file formats for common integration points Order export (XML) Inventory import (CSV) Review import (CSV) Category import & export (CSV) API Framework Many Order Management systems, and others integration points, expose an API that the ecommerce system can interface with, but the other system does not make any API calls itself. In this case, we have built an API Framework on top of the file base import system which allows LEA to easily pull in and send data to these 3rd party systems. As with the sftp solution, all of the plumbing is included. LYONSCG would just need to adapt the file formats.
5 ADMINSTRATION Setting up and configuring the system to support the ecommerce features shouldn t be difficult. Making site administration easier speeds up adoption and increases your ability to take full advantage of its functionality. Google Universal Analytics with ecommerce Funnel Google is strongly suggesting that all sites change to using Universal Analytics. LEA comes pre-packaged with Universal Analytics and tags setup for the checkout funnel. We also provide clear instructions on how to setup the checkout funnel inside of Analytics so you can see where customer might be abandoning in checkout. Google Tag Manager Configuring and setting up affiliate, remarketing and other types of tracking pixels and scripts can be tedious. LEA has built in support for Google Tag Manager which makes the process of managing and updating tracking tags much simpler and you don t have to include the development team when making changes. Optimize/Compress All Uploaded Images When uploading images for the homepage or landing pages, it is very easy to forget to compress the banners or save them for web. If using a 3rd party agency, you may not even know how the images are saved. Having bloated images on the home or landing page does cause a higher bounce rate. LEA automatically will optimize all images uploaded through Magento, including images added to Static Blocks or CMS pages. Many More Promotions LEA comes installed with a long list of additional promotion options that Magento does not offer out of the box Real BOGO Free gift with purchase By 2 get 1 50% off Time based coupons for registering an account (10% off for the next 24 hours) Many more DATA MIGRATION Data migration, whether launching a brand new site, or changing ecommerce platforms, is one of the most difficult part of any implementation. The data migration tools that LEA has bundled makes this process less painful. Simple 301 Redirect Importer (CSV) If migrating from another ecommerce platform, you probably have invested a lot of time and money in improving your search engine ranking. The URL s of the old site may not directly translate into the new SEO friendly format that Magento provides. We have included a simple method of massuploading the list of redirects, from the old site's URL, to the new SEO friendly URL. Category Import/Export (CSV) LEA provides a standard file format for importing and exporting category data. Modifying or creating a large amount of category data in excel is much faster and easier than doing it through the Magento admin.
6 DEVELOPMENT Magento is an open source platforms for ecommerce with great flexibility. However, its vast code base can make development a challenge. We ve used our vast knowledge of Magento to incorporate several modules based on best practices that enhance and improve the workflow. They also help support teams maintain site performance. Full-Page Cache Debugger When adding new modules to Magento, we have found that not all of them work with the full-page-cache. LYONSCG built the only full-page-cache debugger to find the exact module and blocks which are not caching correctly, and therefore hurting your site s performance. With the information provided by the FPC debugger, we can update the offending module to cache correctly, and get the site speed back that you are expecting. WHY LEA FOR MAGENTO LEA for Magento s responsive design helps online retailers meet the challenges of mobile ecommerce. Increasing usage of mobile phones for shopping along with Google s SEO and search engine ranking penalty for sites that aren t optimized for mobile make a responsive store a must. LEA for Magento is cost effective. The LEA package includes the base Magento platform and resources (Project Manager, Experience Designer, Technical Architect, Designers QA Analysts and Training) needed to turn up site with the content layout, navigation structure and application of the LYONSCG reference model. Documentation provided includes detailed functional requirements, project plan, developer style guide, technical design document, and implementation includes a pre-configured Magento platform, development & execution of a test plan. LEA for Magento is robust. The package includes the base Magento platform and resources (Project Manager, Experience Designer, Technical Architect, Designers QA Analysts and Training) everything needed to turn up site with the content layout, navigation structure and application of the LYONSCG reference model. Documentation provided includes detailed functional requirements, project plan, developer style guide, and technical design document. LEA for Magento is fast-to-market. Contract to launch in as little as 8 weeks, with most projects completing under 12 weeks. Skip much of the time-consuming front end requirements gathering and project plan development, LEA uses a pre-developed, off-the-shelf design and implementation plan. It also includes sample product data so customer products can be easily added by clients simply by matching LYONSCG examples. To learn more about LEA for Magento, please contact LYONSCG.
7 Thank You LYONSCG appreciates the opportunity to present our solutions for ecommerce to you. We believe that our extensive experience with strategy, creative services and technical implementation of solutions for many leading ecommerce sites will translate into a solution for you that will enable desired growth. We would be happy to review some current live sites we ve worked on with you, and provide a detailed ecommerce demonstration. About LYONSCG LYONSCG is the industry s premier ecommerce Digital Agency, serving brand, retail, and B2B organizations with tailored ecommerce solutions that maximize online potential. Headquartered in Chicago, the firm offers a full range of services beginning with Digital Strategy and Digital Marketing and extending through Experience Design, Platform Implementation, Application Development, Hosting and Support. The approach is holistic to provide every client with a creative, robust and increasingly profitable ecommerce website. LYONSCG is ecommerce Realized! LYONSCG 20 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 1750 Chicago, IL 60606 P: 312.506.2020 F: 312.506.2022 W: www.lyonscg.com