All posts by Eddie May

About Eddie May

Web developer and Magento SEO & Sales Optimisation specialist.

Show stock levels in Magento

magento, Open Source

Magento is a really good e-commerce platform yet there are a number of quirks or missing features that you come across as you start developing ecommerce websites.

One quirk, or ‘missing feature’,  is that there is no ‘show all’ functionality within the default pagination. From within the administration user interface you can set the number of products per page to show but not to show all (This is now available in the latest versions of Magento).

Another missing feature is that by default, the number of items within stock are not shown on the product page. The interface shows if the product is in/out of stock but not how many there are in stock. I know this may not be something you would necessarily want to show, but again you’d expect this to be a setting within the admin UI.

Showing stock levels on you product page within Magento is not particularly difficult for simple product types & I’ll show you how to achieve it. It means editing a template file within your Magento template, so you’ll need ftp access to your server.

1) The file you need to edit is app/design/frontend/default/default/template/category/product/view/type/simple.phtml

2) The code you need to replace is:

<?php if($_product->isSaleable()): ?>
<p><?php echo $this->__('Availability: In stock.') ?></p>
<?php else: ?>
and replace with this:
<?php if($_product->isSaleable()): ?>
<p><?php echo $this->__(‘Availability: ‘) ?>
<?=(int)Mage::getModel(‘cataloginventory/stock_item’)
->loadByProduct($_product)->getQty() ?>
<?php echo $this->__(‘ in stock.’) ?> </p>
<?php else: ?>
Show Stock Levels in Magento
Show Stock Levels in Magento

What this means is that if the product is in stock, the customer sees how many items are in stock. Not what everybody wants, but our client did. You can see the result in this image.

Leicester ecommerce website relaunch

magento, Open Source

Leicester ecommerce agency Fresh Web Services, have migrated (& redesigned) mymonthlies.co.uk from zen-cart to the Magento ecommerce platform. As part of this process we migrated all products, customers and orders, as well as redesigning the site along the way.

Mymonthlies.co.uk sells a range of feminine hygiene (organic tampons and panty pads, etc) and sanitary disposal bags to consumers and businesses throughout the world.

The decision to move from Zen-Cart to Magento was based on the belief that Magento offers a better platform for expanding their online sales and reach. Improved customer sales tools will help identify where best to focus their marketing and promotional resources.

Magento New Order Emails

magento, Open Source

Recently I had an issue with Magento emails. While searching for a solution I came across loads of people wanting to know why new order confirmation emails were not being sent to customers or to the shop owner.

Some of the confusion around this issue is a misunderstanding about the order workflow. From 1.4.0, Magento only sends an order email once payment has been received from the payment gateway such as Paypal.

A second cause of confusion is that you have to configure Magento to actually send out emails. By default, email notifications are turned off. To turn emails on you need to do the following:

1) Log into the Admin UI, and select Configuration/Advanced/System.

magento configuration
Magento Advanced/System tab

2) In this tab you’ll find ‘Mail Sending Settings’. Make sure that the ‘Disable Email Communications’ drop down is set to ‘No’.

Magento Disable Email Communication
Magento Disable Email Communication

So, before you start to hack at core files to make new order confirmation emails work in Magento, make sure that you are aware of the order workflow & the need to enable emails within Magento.

Magento Ecommerce Website Live

joomla, magento, Open Source, , ,

Leicester web design agency, Fresh Web Services are pleased to announce the launch of several websites in recent weeks.

First, is the Magento powered Goldmark Books, selling the beautifully produced books published by the Uppingham art gallery and publisher. This is the first of a series of Magento powered ecommerce websites we will be rolling out for Goldmark Art Gallery.

Our most recent project is a Properties Manager holiday cottage rentals software service, appropriately called LookB4UBook. Those searching for UK holiday cottages can view videos of the cottages and the surrounding area, as well as viewing pictures and reading descriptions, etc.

Last, but not least, Northampton Probation Trust website is live. Powered by the award winning Joomla!™ content management system, we were responsible for the design, hosting, training and implementation of the northants web design project.

Saving Money – Public Sector Procurement

Uncategorized, ,

George Osbourne has sounded the clarion call to slash public sector spending. In those ‘non ring fenced’ departments, savings of up to 25% are being demanded. Having worked within the public sector (local government) I know there are savings there to be made. I also know how real savings could be achieved – by radically reforming a public sector procurement process that increases costs for no benefit at all.

I have had the frustrating experience of tendering for public sector contracts, where the whole process seems to drive up costs, a sort of unintended consequence of a ‘compliance’ culture, where individuals appear more concerned to cover their backs than to make a decision. The result is that procurement officers place almost impossible barriers to entry to smaller and possibly cheaper suppliers, with demands that only larger and more expensive companies can comply with. For the procurement professionals, the result is that whatever the outcome, they escape blame because they appointed the best/most expensive supplier and its really not their fault if such a reputable company fails to deliver.

Let me give you a recent example. A police authority in central England publish a PQQ for a content management system (cms). They are not a large organisation and their requirements are rather simple and run of the mill. A small, local company might prove to be an ideal supplier. However, the PQQ states that prospective suppliers must have delivered 5 ‘large scale’ cms implementations within the last three years.

‘Large scale’ must imply contracts of at least £100,000 plus, yet their own requirement is not ‘large scale’ – Joomla!, Drupal or Alfresco, at a push, would suffice. Few small companies will have that sort of portfolio, otherwise they will have ceased to be a small company. Straight away these procurement professionals have ensured that this project is going to cost far more than it should.

Prospective suppliers must also have public liability insurance to the value of £10 million! I mean, how much damage could a bodged cms implementation do? This cms is not going anywhere near sensitive information, so why such an exorbitant insurance demand? Once again, the procurement process is upping the costs, for no real benefit at all (except for the procurement professionals, who now have a large scale public sector procurement on their CV).

Cynical? Possibly, possibly not.

How much?!

Open Source, , ,

How much does free cost?

When discussing intranets and website proposals with clients, Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007 (or 2010) is often cited by the client as an option. Afterall, the argument goes, they already have a licence since they bought xyz business servers some time ago. Well, yes and no. To use your Sharepoint 2010 as an intranet, you require the Client Access Licenses (CALs), which are only included in the Enterprise Agreement from Microsoft.

Often then, clients are surprised to hear that they don’t, in fact, usually have a licence to deploy Sharepoint as an internal website, let alone as a public facing website. The next question is then, ‘How much are the additional licences’?

Well, that’s a difficult question to answer, not least because the answer is dependent on a number of factors, in part upon the client’s relationship with their Microsoft reseller. Licence costs are notoriously opaque. This is not an unusual situation – ask an Oracle customer! However,  recent postings have gone some way to letting us bench mark potential costs of using Sharepoint 2010 to power a public facing website.

For a standard licence, the upfront cost is between €5,000-9,500 per server, with a 25% annual Service Assurance (SA) if you want to be able to upgrade, etc. So, for a 3 server farm, on an internal facing website (say intranet), for 1,000 users (for which you need CALs), the upfront, one-off cost would be around £66,000.

For an enterprise licence, the costs are somewhere between €20,000-32,000 per server, plus the 25% annual SA, plus the licence of the FAST search server licence (c. £14, 000). If you do want to deploy more than one server (and you do), then the costs rise accordingly. Bakker suggests that a 3 server farm, for a single public facing domain, would cost in the region of £68,000 (I’m not sure what the costs would be if you wanted to run multiple domains off your Sharepoint 2010 installation).

Suddenly, free has become very expensive! This is of course before you even begin to factor in the other costs (design, development, support, training, etc). The costs can be dramatically reduced using an Open Source solution – the software is usually licence free and the servers tend to be cheaper to purchase and service, and using cloud services can help to reduce costs further.