Optimising Magento for Speed…

Magento is probably the most powerful ecommerce software out there, however this comes at a cost, it is very power-hungry and Magento pages are rather large, often once customisation and images are added, pages can top 500Kb! Before you rush off and upgrade to a dedicated box, there are a lot of things you can do to speed up your installation.

Setting the ‘As Low As’ Price to be the Excluding Tax Value

One of my customers is primarily B2B and they wanted the ‘as low as’ price in the catalog to show the excluding tax value, rather than the including tax value as it is by default. I could not find a way of doing this in the admin panel, so I did some digging and the solution is very straightforward, so I thought I would post it here.

Tracking One Page Checkout Abandonment with Google Analytics, Properly!

Abandonment rates are key in eCommerce but the Magento integration with Google Analytics isn’t ideal, in that there is no funnel that tracks the progress (and therefore the actual point of abandonment) in the onepage checkout process.

Magento CSRF Vulnerability

Yesterday, Varien publicly acknowledged the existence of a serious vulnerability in Magento, the original blog post details the methodology for this exploit.

Using Magento as a Checkout, Payment and Admin System

So, you want to use the Checkout, Payment and Admin facilities but not the catalog? Well here’s a quick and painless solution.

If you have a set list of products then build the product list in the Magento back office, a previous post covers creating Magento products dynamically.

Once you have the products, all that is required is to add the products to the cart. The simplest way to do this is to feed two variables into the cart, SKU and Quantity.

Using Dropdowns for Attribute and Category Selection in Magento Catalog

There have been a few developers/ users on the Magento boards asking about alternative ways of selecting attributes, such as price or colour in the attribute filters on product catalog pages, so here is a really quick solution to convert the <ol> and <li> objects to a dropdown menus using <select> and <option>.

Creating Magento Products On-The-Fly!

Sometimes it’s necessary to create products on-the-fly, typically in situations where there are so many product possibilities that even a configurable product isn’t flexible enough! In such situations the need arises to create products dynamically.

Below is the PHP code to produce a single Magento product and add it to the cart.