To keep your ecommerce site updated in accordance with the latest trends and requirements (whether technical or business related), you have to use pre-built extensions, since most businesses don’t have the resources or the time to make changes to their ecommerce stores using custom coding. This situation is true no matter which ecommerce platform your web store is on.

Luckily though, most popular ecommerce platforms like Magento have a vast library of third party Magento extensions (or plug-ins) available that you can use to implement practically any features or functionality you require that is not supported out of the box. And for any features not covered by Magento extensions, there are numerous ecommerce customization companies and Magento developers out there who you can talk to, to get the custom functionality you require, developed.

The most commonly requested and sought after changes related to any Magento site/web store are those related to its user experience and performance. There are a handful of key factors that affect a Magento site’s performance and user experience, which you must pay attention to, if you want your Magento web store to succeed. Here they are in a nutshell.

Site Speed

Site speed is the most important factor for any ecommerce site, since visitors won’t spend more than a few seconds on a web store that keeps them waiting in order to show the item they are looking for. No matter how interesting the deal may be or how fancy the store, if the page takes too long to load, your visitors will close it and move on.

So how do you ensure your Magento site’s speed is top notch? Simple. With just a few basic tweaks to your existing Magento site, you can improve your site speed exponentially. And they don’t even involve any extra expense, as most of these tweaks involve services already available on your Magento store. There is no need for any Magento customization or development at all. Here are the most important steps recommended for enhancing your Magento site’s speed.

Site Availability

The second most important factor that affects a Magento site’s user experience and performance is its availability. Your site’s visitors are your bread and butter and if they come your web store looking to browse or buy something and your web store is unavailable, they’ll likely just go to one of your competitors and never visit your site again. So you must ensure your your site is up and available at all times. And if by chance it isn’t (due to maintenance or some other reason), then it should clearly inform visitors of the same.

Maintenance activities are typically planned ahead of time so it’s a good practice to let your visitors know beforehand when a scheduled maintenance window will occur on your Magento store, during which the site will be unavailable. If regular customers and visitors are kept informed about scheduled downtime beforehand (and when the site will be back online), they are less likely to be caught off guard.

On the off chance that your Magento store goes down suddenly to technical issues or mishaps, you can still let visitors know about it (and when the site will be available again) by displaying a message on your Magento store’s home page. You can do so by using Magento extensions like Maintenance Mode (which is also free). Even if you’re operating multiple Magento stores and want to take only one of them down for maintenance (which is a hassle otherwise), you can easily do so by using the Maintenance Mode extension. And if you want to provide access to your store’s admin(s) and internal users while the site is down, you can do so via IP white listing.

Flexible Payment Methods

The third critical factor that has a major impact on your Magento store’s user experience is payment methods and you have to facilitate your customers in that area as much as possible. With Magento stores that support offline payment options like pay by check, cash, bank draft, pay order, etc. you often get situations where a customer will select a particular payment method at the time of checkout (like pay by check), but later on will wish to pay via another payment method like cash on delivery.

In real world transactions this is easy to do, since the customer is physically present in front of you when making the transaction and they can easily swap payment methods as per their preference, whether they choose to pay by credit card or cash or check, etc.

But with online transactions this isn’t easy to do, and in the case of Magento, it is not possible since Magento doesn’t allow you to change payment methods once an order has been created. However if you tell the customer that changing their payment method isn’t possible after checkout, you risk aggravating them. They may just cancel their order and go to a competitor for the same.

Again, the solution to this problem is to use Magento extensions like Payments Methods on your Magento store. With this extension you have the option of converting your receivables into immediate cash sales, so if the customer has selected a different payment method like check, bank draft, etc. at the time of check out and later wishes to pay by cash in person, you can easily change the order to a cash sale, using the Magento admin panel. This extension also allows customers to change their payment method after checkout (only if they have selected an offline payment option) so they have that flexibility available to them. And since it’s a plug-in, it doesn’t require any coding effort.

Order Management

The last factor on this list, which directly affects your Magento store’s user experience is actually one of the most overlooked areas in any Magento store i.e. order management.

Consider a scenario where on a busy day like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, someone from your team while working at the back end, accidentally cancels an order from a customer that was yet to be fulfilled. Since Magento does not allow you to restore cancelled orders by default, this would be a major issue as the customer would undoubtedly be upset at his order being cancelled without his permission. So how do you remedy this situation if it occurs? With Magento extensions of course.

Wrapping Up

By using Magento extensions like Undo Cancel Orders you can avoid any unpleasantness that may otherwise have occurred if someone from your team had accidentally cancelled a pending order.

Hope you found this post useful. Feel free to leave your comments below.

If you have a Magento design, development or Magento customization requirement you would like to discuss (for Magento 1 or Magento 2) please get in touch with us. To learn more about our Magento development services please visit https://folio3.com/magento-development

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