Magento comes by default with a number of product types for different situations. These product types are: Simple, Virtual, Downloadable, Grouped, Configurable or Bundle. Each product type shines in particular scenarios - bundles are great for building custom products, grouping items together as a discount while still managing stock levels. Grouped Products are great for quick data entry in B2B or when multiple qty's of different products need to be chosen quickly. Configurable products are great when you have to select multiple options to choose a single product (ie: Large and Red).

Through Magento's great extension ecosystem, it's now possibly to mix and match Configurables (the ability to choose multiple options for a single product) with Grouped products (the ability to choose multiple quantities of similiar products) in a single product detail view page.

Now, obviously, this screenshot is a cut down example but consider the above scenario where you might be ordering Team Jerseys, School Uniforms or Work Uniforms and you may need to order 3 x Large, Red Men's, 3 x Large, Blue Men's, 2x Small, Red Women's etc. In grouped product scenario, you would have a massive grid of products containing all the different sizes and colours for both mens and womens. Or alternatively, in a configurable product scenario, you would need to enter and re-enter the page many times.

Mix this up with an Ajax 'add to cart' affect and you can achieve very quick ordering of complex product types very easily. Simplifying these processes are vital. Our Google Analytics data shows us that the large majority of orders are placed by a customer in under 5 minutes. In many cases, it's less than 3 minutes. Making it difficult for customers to fill their baskets is like walking into a shopping centre where, you can only use a carry basket instead of a trolley and everything is on shelves almost out of reach and then reaching the checkout and there's a 20 metre queue. It would be a frustrating experience. Always keep these things in mind when developing your Ecommerce experience for customers.

If you need to log or monitor actions performed in Magento Admin? Inchoo's admin logging actions extension comes to the rescue. A feature normally only found in Magento Enterprise Edition, this extension will help you discover which admin user logged in, where they were and what areas were modified, if any. And of course, this can also serve as a security tool as well.

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Magento's out of the box search experience is not the best, we can all agree. One of the sorely missed points is that CMS Pages are not searched by default. This can be a painful experience for you, if you have a lot of worth Static Page Content. Read More

Magento Ebay integration extension now made available free from Magento connect

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Magento doesn't have the native ability to export well-formed feeds that can be consumed by Google Shopping, Getprice Shopbot, MyShopping and other Shopping Comparison websites like Shopwiki and Ozbargain but as is nearly always the case with Magento, there's some good extensions to help with that. In this post, we describe why you need to be on Australian Shopping comparison websites to market your ecommerce business and how best to do that.

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Choosing software to run your Magento Newsletter Campaigns is no small feat. We choose Mailchimp for a very good reasons. Read on to find out why using Mailchimp is great for Magento Newsletter Campaigns.

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Are you trying to choose an Australian merchant gateway provider for your ecommerce store or want to quickly see if your bank or payment provider is supported by Magento? We've compiled a great list of supported payment providers in Australia.

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Magmi is a Magento Mass Importer developed as a magento DATABASE client, (ie not a magento extension) , that operates directly in SQL and is the result of a deep analysis of the Magento Database Model. The first magmi goal was catalog import & update. It can create products or update an existing catalog and deal with HUGE data (Millions of products could be managed by magmi,but even above a few 1000’s , you’ll see the real difference with dataSlow)

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How to get Securepay Merchant Gateway working with Magento Commerce.

1. Remember to always initiate your Merchant account with your Bank asap. It often takes weeks. Some of our thoughts working with different Banks

Westpac - you can utilise the Fontis Westpac Payway and Quickgateway Extension. This extension communicates directly with Westpac so there's no need for an Eway / Securepay account

St George - allows direct communication also using another Fontis extension - be aware that it only works for their IPG product and it cannot be run on a shared server. You will need to have your own VPS or Dedicated Server and sufficient Linux skills to compile the PHP module. In short, it's quite a pain.

ANZ, CBA or NAB - You are required to use a 3rd Party like Eway or Securepay to communicate with these banks. Both Eway and Securepay have extensions available for Magento.

Getting Started with SecurePay (eway to come later)
We tend to favour this particular SecurePay Extension Magento SecurePay Extension over the Fontis one but I forget why we're not using the Fontis one now. I recommend enabling debugging in the extension and also in Magento Admin -> Advanced -> Developer -> Log Settings. These log files are written to:

 var/log/exception.log
 var/log/system.log
 var/log/Sxml.log

(the last one is for securepay - for some reason, this sometimes won't get created with an error: var/log/Sxml.log" cannot be opened with mode "a" in the exceptions.log file, so we manually create an empty file with the correct permissions)

MerchantID & Password are not the ones they send you (or your client) in the email. Those are just the details required to login to the Merchant's interface. Securepay's technical support is actually fantastic, so I suggest you call them, tell them you need to confirm the XML API Gateway MerchantID & Password with them and they will help you out.

We generally use the well known test card: 4111-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx for testing and just test against the live gateway. Be aware that numerous bad attempts to SecurePay can trigger their firewall systems to block your server. The final line below means our gateway is working but the card is wrong. It's sufficient for the time being.

INFO (6): Preauth Declined. The remote Gateway reported the following status error: 504 Invalid merchant ID
INFO (6): Preauth Declined. Transaction Declined (56): No Card Record

Have fun and we hope this helped. Of course, if you get stuck at any stage, we can provide remote assistance via Skype or do it all for you.

It's one of the more expensive extensions for Magento but if you are looking for a Group Buy / Purchasing extension for Magento then this extension looks very promising. 

There is another extension similar to it in MagentoConnect but the developers aren't running their own Magento store and you can't purchase it from them. Four days after I contacted them enquiring about the extension, I have still not yet received a reply. For those that are still interested, it is called Groupon Clone and is priced at $399.00 at the time of this writing.

I haven't yet implemented either, though a project I am working on will use one or the other, likely the XinPlaza one because it seems I can actually buy it!

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