In this blog post I will talk about some of the most critical areas of Magento’s conversion rate optimization process – Magento’s shopping cart and Magento’s checkout page.

Online store owners often don’t realize how much more money they could earn if they invested just a small amount of time and money into conversion rate optimization. Each store is unique and different, with different products and design, different customer’s demography etc. This means that each online store needs to be fine tuned to achieve optimal number of sales. This fine tuning process is called conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Although each store is unique, some things in Magento are universal and some mistakes are made very often. I will outline two of the most critical conversion rate issues with Magento’s cart and checkout page…

Sometimes, clients requirements exceed the defaults built into the Magento. Recently we came across a task that among other things required manipulation of bundle products in Magento. In order to help my coworker Tomas I wrote this little code snippet that programatically adds bundle product to cart.

Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients in Sweden. I had some trouble figuring out how to send default Magento order email with all of the order info. After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here is the solution on how to send email after successful order has been made.

If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup, you will surely get many replies. Everyone will present you his favorite. My first developed online store was created with standard osCommerce platform. After three or four projects, I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently for years.  Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had many advantages. I switched to Magento™ early this year and this is my final choice.

Let’s look at the popularity of those platforms now.

Google™ Trends is a great tool to check some platforms popularity by comparing it to the competition. For my short analysis, I compared: