Magento Tutorials

The ecommerce industry has evolved since Magento was first released over a decade ago. In 2008, shoppers visited stores on desktop machines. They were tolerant of slow-loading pages and complicated checkouts because ecommerce itself was a novelty. Apple released the first iPhone just a few months earlier, and smartphones were nowhere near as sophisticated or ubiquitous as they later became.

Today, over half of all web traffic is mobile. In many stores, most purchases are made from mobile devices. Shoppers search on mobile and expect to be able to buy on mobile too. They demand a fast, pleasant, and uncomplicated user experience. Progressive Web Apps are the latest attempt to bridge the divide between the web and mobile and to improve the experience of mobile shoppers. 

Traditionally, ecommerce stores such as Magento were designed to be monolithic applications that ran entirely on the server. The back-end was on the server, and the interface was generated on the server before being sent to the browser.

In recent years, as mobile browsers have improved, interface functionality has gradually been moved into the browser. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are the logical culmination of this process, separating the front-end from the back-end entirely. Magento was an early mover in the PWA space, and today offers one of the most sophisticated and developer-friendly platforms for building and deploying Progressive Web Apps for ecommerce.

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When you first set up a Magento site, your products will have a price, a weight, an image and some other popular e-commerce options.

However, these options won't be enough for many stores. Different products have different needs. Here are some simple examples: 

• A book store will require fields for the Publisher, the Date of Publication, and the ISBN number.
• A clothing store may require fields for Type of Fabric, Clothing Size, and Clothing Color.
• A car store may require fields for Engine, Body Type, and Miles Per Gallon.

Magento allows you to add all those details through the use of "attributes". In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use attributes in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

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Blocks and Widgets are the key layout features in Magento. These two features are very closely linked, and are often used together.

One way to think about Blocks is that they are mini-Pages. A Block can also contain text, images, video and more. But because Blocks are smaller, you will see them around the edges of your site. Blocks are often inserted into headers, sidebars and footers.

However, Blocks are placed using Widgets. First you create a Block, and then you use a Widget to decide where that Block will be displayed.

Let's walk you through some examples and show you how Blocks and Widgets work in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

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However, when you're running an eCommerce store with Magento, Taxes are an unavoidable headache.

We're going to try to explain everything in plain English, but there's no getting around the fact that taxes are hard work.

So, sit down in a comfortable chair and make yourself a strong cup of coffee. Let's explore how taxes work in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

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Magento is an open source ecommerce platform designed and used by many companies to strengthen their brands. Today it is one of the most trusted platforms for developing web based ecommerce businesses.

Setting up an ecommerce store requires lots of strategies to be undertaken in order to come up with an excellent working online store, something that is not as easy as it sounds. By using Magento, users can create both simple and sophisticated stores that can be customized as per the users’ ideas.

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Great software development can turn difficult problems into easy tasks. But sometimes, the opposite happens and apparently easy problems become difficult tasks.

Magento makes some tasks way harder than they should be.

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Are you planning to add a website to your brick-and-mortar store? If Yes, then running your site on Magento could be one of your best choices.

You have several options to install Magento. In this tutorial, you will learn what you need to know before installing it.

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If you add products to your Magento store, multiple versions of your image are created automatically.

When you're editing your product, you'll see four different image versions:

• Base
• Small
• Thumbnail
• Switch

What do those versions mean, and where will you find those different images on your site?

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A couple of years ago, Magento appeared to be a dying platform lost inside eBay's corporate ownership. The software was being poorly developed, and their approach to security releases was absolutely awful. Community members were worried.

In 2017, things are very different. Magento was sold to a private equity company, and then Magento 2 was released after several years of delays. On the back of those changes, they raised $250 million. That money is burning a hole in their pocket. Their CEO publicly announced an acquisition spree, and recent purchases include:

• RJMetrics, an e-commerce analytics platform, which is now "Magento Business Intelligence Essentials".
• Shopial, which turns your store into a Facebook shop. This will be used in a new service called "Magento Social".
• Bluefoot, a Page Builder module, which Magento has rebranded as "Magento Advanced CMS".

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If you have a large Magento 2 site, you may well end up with a lot of content.

To stop this content from harming your site performance, you should understand indexing in Magento.

In a nutshell, indexing is Magento's way to store your shop data, such as products, categories, prices, and taxes.

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If you're brand new to Magento 2, it's not always easy to understand how to add new products.

Before adding products, you need some knowledge about Magento in general, including attribute sets, and tax classes. You also need to understand what happens after adding your product, in order to ensure it goes live on your site.

In this video from OSTraining's YouTube Channel, Rebecca Troth shows you everything you need to think about, from attribute sets to indexing:

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