In June, Chloe got the opportunity to attend the Meet Magento Conference where she learned more about Magento’s latest evolution and picked up a ton of tips on how to make the most of the Magento platform. The conference was a great way to connect with peers in the industry and made everyone feel like they are part of a club. Read on to learn more about what’s happening in the world of Magento.
What’s Happening at Magento
- Big Picture
- Need for community
Key Notes
Guido Jansen: Guido talked about the newly created Magento Association whose mission is to advance and empower the global Magento community and eCommerce ecosystem through open collaboration, education and thought leadership. This formal body will give voice to the global Magento community and allow them to access the decision-makers and leadership at HQ. If you are a Magento user, you can and should get involved. Membership is currently still free, so don’t delay joining!
Phillip Jackson, the host of the dedicated Magento podcast MageTalk, gave an impassioned plea to everyone in the Magento community to work together to make the Magento product better. There is a sea change happening at Magento right now, which means Magento users have a massive opportunity to effect change and help steer the direction of the platform.
Tech Updates: M1 vs. M2
A couple of years ago, you might remember that Magento announced that they would be launching Magento 2 and that Magento 1 would be discontinued. Unlike Shopify to Shopify + which is literally a click of a button, Magento 1 users were going to be in for a big change. The transition, according to Magento, would require a complete rebuild with an entirely different code stack.
This news shocked a lot of people, largely because there are many businesses happily utilized M1. Which is why it makes sense that there were some rumours going around that M1 may still remain supported after it’s official end date. Please understand that absolutely none of these rumours were official.
Listen to learn the latest about the transition to M2
If you are currently using Magento 1, it’s important to assess carefully what platform is going to be best for your business now and in the coming years. There are a lot of people on Magento 1 for whom Magento 2 won’t be the right fit, so test ruthlessly and make sure you know what’s going to be best for your business.
Mobile
One endeavor that is currently underway is Magento’s move to bring together a number of merchants, agencies and specialists to fast-track testing and improvements for how Magento works on mobile. They are still actively testing those optimizations and are using Magento community members as beta users.
Community members can still opt in to joining the test community at Mobile eCommerce Optimization. The group has been looking carefully at the data to help build a better system. Here are some highlights of what they found.
Listen to learn some new rules for mobile gleaned from intensive data analysis.
Highlights of Mobile eCommerce Optimization Findings:
The Mobile Revenue Gap
Using data from Cyber Monday 2018, the group found that 51.4% of visitors used mobile to visit sites, but only 34% of transactions happened on mobile. This gap is known as the mobile revenue gap and is the reason that Magento initiated the whole mobile optimization testing in the first place.
Revenue Per Visitor
RPV stands for revenue per visitor and is a simple KPI which is: the total value of sales during a test period ÷ the total number of visitors during a test period. This formula gives you a stat of revenue per visitor to the site. If you’re trying to measure the impact of changing your branding or a new product range or any other refocusing of the business, this KPI is a great way to assess those things.
Statistical Results from the Mobile eCommerce Optimization Findings:
- Collapsing the coupon on PROMO code boxes increases RPV by 3.34% on mobile. There is one caveat: if you are actively using the promo code to drive business, be careful with this.
- Removing the wishlist feature from product pages increased RPV by 5.62% on mobile.
- Automatically updating the cart when quantity etc. changes are made increased RPV by 8.1%
- Do not remove breadcrumbs. Removing breadcrumbs had a -7.09% impact on RPV. Keep those breadcrumbs!
Another great session was run by IMRG, a group that exists to represent the needs of internet retailers in the UK. They do a lot of lobbying and political activism for online retailers and have a great set of data from their customers.
IMRG gets full data feeds from members and uses that to put together a comprehensive picture of what’s going on in the world of online retailers. They shared some benchmarks that are helpful for anyone involved in eCommerce.
Funnel Benchmarks for average performance for the IMRG’s data sets
- Site visitors who view a product page is ideally 56% or more
- Site visitors who add product(s) to the basket is ideally 19% or more
- Site visitors who have added a product to basket who then proceed through checkout is ideally 57% or more.
- Site visitors who proceed through checkout and go on to payment is ideally 58% or more
Tips and Things to Test from Andy’s IMRG Session
- Review score position on the product page should be right under title but before the price
- Live chat: average number of sessions that use live chat is just 0.3% with so few people using live chat, it is worth being more strategic in deployment. The most popular live chat conversations are product information queries, returns and refunds and payment. Definitely deploy live chat on product information pages, but think first before deploying elsewhere.
- On site search tends to be used by people most likely to buy. Make sure the search is easy to find. It’s generally better not to have perfect results. Slightly expanded and imperfect results can have a positive impact
- The effectiveness of site search has no correlation based on the number of SKUs you have.
Links
- MeetMagentoUK
- Magento Association
- Megatalk
- Magento Mobile Optimisation
- JH – the Magento agency who organised it all
Related episodes
- HoneyTree’s Sebastian Galbraith-Helps is back to talk Magento and Subscriptions
- Takeaways from eCommerce Expo for the smaller retailer
- Subscription eCommerce – what you need to know with subscription specialist Stefan Pretty
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