nextbracket

Online Customer Segmentation

Tzvi Arnstein — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:31:52 +0000

Many online stores need to categorize their customers. A common scenario is wholesale & retail, where wholesalers get pricing discounts. Let’s review how the popular platforms handle this.

With Magento you can have unlimited groups, pricing can be assigned at group level or product level & SKU level pricing can be bulk imported. All group functionality is included in the Magento Open Source eCommerce edition.

Shopify has no customer group functionality out of the box besides the ability to tag customers & filter by tag. For group pricing you’ll need an app from the Shopify App store, Bold makes a good one that will run $30-70/month

BigCommerce “Customer Groups” includes many features like Magento and is built into the “Plus” plan. The only setback is that the bulk data importer doesn’t allow for SKU level group pricing. If you have many products you’ll need to use percentage or fixed price discount at the category level. Alternatively you can use “Price Lists” available on Enterprise plans, use the API or manually via the backend.

WooCommerce doesn’t either come with customer groups but most functionality can be added with a few WP plugins including user level permissions & group/product level pricing.

Website Catalog Management

Tzvi Arnstein — Thu, 30 May 2019 13:50:49 +0000

If you’re selling online, your website has a product catalog. I’m gonna highlight a few cool features unique to each platform.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce catalog itself is standard, the category menu setup uses the familiar WordPress drag & drop menu management which is the most flexible in the field.

BigCommerce
BigCommerce categories automatically appear in your menu unless disabled. One major perk is the automatic redirect generator so that you never have broken links when rearranging your categories.

Shopify
Shopify’s got a real nifty feature for categories (which they call collections). While most platforms assign products to a static category, Shopify offers “Automated Collections” where you can create rules to control which products go into any given collection by price, title, tags or weight.

Magento 2
Magento doesn’t bring any extra category features over other platforms but they’re the only one to allow for completely isolated catalog sets in one backend, however that’s for multi-store which is deserves an entire post on its own – I’ll leave that for a different time.

Clutch Award

Rivka Neuman — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:26:15 +0000

Nextbracket Recognized as a Top Design Agency on Clutch!

In today’s massive digital marketplace, web designers and developers are a dime a dozen, with sleek sites seeming to pop up wherever you look. With more firms being able to offer a site that looks good and performs well, what sets top digital partners apart from the rest are their approach and their methodology. With a client-centric process and an understanding of the holistic nature of web design, we are proud to offer our clients with top notch digital services that drive business and achieve results.

We are proud to share that we have been featured as a top firm on Clutch! Clutch is a ratings and reviews platform for vendors of B2B services, helping firms make more beneficial relationships with their service providers. Clutch conducts in depth research on the firms on their platform, collecting information on the marketing presence, company portfolios, and client reviews of every business on the site. After being the subject of this thorough research, we were thrilled to be featured as one of the top web design agencies in the New York area.

Although we appreciate the opportunity to receive evaluation from industry analysts, we are even more grateful for the chance to hear what our clients think of our work. Clutch analysts conduct in depth interviews with companies’ clients to properly gauge the calibre of their services, and we are pleased to have a perfect rating of five stars as a result of our clients’ feedback. Speaking to the results of our services, one of our clients said, “Our new website is much easier to use and converts better than our previous online store.” We want our finished products to not only look good, but deliver results for our clients. And reviews like this let us know we are doing our job well.

And to put another feather in our cap, Clutch’s sister-site, The Manifest, listed us as one of the top cloud consultants in the greater New York Area. The Manifest serves expert advice and how-to guides to firms of all shapes and sizes, helping to address a range of challenges as well as opportunities. We are featured with notice being taken of the size of our firm as well as the quality of our work, and we are thrilled to be recognized as a team of multi-talented designers and developers. And we can now be found on Visual Objects, a place for web developers and designers to showcase their work, and we are hoping that our inclusion will help a new audience take interest in us and our services.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to our multitude of wonderful clients. We appreciate everything that you have done for us, and we cannot wait to see what you have for us next. We are proud of everything we have accomplished, but we are just getting started.

Which platform do you drive? Upgrading From Magento 1 To Magento 2

Tzvi Arnstein — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 17:49:39 +0000

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that Adobe owned “Magento” will no longer support version 1 starting June next year. This means they won’t be providing important bug fixes, malware patches, etc so you will need to do something. Let’s talk about the options available to those who own an online store running Magento 1. First, to dispel any myths or false hopes, you cannot just click an “Upgrade” button and update your store to Magento 2. There are a number of steps to upgrading, including installing a new Magento 2 backend, migrating your catalog, redeveloping your theme and replacing extensions to those that are M2 compatible. As you can see, what you’re really doing is re-platforming. Yes. While there are visual and functional similarities between the two versions, M1 & M2 should be treated as two different platforms.

Before you bite the bullet and jump into the process of migrating to M2, you need to be aware that there are other options out there. Other options? Yes, let’s back up for a minute. Initially launched in 2009, Magento started becoming really popular in 2012 when new features and bug fixes made it quite stable and flexible for public use. Magento comes packed with just about all the functionality any vanilla eCommerce business needs and as its open source, its free for anyone to use. With that features list comes speed issues, a tough learning curve, security vulnerabilities and maintenance overhead among other challenges. At the time however there weren’t many players on the market that can match Magento’s flexibility and functionality making it the obvious choice for over 200,000 online stores.

Fast forward to 2019. While the hosted platforms never offered the same tool set as Magento, with their continued feature updates and ever growing app stores, you should now be paying them some attention. While in the past Magento may have been the “best” platform, that is definitely no longer the case. The eCommerce arena has matured to the extent that each platform now caters to its best use case. Hosted platforms such as Shopify, Lemonstand, SquareSpace & BigCommerce all offer an almost maintenance free environment. You’ll never have to deal with new versions, security patches, the need to scale up for a campaign or server crashes, as the entire infrastructure layer is all taken care of by the provider. Squarespace is best for designer stores with small catalogs, Shopify is great for any store looking for a quick launch and BigCommerce for businesses looking for a more comprehensive solution.

If we can use transportation as our metaphor, trucks & sports cars aren’t better than family cars. They’re just different methods of transportation for different needs. While matching the vehicle to the transportation need is rather easy, it takes an experienced development agency to match your eCommerce needs to the platform that will serve you best. Ever tried hauling 20 tons of goods in a Toyota Camry? How about taking a tight curve at sixty MPH while driving a tractor trailer? The results in either case aren’t fun. In summary, although you don’t have the option to stay on Magento 1 for much longer, you should explore all the platforms of 2019 to make the best decision for your online store. You know your business and we know platforms, perhaps we should talk so you don’t get taken for a ride Contact us today!