the latest in ecommerce news and trends

Top 10 Quick Ways to Keep your Magento Site Healthy

Posted by Tim Cuttill

• When possible, avoid running back up utilities during peak hours of your site’s operation. For most ecommerce sites, it is best practice to reserve a time after peak hours (typically anytime between 12am-5am). Additionally, avoid running security scans, such as McAfee Secure, during peak operating hours. This will ensure your customers are not leaving your site due to excessive latency.

• Avoid using too many different external sources because every DNS lookup takes extra time and could cause latency with your site. Having images, iframes, twitter feeds, etc..  pulled outside your server will slow down your site and page load time. When possible keep what you can on you own server as this will speed up your site tremendously.

Tablets: ecommerce’s portable lucky charm

Posted by Ryan Sheppard

The holiday season is upon us, which means shopping, eating, shopping, football, eating and gift exchanges!  It should come as no surprise that at the top of almost every “Top 10 gifts” list is an iPad or tablet of some sort.  The use of tablets is growing and they are not just used for gaming, facebook and email anymore.  Apparently, tablets have become the next tool for doing holiday shopping!

Good News Regarding Magento Imports

Posted by Eric Marsh

Magento recently introduced a new and much faster method of importing products in Magento Community 1.5 and Magento Enterprise 1.10. Getting product data into Magento can sometimes be a bit of a struggle, so when Magento brought in new importing functionality, it was a good day for all of us Magento developers!

Miss out on X.commerce?

Posted by Sara Doudt

For those of you who don't know, Magento hosted the 3-day Innovate Developer Conference out in San Francisco from October 12th - 14th. This conference was the launch of X.commerce.  X.commerce is a new platform that provides merchants with a powerful set of tightly integrated tools that they can use to easily build and execute innovative commerce strategies. This platform brings together assets from eBay, PayPal and Magento in an open environment that will leverage the talent of the worldwide developer community.

Shop.org = Crazy Awesome!

Posted by Sara Doudt

Last week, our team traveled to Bean Town for Shop.org's Annual Summit.  With over 3500 attendees and over 150 speakers, the Annual Summit is one of the best opportunities to learn from industry leaders and to network with today's movers and shakers of the eCommerce world.

Building a Successful Customer Loyalty Program

Posted by Sara Doudt

With several online businesses showing a renewed interest in Customer Loyalty Programs, lyonscg wanted to be sure to share with clients and friends how to build a successful Customer Loyalty Program and decided to partner with Sweet Tooth to present a webinar on this very subject.

Lyons Consulting Group Playing Hardball in the Chicago Recruiting Challenge

Posted by Sara Doudt

Chicago. The Windy City.  Second City. Chi-Town. The Queen of the Lake. Chicago has been called many things, but lately, employers are taking note of the challenge in technical recruiting.

PayPal: Did you know....

Posted by Sara Doudt

After a very successful webinar with our partner, PayPal, this past week, I thought I would share some of PayPal's most intriguing statistics that online businesses may or may not know:

Turn Buy Now? Into Buy Now!

Posted by sara doudt

Don’t assume that since your customer is on your product page that they will automatically buy. Here are 5 things to consider when persuading your customers to push that BUY NOW button:

Blogging 101

Posted by sara doudt

As with almost everything else in business, a well thought out plan is necessary when starting a blog. Many online businesses think that all they have to do is write a few cute stories, add it to your site, hit “publish” and voila – instant following and instant increase in sales.  Wrong.  Blogs can be a wonderful extension of your business and should be thought of as just that- part of your business. Here are some of the major things to think about when starting a blog: