If you are using Magento for e-commerce development you need to be sure if you are getting the most out of the flourishing platform. Magento is an ever-growing open-source facility to allow developers to explore new opportunities with e-commerce web development. While Magento is mostly known to be a robust and secure platform, it is also a programming system that holds excellent inventive features in the space of e-commerce.
You may be aware of most of the features and functionalities available with the platform but there are a few hidden features that are not known to all of us.
Let’s have a look at these phenomenal features that may change the way one uses Magento forever.
Increasing Session Time
You may relate to a situation when you fill in a long form or submit changes on a webpage and hit the submit button, the session times out and all your efforts go to waste. That’s too annoying in any given situation.
Magento responds to this situation with an incredibly useful and effective feature. The platform allows you to increase the Admin Session Lifetime accessing the setting from the admin panel. So, how do you do this? Here’s the trail of steps you need to follow to increase your session time on Magento: System > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > Security > Session Lifetime (Seconds).
Tier Pricing
Tier Pricing is another hidden feature that proves to be an effective sales and promotion tool. This is a great way to manage your pricing structure across product categories based on the number of sales. You can add different prices setting up different quantity categories. With this feature, you can also set up discounts and offers on bulk quantities.
You may get this configured with the help of a Magento web development expert or by yourself if you do not have complex or multiple level tiers to add. Just follow this track and you’ll be all done: Catalog > Managed Products > Add/Edit Product > Prices > Add Tier
Product Alerts
Many times while browsing an e-commerce website we end up landing on a product page only to find it unavailable or out of stock. Well, that’s quite normal but that’s something that needs to be addressed with an actionable response. If the user doesn’t get an update about the availability of the product it ruins the whole customer experience with the service and this also drastically affects the sales of the portal.
Not many Magento site owners know this but they have an option to appoint product alerts to send updates to the customers as and when the product is back in the store.
This can be done without integrating third-party extensions into your web store. This is an in-built feature of Magento. This is how you can get there: System > Configuration > Catalog>Product Alerts. To set this on you have to select “Allow Alert When Product Comes Back In Stock.” With this setting on, customers will be able to opt for notifications on their emails when the product is back in stock.
Set Custom Product Ratings
Magento allows you to set custom criteria for customer ratings. The platform offers the default rating criteria as price, quality, and value. But, you can add or remove custom assessment factors that best fit your product lineup and the idea of your offering.
This allows you to have a rating system that gets you to gather more accurate and relevant feedback for your products. To do this you can navigate through Stores > Attributes >Rating and click on the Add New Rating option appearing on the top right corner.
Customer Group Creation
To be able to effectively manage your customer programs and optimize your marketing channels, you need to segregate customers into different identifiable groups based on their behavior, interest, and demographic profile. This way you can set different prices, discounts, and offers for different types of customers.
Magento allows you to do this with another much-underused feature known as customer group creation. With this feature, you can decide whom to show special prices and whom to hide them from. You can display a different assortment of products for a different set of users or run offers only for the customers from a particular location. You can do this by tapping on Customers > Customer Groups and editing the groups as per your preferences.
Final Words
Magento is a vast e-commerce platform that holds a gamut of development options and features to prove highly inventive and resourceful for online sellers.
These were some of the most interesting hidden features of the platform. To have more information on such features and to explore possibilities with building your e-commerce store with prolific Magento features, you can connect with e-commerce experts at Planet Web Solution.
