Adding products to the home page of magento – Amazon.Com Style
I have been experimenting with Magento and seeing how well the built in displays of products measure up to hand crafted home pages.
There are two main issues with Magento and the home page.
- The order sort of the products in the category displayed on the home page does not allow for negative numbers.
- The product display itself does not produce the best sales results
Product Sorting for the home page of Magento
I have been using some code like this:
{{block type=”catalog/product_list” category_id=”2″ template=”catalog/product/list.phtml”}}
It basically takes nine products from any category you choose puts it on the home page. However, Magento does not recognize the negative (-2) sorting order. All numbers must be a positive value or be zero.
This presents a problem if you have thousands of products in a single category. You have to change all of your products to a higher sort number, like 9, and leave the rest at 0. This can take a ton of time.
If you still want to use that tactic, you could create a separate category and just include the products you want featured on the home page. But again, my experimentation has indicated that I have higher sales…
Selling Amazon.com style
As a matter of fact, for one site I used this method, my conversion rate doubled. The site sells higher priced items and the average sale is $251.13. The conversion rate went from .85% to 2.04%. Other factors are involved such as additional smaller ticketed items and a new shipping module. However, it appears based upon Google analytics that the bulk of the improvement was the re-designed home page. Visitors were able to quickly find what they were looking for and were more apt to buy.
So, what is selling Amazon.com style…well its actually quite simple:
I think its brilliance is in its simplicity actually. A user is able to quickly find what he or she is looking for without digging through tons of categories. There is an added SEO benefit we will discuss later. But for now, I am going to share my coding so you can easily set it up. I am using the default template/skin that comes with Magento.
Here is the CSS that needs to go in your CSS file (I put mine in boxes.css). Here is a text file with the source code.
/* home page styles */
.homeBox{
text-align:center;
height:200px;
float:left;
padding:8px;
width:150px;
}
.homeBox img {
border:1px solid black;
}
.homeBox img a {
text-decoration:none;
}
Next, I went into my home page in the CMS and I manually created the boxes with this code:
<div class=”homeBox”><a href=”/URLofproductorcategorypage.html”><img src=”/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/135×135.JPG” border=”0″ alt=”SEO Alt text” />
The Title Of The Item</a></div>
I also created titles for each Product Row…(e.g. Our best keyword sellers). Study Amazon.com’s headlines, you can learn alot.
My next post will cover SEO for ecommerce and more on how to use this technique to improve your SEO and conversion rate.
If you have any suggestions about the coding or perhaps automation, comment…lets discuss.
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Sometimes, simplicity is really the key. Online users and shoppers get tired with those complicated ads and incorporating simple but targeted ads will definitely pleased them. I will suggest your coding to my sister who would like to monetize her site. Thanks a lot dude!
Great post, thanks a lot for the code.
I’ve been a fan of Magento for some time now and I absolutely love it.
you are welcome!
What a great peice of advice. I often use Magento for other work related business and have always struggled with customisation. Thanks for sharing
hi, thanks for posting this code of CSS, but I am wondering what does Magento is, it is my first time to heard and to know about this, is it a page? or a software? i hope I could get a response from you.. are you using macromedia dreamweaver in making a web page? if so, can i have some of your strategy in programming?, hope i could get your response..thanks..
go to http://www.magentocommerce.com to learn about magento.
Thanks for sending CSS of text file.It will be more helpful for me
have you ever heard of BANS(Build An NIche Store)for eBay?
I’m just wondering if could work for magneto…
People are using the float:left; very less. i too haven’t used much earlier. but now it is very useful when you wish to display something in row and column as you described.
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@Ajax, I love to use float, you can do a lot with it.
Hmmm some nice ideas there, worth a look to see what we can implement over down my website
Cheerzo
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I could really use some help setting up my online store – drop me a line or point me in the right direction. Thanks
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Your side bar advertisements are looking very nice.
What are all these side bar advertisements? How did you get it? are you using the same float method to format those ads.
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I just read about Magento from your other post.
Any particular reason why you choose it? And also I couldn’t find its pricing. Please inform how much is the software cost?
Sorry for this silly question. New to ecommerce and looking for the right platform for my small e-commerce. I actually am still looking for a Wordpress based platform, but any ‘good’ one will be fine.
cool very informative. new ideas for me. thanks for posting this blog.
I’ve used ReviewAzon which is great buit I’ve not checked out Magento. I’ll give it a look.
Dhany,
I chose Magento because it is open source and looks great right out of the box. There are a ton of modules available. The problem is that it is so large that it runs slow, so you have to have a server that can handle running the beast. I have started using Google checkout’s shopping cart and wrote a plugin for easy integration into Wordpress: google checkout plugin
Those are affiliate offers, I just put the images there with the float style.
I’m currently hosting Magento on a dedicated virtual server, which costs just a fraction less than the Professional tier which is what I would need for my number of products.
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I think its a brilliant idea,will have to start using amazon.com to better my rates.Thanks for the information.
Great tip and it really works. I’ve got lots more Magento Commerce screencasts, video tutorials, how-tip, tips, tricks, and hacks over on ScreencastWorld.com.
Apple’s product may be the canvas for which many artists’ hands will produce. What will the hand and finger produce about the touchscreen? Who knows, the answer might be a future ipad commercial.
2.04% conversion rate is note bad at all! Thnx for the code!
Hi i am also uisng Amazon Product services API to display the amazon inline links. But the conversion is not upto satisfaction. I am testing all the possiblities.