nopCommerce Tutorials, Tips & Tricks

Often time, setting up your nopCommerce store is just the start. If it doesn't bring in sales and revenue, it's meaningless to set up the store anyway.

E-commerce sales are on the rise and expected to continue growing over the next several years. That’s the conclusion of a recent Forrester study. Total e-commerce sales in 2013 reached $262 billion, a 13% increase over the previous year.  Forrester predicts e-commerce will grow by an additional 10% annually for the next five years.

Of course, some sites are more successful than others.  According to a recent survey of online shoppers, the most popular sites are Amazon, eBay, Newegg, ASOS and Sephora, in that order. What shoppers like about these sites includes affordable pricing, simple navigation, easy checkout, free shipping and useful product reviews, among other qualities.

How can you increase your e-commerce profits and give site visitors the kind of experience they want? 

Here are 4 common sense tips to maximize e-commerce revenues:

In case you do not already know, we sell a couple of free and paid nopCommerce themes on our website. We like creating beautiful and usable nopCommerce themes, and I would like to lay down some guidelines in this blog post on how to choose the perfect nopCommerce template for your next store. (I've earlier written a more generic article on the same topic, make sure you read it before continuing.)

When it comes to e-commerce, the layout of your shop can be crucial to positive user experience (UX), how long a user stays on your site, and even conversion rates. When users visit an e-commerce store they want to easily find what they're looking for while viewing a website that is aesthetically pleasing to their eyes. In fact, a well designed e-commerce template can directly increase your store's sales. 

So how do you choose the perfect theme?

Consumers today have a much different expectation than they did 50, 20, even 5 years ago. The faces of small businesses have also greatly changed. That is why it is so important to make sure your business is changing to meet the needs of its consumers. Often times, first impressions either make or break your customers' willingness to continue their shopping with you. 

In fact, all it takes is 0.2 second for your customers to establish their first impression. This makes it so vitally important to have a functioning, aesthetically pleasing and profitable website for your business.  

Some websites have perfected this technique and have reached great success. Here is a list of the year's most beautiful e-commerce websites according to AWWWARDS where you can gain inspiration and learn from the best.

Here are the list of well-designed e-commerce stores:

Being a nopCommerce programmer, have you ever encountered a situation where you need to take over an existing nopCommerce projects from other developers but are not provided with enough information? I have!

Recently, I am working on a project on nopCommerce customization that put me in hot water. The client has only provided FTP access to compiled files - no source code, no database backups, no RDP access, no nothing!

Because the project is an already-customized version of nopCommerce 3.40, I am faced with the following issue:

1. No source code means I can't check what has been customized
2. No database backups means that I can't even infer the customization from database
3. The database is fire-walled. That means even if I can get the Connection String from Settings.txt, I can't connect to it using Microsoft Sql Server Management Studio

Although the project was only involving theme development & theme customization, the challenge is big enough to have stopped my team from normal development for a few hours.

We needed a solution to solve [1], [2] and [3]. And the solution? Programmatic generation of nopCommerce SQL Server database backup using C#!

Many e-commerce website owners work diligently on search engine optimization (SEO) to drive massive amounts of traffic to their site, only to discover that their sales aren't keeping pace with their web traffic. These business owners learn the hard way that selling online is not just a numbers game. Raw web traffic does not necessarily translate into e-commerce sales.

So what more can you do after your SEO effort is starting to pay off, and your website has a steady stream of visitors? Enter Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)! CRO is those techniques that convert your visitors into paying customers.

Here are essential 5 e-commerce tips & tricks that can help you improve sales:

Let's admit it - running an online store is not easy! While there might be tons of article (like this one) telling you how easy it is to open an online store, running it can still be a chore if you want to be successful.

With so many factors out there that can affect how successful your online business is, it is hard to focus on all of them, especially for small business owners where resources are limited. Here's a list of 5 e-commerce best practices to keep in mind. Tackle these, and you will be on the right track!

With the announcement of nopCommerce 3.50, we are glad to announce the availability of our popular NopLite - Responsive nopCommerce Theme.

And the good news is, we did not just upgrade it to 3.50, there is also a couple of features upgrades in the 3.50 version.

With technological advancements happening each and every day, it is no wonder the number of sales made from mobile phone users continues to rise each year. There is not much left in the world that we cannot do or see from the palm of our hands, and this includes online shopping.

In fact, Google has recently make it very clear that they are taking serious consideration of a website's mobile-friendliness. As part of the initiative, they've even launched a mobile-friendly test tool.

When it comes to e-mails, nopCommerce has a very flexible Message Templates system to render e-mails by replacing what are called Tokens with actual values. For example, %Customer.FullName% will be replaced by a customer's full name.

While nopCommerce's Message Templates system is flexible enough to handle most scenarios (version 3.50 even supports attaching a static file), there are at least 2 deficiency with the implementation:

1. Conditional rendering (if... then... else...) is not allowed
2. Common layout has to be copied over to each and every Message Templates

To overcome these shortcomings, we can make use of Microsoft's powerful rendering engine - Razor. I believe most MVC developers are vary familiar with Razor syntax.

Below I'll show a proof-of-concept of using Razor engine to render Message Templates.

Being a popular e-commerce platform, nopCommerce is used in a variety of senarios. One popular nopCommerce use case is to integrate it with third-party ERP / CRM / POS solutions. For example, it is possible to develop an integration such that the POS system pulls product & customer information from nopCommerce, and places order to nopCommerce.

There are several method to implement the integration and nopCommerce already comes with a Web Service plugin (Nop.Plugin.Misc.WebServices). However, with the popularity of REST service, I feel a need to develop an nopCommerce REST API plugin to fill in the gap - and that's how NopRest - nopCommerce REST Service Plugin is born.

Using NopRest is easy as it follows a very intuitive, MVC-like architecture. In fact, it is implemented on top of MVC. For those who are familiar with ASP.Net Web API, you might be wondering why NopRest is not implemented on top of Web API. The reason is simple - I want to reuse as much code from nopCommerce as possible. A more detailed explanation is published here.

To provide a real world example of how NopRest can be used, I am sharing with you a use case whereby my client requires to clear nopCommerce cache from external WPF application.