We've found a lot of people who seem to spend a great deal of time changing the look and feel of their ecommerce site, but then neglect to pay any time looking at the users experience when trying to complete the main purpose of most ecommerce sites which is to find and pay for some items. After a user has found the products they're looking for the next part can be more stressful, so it should be the site owners responsibility to make the users journey through the checkout as simple as possible.

We're just going to outline some improvements to the standard Magento checkout that most people seem to ignore and just live with it, these can hopefully get your customers through the checkout process as quickly as possible, eliminating unnecessary steps is the best way to reduce cart abandonment. We're not going to look at completely redesigning the checkout process of Magento as that's a different article all together, we'll just be looking at little changes you can implement quickly and hopefully see results in conversions and reduced abandonment rates.

By default Magento doesn't offer much to the user if they misspell words. As a simple fix for this you can use the PHP functions pspell to highlight to the users any basic misspellings for their search word.

It can be difficult finding creative ways to promote products on your ecommerce site, I'm sure most retailers would benefit from pushing sales of certain products. Trying to do this while keeping a site easily to navigate is sometimes difficult, I was recently asked to implement featured products into the drop down menu of a Magento site. Magento's menu generating code is pretty straight foward and with a bit of careful coding you can insert some extra markup in the right places to allow a different product to be shown in each dropdown area.

We've just finished implementing an appointment booking and management system for a clients Joomla site, after looking into a number of possible components we choose Appointment Booking Pro by Softventures, this system includes a wide range of excellent features including a full mobile app for booking and mangement. Integrated with Paypal for instant payment of appoinments book this covered all requriements for the clients site and just required us to implement it and customize to their exact needs.