Magento Commerce Blog

Blue Acorn Client Named Finalist for Magento’s “Most Innovative Site of 2011” Award

by Marketing Manager
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We’ve already told you what we’ll be up to at this year’s Imagine eCommerce Worldwide Conference, and we’ve got one more surprise…

Blue Acorn is extremely pleased to announce that our client, Reed & Barton, has been chosen as one of the three finalists for Magento’s Most Innovative Site of 2011 award. It’s the first time such an award has ever been given away by Magento, and we are honored to have been selected as a finalist when we know – very well – just how many great Magento sites were launched last year.

Entries for this award came in from Magneto Solution Partners around the world, and Magento narrowed the field down to three finalists. These three finalists will have their sites presented at next week’s Imagine conference, where the winner will be determined by a popular vote among all of the conference attendees that will take place at the conference.

UPDATE: We won!

Imagine an eCommerce Conference in Las Vegas

by Marketing Manager
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Magento Imagine Conference 2012As the fourth week of April approaches, Blue Acorn is doing everything that an eCommerce agency is supposed to do before an industry conference in Las Vegas: confirming flight and hotel reservations, restocking our business cards, watching The Hangover, double-checking our presentation materials, and planning for a stellar pool party!

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Certifiably Magento

by Magento Evangelist
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Certifiably Magento - Magento Developer Certification

Magento Certification, Where Have You Been??

At Blue Acorn, we quickly noticed a pattern: Company A would send out an RFP. We would leverage our experience as early adopters of the platform, respond with a fair and accurate quote, and then lose the bid to a shop that would promise to get the same job done for half the price. Company A would then come back to us six months later with a non- or barely-functional site: time and money needlessly lost. Read More

Plundor Brings Significant Value to the Magento Extension Community

by Marketing Manager
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Plundor

Throughout time, the Dutch have provided us with numerous innovations: the microscope, the telescope, submarines, 4WD, and the compact disc. Now, they have a new contribution specifically for the Magento development community, Plundor. The creation of Dutchmen Guido Jansen and Sander Schoneville, Plundor serves a marketing program for Magento extension builders, generating a lot of publicity by giving Magento developers the chance to purchase their extension as part of a “bundle” of complementary Magento extensions at a hefty discount. Read More

Renewing Our Vows with Magento

by Marketing Manager
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Blue Acorn & MagentoYou might have considered it love at first sight. It was a relationship that began over three and a half years ago, when we posted our first review of Magento, a platform we instantly recognized as a soon-to-be leader in the eCommerce space. It was a welcome addition in a market that was saturated with lackluster options in the small and mid-tier. Yes, there were plenty of fish in the sea, but none that caught our fancy quite like this platform It was sexy on the outside, intelligent on the inside, and had a good head on its shoulders. Read More

A Magento Conference Worth Imagining – and Attending

by Founder & CEO
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Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference
Who would have imagined that a small eCommerce services company would embark on a path to revolutionize the eCommerce marketplace? Who would have imagined that the software they developed would, in two years’ time, process more than $25 billion in transactions, power some of the world’s most renowned brands, employ more than 240 people, and create an entire marketplace for developers, consultants, and marketers alike? Who would have imagined that they accomplished this all within three years’ time? Well, they did, and so did we. Read More

PCI Compliance for Magento

by Founder & CEO
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It’s one of the biggest questions circling the Magento community for quite some time now – will online merchants running Magento Community Edition be able to achieve PCI Compliance?  It comes as no surprise to me that many answers to this simple question were ill-informed, and broadly ranged from flat out “no (you’ll need Enterprise Edition)”, to “yes, piece of cake”.  With many merchant service providers getting down to laying down the law with smaller retailers, this question has become more and more frequent as of late.  And yet still, lots of confusion, and lack of a clear answer.  So let me lay down a definitive answer for you:

“I’m an online retailer running Magento Community Edition – can I achieve PCI Compliance?”  YES
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Magento Commerce: Which Edition is Right for Me?

by Founder & CEO
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Magento Comparison Banner

This post started off as a head-to-head comparison of Magento Community Edition vs. Professional Edition, and as I started writing, there were grumblings of a Professional Edition being released, and as such this post got put on hold until its official release (comparison available here).  The reasoning for this post started from a tweet we posted back in April, stemming from some sales calls whereby several prospects had discussed with us the question of whether they should use the Professional Edition or the Community Edition of Magento Commerce  - at the time, these were the only choices available.  In those discussions however, several of those people had indicated that they had in fact contacted Magento directly in search of an answer to this very question.  What the Magento sales team was telling them, was surprising, but understandable. Read More

Magento SEO Development

by Founder & CEO
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Magento Commerce is certainly an “SEO-friendly” shopping cart – but just like much of its brethren, there is still room for improvement. Granted, it has come along to fix some of the issues we pointed out in our first Magento review, and a few in the community have put together some extensions to further that along.  Yoast has even gone so far as to creating a beginner’s SEO guide for Magento which does a great job of covering some of the basic setup points for those setting up a Magento store that might not be attune to some of the intricacies with SEO on an eCommerce platform.  But we actually take that a step further with some additional tips and tricks that we utilize to ensure our Magento projects are search engine optimized.  I’ll try to avoid regurgitating the steps already recommended in the Yoast guide, and focus more on some of the additional steps we take when optimizing a Magento theme for SEO. Read More