You redesigned the entire user interface to be clean, polished and modern.

You’ve incorporated social media tools to let your loyal customers organically promote your brand.

You’ve improved your product categorization, added new attributes and metadata to incorporate layered navigation, and applied full text search.

You spent the time to arrange related products and set cross sell and up sell relationships.

You may have even implemented a mobile solution or responsive web design (RWD) to target mobile users that you keep getting told are the future of the market place.

You’re reward for this effort, a quick burst of traffic and orders, which slowly trails off over a period of 4 to 6 months as the ‘newness factor’ wears off.  What should you do? Go back and repeat the expensive and time consuming process you just finished two quarters back? Certainly, there are tactical changes to be made to keep improving, but do you have to overhaul your site every year to keep things growing? Here at Levementum, we think there is a better next step that provides faster returns and consistent ROI once you establish a robust, flexible and dynamic ecommerce presence.

For a merchant in this scenario we suggest you take a look at Bronto’s Marketing Platform. (http://www.bronto.com).  Bronto is much more than an email marketing (though it does that too).  The Bronto platform plugs into many environments including Magento Enterprise and offers a rich suite of tools that allow you to build layers of sophistication that you don’t see in standard email marketing tools.

These elements include some very important elements online merchants crave:

• Campaign management (which includes A/B testing and measurement)
• Customer segmentation and targeted marketing based on actual order history  vs. ad hoc defined customer segments
• Proactive Shopping Cart Abandonment Campaigns and Messaging designed to bring visitors back to complete their orders
• DRIP marketing to target customers with scenario based email messaging over the course of the lifetime of their account
• Detailed reporting of site activity and response rates for your marketing efforts
• SMS marketing for mobile devices
• Social media marketing features
• + many more

Levementum is a proud partner of Bronto and we are here to help you determine how to best utilize this suite of tools to your advantage.   Bronto is a leading marketing automation tool for Magento merchants. Bronto is a ROI driven solution that will help you grow profitably and maximize the value of every site visitor.

The post Leverage Bronto to drive the next wave of growth for your Magento site appeared first on Levementum.

Regardless of your opinion of this legislation, and Levementum doesn’t take a position on the bill either way, passage could have a significant impact to companies who have built a strong online presence to sell their goods and services nationwide.  The implication of having to comply with literally thousands of sales tax requirements is an overwhelming challenge and many companies are not adequately prepared for the operational implications of collecting the appropriate sales tax and filing tax returns in each jurisdiction.  The prospect of these scenarios are causing many a merchant sleepless nights because there are so many unknowns.

Levementum’s partner, Avalara, an expert in sales tax collection and filing processes and technologies is holding a free webinar on Thursday May 16, 2013 to speak to the potential impacts and to make merchants aware of their service which plugs into many ecommerce and ERP solutions. We encourage anyone with even a remote risk of being impacted attend this webinar to learn more. Sign up for the webinar can be found at http://www.info.avalara.com/ecommerce_marketplacefairness?partnersource=Levementum .

If you are unable to attend the webinar, we still suggest you contact Levementum or Avalara to learn more and see how to prepare for this potential legislation.

The post Will the Marketplace Fairness Act Impact Your Online Store? appeared first on Levementum.

Now that a week has passed since the conference ended, we wanted to share some of the overriding themes that we took away from Imagine.  For merchants using Magento or considering Magento down the road, this particular conference was incredibly revealing and motivating. There is a lot to be anxious and excited about going forward and clearly, the road to drive higher sales and margin through Magento has never been clearer or easier to navigate.

Theme 1: Mobile, mobile, mobile- If you aren’t considering it, you need to right now.

From the keynote speeches, to the breakout sessions, it was impossible to miss the fact that mobile is a cornerstone of not only Magento’s plans, but also that of eBay.  John Donahoe, CEO of eBay shared that 21% of eBay’s customers leverage more than one platform or device type.  That 21% of customers generate approximately 40% of eBay’s revenue. It’s a pretty safe bet that eBay and Magento will therefore be investing heavily in mobile solutions and tools (tablet and smart phone) in the coming months and years.  Version 1.12 of Magento Enterprise introduced HTML 5 support as well as a great mobile platform in the shape of the iPhone, iPad and Android applications. Going forward, I expect to see a lot added around these tools.

Theme 2: Customer data and advanced analytics are coming to the merchant

This topic may be a little more abstract for some merchants who have not done a lot of customer segmenting and analysis, but it arguably one of the most compelling values we’ve seen from any platform at any time. One of the key things eBay is looking to enable is the collection of detailed, segmented metrics on users based on site analytics, purchase patterns (across all of eBay’s platforms), and behavior. This will help drive the integration or ‘knitting together’ of all of eBay’s portfolio of technologies.

The plan in the coming year is to enable portions of that data to be consumed and used directly by the merchant within Magento to influence how the merchant shapes marketing, promotions and other activities. This is the first time we’ve heard a large multi-platform, multi-technology vendor like eBay advocate and push for publishing of customer metrics down to the merchant. In fact, it’s quite contrarian to what we see normally where a few very large firms want to own and control all knowledge in this area.

Theme 3: Responsive Web Design Continues to be a Key Need, but it’s focused more on tablets than smart phones

The data we’ve seen from multiple sources, including at Imagine, continues to demonstrate that ecommerce on tablets is much more successful and impactful than on smart phones.  In the smart phone environment, limited bandwidth and screen space continue to be a deterrent and if you don’t have a native app that ranks highly, adoption is slow. While, it’s arguable that there is a chicken and the egg scenario here given the low rate of smart phone enabled apps deployed, our opinion is that most consumers are still a bit out from fully embracing smart phone driven ecommerce on a regular basis.  This is not the case with tablets. In some cases, tablet usage and conversion rates are exceeding PC rates.

This is such an important set of facts that we are actively promoting RWD for tablets from day 1 to new customers and advocating that existing customers consider adding this in right away.  This has the potential to be the biggest game changer in the short term. Based on the data we’ve seen, this is an investment with a payback period inside of a month once launched.

Theme 4: Version 1.13 of Magento Enterprise is a Milestone Release

One of Magento’s challenges (and truthfully it’s not unique to Magento at all) was that if you had a large catalog (hundreds of thousands of SKUs), or a quickly expanding and changing catalog, the system cost of indexing and caching could be significant.  The changes to improve scaling and performance for large catalogs through improvements to caching and indexing in version 1.13 of Magento Enterprise are more significant than any functional change Magento has added in the past 3 or 4 releases. This will reduce implementation time for Enterprise customers immediately.  For small to mid-sized merchants with large third party catalogs being resold, this is a reason to upgrade right away. Your site will scale and perform better immediately.

Our own internal testing with version 1.13 has shown performance improvements of almost 40%, especially when catalogs are being reloaded or refreshed, with no other site changes applied.  This is a big deal.

Theme 5: In 2013 and beyond, Customer Service tools will be a difference maker for merchants

For Imagine 2013, Levementum released our Magento and Salesforce connector to the public.  The reason behind this investment of R&D time and dollars was that for growing and successful merchants, customer service has been and will continue to be the differentiating factor.  Knowing that this is such a big differentiator for successful organizations, we felt it natural to build a ready to go, 1 day install solution that integrates a world class ecommerce tool like Magento with the best in class, top tier customer service tool in Salesforce’s Service Cloud offering.  The number of visitors at our booth who asked us to walk them through how this works and how they can quickly leverage this in their environment was astounding. Of all the conferences we have attended, this connector technology and demonstration drew more traffic than arguably any other prebuilt solution we’ve unveiled. To learn more about this newly released connector, visit our site at http://levementum.com/products/magento-salesforce-plugin .

While there were many other exciting an interesting elements at Imagine, these five represent what we feel are the most impactful to the merchant in the next 6 to 12 months. Each of these has the potential to have a significant impact on sales and operations that you should consider as part of your road map planning for you ecommerce site.

Levementum is a Magento Gold Certified Solution Partner. We excel at helping merchants of all sizes leverage Magento Enterprise to drive the highest levels of return from your ecommerce store.

The post Recap of Magento Imagine Conference 2013 appeared first on Levementum.

For large or quickly growing merchants, this product package will offer some very unique elements you won’t find in other Magento and Salesforce integration solutions that are specifically targeted to help you drive the most value of your investments in Salesforce and Magento Enterprise.

The first layer of this integrated solution focusses on the account and order detail you need to manage and report on sales activity. This solution will feature bi-directional integration of Accounts (including Customer Group Membership), Orders, and Shipment Records. Customer records will be synchronized not just for those who order, but for any user who registers so that you can include these accounts in your direct marketing campaigns through the use of Pardot, Bronto or other e-marketing tools that tie in your Salesforce environment.

Taking this one step further, this will be the most robust Magento and Salesforce integration tool that brings the immense value of Salesforce’s Service Cloud to Magento users. The solution will allow customers within a Magento Enterprise site to submit support cases to Salesforce so that customer service staff can manage tickets, issues and inquiries directly from Salesforce while your customers see real time updates in Magento.

We will also be providing Web To Lead capabilities that allow site visitors or would be partners (particularly important for those merchants who have B2B relationships) to submit inquiries that flow directly into Salesforce as leads for your sales team to nurture and develop.

This solution leverages Levementum’s industry leading knowledge and understanding of Salesforce  and Magento Enterprise into a complete product solution that offers merchants the best out of the box value for both of their environments.

#Levementum is a leading Salesforce and #Magento Enterprise Implementer and System Integrator.  We welcome the opportunity to speak to you about bringing these two world class solutions together within your organization to enable more profitable growth and more effective operations for your online sales channel.  Come visit us at #Imagine to learn about how we can help you thrive in the online marketplace.

The post Levementum is introducing its Salesforce and Magento Integration Package at Imagine 2013 appeared first on Levementum.

#1 M2E Pro to integrate your Magento Store to Ebay, Amazon and other sales channels.

Want to get yourself listed on Amazon, Ebay and other channels while minimizing the administrative overhead involved with maintaining multiple catalogs? Take a look at this extension. It will take some tweaking after you install it (expect to spend a day or two updating elements after the install), but this is the single best way to leverage your Magento platform for the most valuable online retailers out there.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/ebay-magento-integration-order-importing-and-stock-level-synchronization.html

#2 Channel Advisor tie in.  There are actually multiple options here, but if you use Channel advisor to manage your online presence for Ebay or other sources, we suggest you take a look at this one (or others).  It allows you to maintain your catalog out of channel advisor and integrate those changes directly to your Magento catalog. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/channeladvisor-inventory-import-and-stock-sync-7687.html

#3 Web Shop Apps for freight, dimensional shipping and drop shipping support.  These 3 extensions aren’t free or even cheap (though you can often get a discount if you buy multiple items together). But if you’ve tried to solve drop shipping, freight forwarding and / or dimensional shipping, you’ll realize the costs are much higher to build these items out vs. the extension cost.  Plus, these install well, are well supported and maintained.

http://www.webshopapps.com/us/shipping/freight-shipping.html

http://www.webshopapps.com/us/shipping/dropship.html

  http://www.webshopapps.com/us/dimensional-shipping.html

#4 Jirafe and AheadWorks analytics for better real time reporting.

Everyone knows that reporting is not Magento’s strongest suit. For better real time, transactional reporting, check out Jirafe’s extension. Also, aheadWorks provides a great reporting extension for a very limited cost.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/jirafe-analytics-free-extension-4173.html

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/advanced-reports.html

#5 Color Swatches

When we first began using these, it was for apparel based stores. We’ve found however, that is has broad applicability for sites with multiple color or size options. Be prepared to spend 2 to 3 days though setting up data to use these. We have an alternative option listed below as well as this can be a little bit of trial an error to get the right solution.

Best fit:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/color-swatch-with-zoom.html

Alternate option:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/product-color-swatch.html

#6 Product Options

Everyone who runs an apparel store or site with configurable products knows that setting up and maintaining products with ‘options’ can be a bear.  This extension makes a huge dent in that effort. Don’t try to manage products with color, size or dimensional purchasing options without this.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/advanced-product-options.html

#7 Levementum’s Grouped Product Display

If you have products that are grouped together by lot, bin, or other common characteristic, but sold as unique child SKU’s, you need this extension. It allows you to expose custom attributes and differentiate inventory by lot or package group for more granular control. Attribute based sorting and search is also provided with this extension. This is also one of the best documented extensions in the Magento marketplace.

http://levementum.com/products/grouped-product-display-extension

Levementum is a Gold, Magento Certified Solution Partner.  We are here to help Magento merchants, both new and old, continue to grow and expand their online revenue in a cost effective manner.

The post Top Magento Extensions to Continue Growing Your Online Business appeared first on Levementum.

Yes, this is the same Cabbage Patch Kids that many of us who care not to date ourselves that far back knew all too well in the 1980’s.  If you hadn’t heard much about them recently, well, you probably haven’t paid too much attention to the Toy aisle at many of your major big box retailers. But that’s not the exciting part, what truly sets this customer and project apart is what is unique to the ecommerce store itself that we just helped re-launch a little while back.

Cabbage Patch does have a line of mass marketed products you will find in abundant supply at the Target, Walmart, and Toys R Us’s of the world.  But if you visit their site, you’ll find there is an entire line of products that were previously only available if you visited Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, GA. In addition, you’ll find that there their complete unique, authentic and truly one of a kind products are available online for the general public vs. the lifelong enthusiasts who previously had an inside track on every seasonal offering. Take note though, these items disappear almost as fast as they are added to the site, so quickly in fact that there is a time limit to how long they can be in your shopping cart before they’re released back to the rest of the world to prevent some individuals from claiming them all for themselves (and you thought only Ticketmaster did this?).

This site overhaul was a great experience for the team. http://www.CabbagePatchKids.com was completely redesigned and re-branded.  The backend was fully integrated to the operational systems to quicken fulfillment cycles for customers who used to call daily to check on the status of their adoption of their one of a kind baby. New offerings such as birth certificate requests and the collector’s club memberships have been fully integrated as well.

While the site is exceptional, and a great example of how much Magento Enterprise can enable you to do, it’s a small part of the success of this great company.  We encourage anyone who can to go visit the Cabbage Patch Kid team at Babyland General Hospital and be wonderfully surprised at how much fun you will have. Bring your kids and take a lot of pictures. It’s a beautiful setting (especially for those coming to the annual Easter Eggstravaganza on March 23, 2013 http://www.babylandgeneral.com/calendar/upcoming/ ). And if you are looking for a place to stay, there is no place more enjoyable or pleasant spot in this country for a long weekend than nearby Helen, Georgia. You’ll have to trust us on this one and visit for yourself to see why.

The post Cabbage Patch Kids Returns to Center Stage, a Must See Site and Place to Visit with Your Family appeared first on Levementum.

For many of the merchants I speak to, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other and they end up getting into a bidding war for the lowest cost service with no understanding of the outcome or what they’re actually getting for their investment. Don’t get me wrong, lower cost of service and greater utility is what we all want, Levementum included. But if you are running an ecommerce site, and it is of any material importance to your overall business, you need to avoid the temptation to try to over simplify this. It’s important to ask yourself some unbiased questions to identify what you’re real needs (and capabilities) are so you identify the right solution before you get into a bidding process.  Your ecommerce site is your identity to the world you’ve not yet spoken to. It not only takes orders and generates profit, it’s what establishes your presence, brand and reputation amongst your competitors. At a minimum, your ecommerce site must perform at a level that is on par, if not significantly better than those you compete against. It must also require a decreasing amount of investment in terms of skilled labor (time and $) to manage and maintain.

Beyond just site performance, there are other elements you have to consider when making infrastructure investments.  Consider the following elements which all take staff or consulting partner time and have a real cost (and a greater cost if something goes wrong and you’re not addressing these proactively):

1. Server monitoring for uptime – you don’t want your customers telling you there is an issue because someone on your cloud or shared host kicked off a catalog import of 150,000 Sku’s that tied up the server’s processor time.
2. Operating system patching – even in the non-Microsoft world, this is a critical security item you can’t neglect. If major companies like Microsoft, Apple and others can be hacked (and have been in the past few months), are you able to protect yourself on your own?
3.  Backups – daily, weekly, monthly? Who’s going to do it and how will you verify it’s done? Do you want to wait until you need a backup to know that it was done properly?
4. Server optimization, is it pre-tuned for your site technology (i.e. Magento)?  Just because you have a server with 24GB of RAM doesn’t mean it’s all getting used properly (or getting used at all).
5. Intrusion detection and prevention and application firewall software. If you’ve not reviewed the PCI standard, you should. If you are generating even $500,000 a year in online sales, this is a must have, not a nice to have. A security breach because of non-compliance can shut down your online operation, permanently.
6. Firewall load balancing and redundancy – the server is just one part of your infrastructure. What happens when the equipment that receives the initial requests (and all the spam requests) fails?
7. If you’re a high volume site, odds are that you’re going to be required to separate your web server from your database server and that there is a formal DMZ network segment that your web server sits in. If you’re on a cloud hosted server, chances are, this isn’t an option (at least not at your entry level pricing options). You may have two servers, but validating that a true DMZ is in place (that can be audited) is a totally different thing.

The skillsets traditionally required to implement and maintain these elements require a six figure IT security specialist, minimum.  These are not easy things to do and require constant activity to maintain compliance and effectiveness.

The problem with most ‘cloud hosting services’ isn’t that they can’t provide you quick, cheap server capacity.  Every hosting provider can. But if you look at the requirements above, none of these speak to server capacity; they speak to the processes and programs required around server to maintain an effective operation. These are not just requirements about compliance; they’re elements of a basic, effective operation you need to have in place to ensure you’re able to grow pragmatically and safely.

What most cloud hosted customers are finding (or users of SaaS based Ecommerce solutions) is that these elements are not consistently met or managed. So in addition to the less than ideal performance of virtual cloud hosted sites vs. managed service environments, merchants are finding their internal labor costs with IT maintenance are much higher, which in some respects defeats the entire purpose of going to the cloud to begin with.

For all these reasons, Levementum has decided to recommend Peer 1 as its recommend hosting partner for Magento Ecommerce Solutions, especially those using Magento Enterprise. While Peer 1 has cloud hosting services which are not only price competitive with other cloud services, but also perform better, it really distinguishes itself in the managed service space. For the same, or slightly higher costs than an adequate cloud hosted solution, Peer 1 can provide the capacity, backups, patching, monitoring, IPS / IDS and other elements that are key to overall success, and they do it in an environment with the highest performance levels and best service level agreements for support.  Peer 1 literally wrote the white paper on Magento scaling and performance. Their prices are competitive with any other reputable offering and the value provided (as well as performance of their infrastructure) exceeds everything else on the market at this time.

Levementum is a Magento Gold Certified Solution Partner.   We not only address the design and branding elements of your online business, we can help you with the entire deployment, integration and operation of your sales and marketing organizations to help you grow profitably.

Contact Levementum to learn more about Magento or Peer 1’s hosting services at any time.

The post Why You Should Consider Peer 1 for your Magento Hosting Needs appeared first on Levementum.

One of the elements within Magento Enterprise that enables it to scale more effectively than Magento Community is its use of Full Page Caching. In talking with one of our Certified Magento Developers, Russell Mantilla, I realized there is a great deal of value in sharing some of the details around this with the wider community. For those with large or quickly growing catalogs, this is an architectural element of Magento Enterprise should strongly consider when evaluating which solution is right for you.  Below is a portion of my conversation with Russell.

DJ: “Most people look at ‘caching’ and see that there is some form in each version of Magento.  But most don’t understand fully what it is and there is more than one type of caching available.  Can you give a simple overview for reference?”

RM: “Magento Cache is a system built into all versions of Magento to speed up performance of the Magento store front. It does this by saving “blocks” of information previously requested from the database to the files system for quicker retrieval, and in turn faster web-server response time and page loading. This includes side blocks (polls, layered navigation), product attributes (price, stock amounts, stock status), categories(hierarchy, products) and images(product images, category images). In Magento Enterprise, and Magento Go there is also Full Page Cache, which extend base Magento cache functionality to all “blocks” generated by Magento, not just products and categories, but also static CMS pages and CMS blocks.”

DJ: “So why should I care about this? If I just buy a big server, is this really necessary?”

RM: “Naturally, there are specific situations that having Magento Cache enabled can help improve the customer experience. Stores with many products and multiple levels of categories can cause Magento to bog down when a request is made on the server. Magento Cache solves this by pre-calculating category hierarchy and product attributes (for layered navigation) so requests made to a category or product page load much quicker since they do not invoke the database. This is also beneficial for storefronts with high amounts of web traffic, as requests are handled quicker by the webserver, which in turn enables your store to handle traffic spikes seamlessly.”

DJ: “I can imagine though, there are some situations in which you don’t want all information cached.  Is this true? “

RM: “There are also situations in which it would be better to have Magento Cache disabled.  These usually arise during the development of your site, when working with the catalog and products.  Since Magento Cache works on the category hierarchy and product attributes, you would want to disable it while working in these areas (or while updating products and inventory on a live storefront) to help you validate changes are taking correctly. This also holds true with CMS pages and CMS blocks.”

Caching is an important element of scaling your site to handle an increased volume of visitors. But you need to implement this with care and planning to take into account how processes like catalog refreshes triggered y Magento Integration to your ERP system will impact this. In addition, leveraging larges amount of caching generally requires increased amounts of memory, so be sure your server is sufficient to take advantage of this feature.

Here are few developer tips/info for Magento cache:

1. Enable memcache in Magento – http://blog.nexcess.net/2010/03/22/enabling-memcached-in-magento/
2. Developing modules with Full Page Cache – http://oggettoweb.com/blog/customizations-compatible-magento-full-page-cache/
3. Demystifying Magento cache in the code – http://blog.kyp.fr/make-a-clean-sweep-of-commons-magento-cache_lifetime-workarounds-usage-in-cache-block-policy/#.USaq6qWR_CJ

The post Interview with an Expert: Russell Mantilla talks about Caching in Magento Enterprise appeared first on Levementum.

As a result, Levementum has implemented a free upgrade assessment program through April, 2013 for merchants looking to move to Enterprise Edition for the first time or for those looking to upgrade to the latest version of Enterprise Edition.  If you would like a Magento Certified Expert to review your site, verify your site is upgrade safe and provide you with a quote on upgrade services, please fill out the contact us form and we’ll follow up with you right away.  We’ll provide you with verification that your site is upgrade ready or a complete list of upgrade compatibility issues and risks that Levementum can address to ensure compliance going forward.

Levementum is a Magento Certified Gold Partner and the leading authority on upgrading to Magento Enterprise Edition.

The post Contact Levementum for a Magento Upgrade Assessment appeared first on Levementum.

For merchants just venturing into this space, evaluating the different options can be a daunting task. When looking at ERP systems vs. a more narrowly focused set of order management tools, it can be hard to understand the differences between these platforms.  Generally, order management tools will be focused on managing your stocking warehouse and the pick, pack and ship processes. They may have some financial tools, but they are going to be restricted. ERP systems generally take into account things like Human Resource Management (Payroll), Manufacturing, Accounting, Asset Management and other more advanced Finance elements, and potentially other related items like Point of Sale and Vendor / Purchasing Management.

We’ve gone back and surveyed many of our mid-sized customers and compiled a couple of options you should consider when venturing into this area. These are all good tools for processing and managing orders and inventory effectively. They are moderately priced and they have some form of prebuilt integration to Magento that minimizes (but does not completely eliminate) costs of integration. It’s important to note that when looking at order management (and ERP) tools with prebuilt integration, you are trading some flexibility for time to market and reduced cost. Each of these may impose some constraints and limitations along the way, but they offer excellent value for the growing merchant.

We’re listing these products in no particular order and this is by no means a definitive list. And while we’re not necessarily endorsing any of these products for your selection, we do suggest that if you are leveraging Magento and you are venturing into the Order Management area, one or all of these products should be part of your evaluation process.

Option 1, Stone Edge (http://www.stoneedge.net/)

Stone Edge has had a Magento integration tool set for several years. Over time, the out of the box integration package has become more functional and required less and less modification to update the integration work to Magento.  Expect that this is something that can be done and implemented in a week or less unless you have a very non-traditional product model. However, if you are running a site with a lot of configurable products, or if you are leveraging non-credit card payments methods (purchase orders,  Echecks, etc.), you want to make sure allocate a little extra time for testing and revisions.

Stone Edge also integrates well with QuickBooks and can help bridge the gap from web order to fulfillment to financial management.

Option 2, Order Motion (http://ordermotion.com/)

Order Motion’s Connector is one of the more advanced in the space. It does an excellent job of not just funneling orders from Magento to the central management system, but it also updates Magento’s product and inventory data based orders being received from other channels (such as POS transactions).  It does a very good job handling more complex order elements such as drop shipments, multi-shipment orders and returns.

Key element to know about this connector, it requires Magento Enterprise Edition to leverage all the functionality available. Community Edition integration is available, but you would not be able to leverage all of the Order Motion capabilities with community edition.

Option 3, OpenERP  (http://www.openerp.com/)

For those moving beyond just basic order management, and ready to begin looking at true ERP solutions, there are a number of options. A strong, open sourced based tool, with prebuilt connectors available for Magento is OpenERP.  Open ERP is a more complete and robust solution. It provides accounting, warehouse, manufacturing, Point of Sales (POS) and other modules as you would expect from and ERP system. However, you do not have to use all these modules and the point of sale feature is a fantastic plus for this solution.

OpenERP offers an enormous amount of functionality for the mid sized company looking to expand and grow, but that functionality does take more time and effort to implement. Installing and getting going with OpenERP is a real project, it will take one or more months to go from end to end and will likely require consultation and services from an OpenERP partner.  But for those firms looking to establish an ERP instance, this is a good option to consider.

The post 3 Strong Order Management Solutions to Leverage With Magento Enterprise appeared first on Levementum.