Reasons Not To Use Your Ecommerce Platform of Choice

If you are trying to weigh up PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento, ZenCart, and thirty bees for your ecommerce website.. What  could be the reasons not to use it?

A lot of article on the internet have been written in support of using these ecommerce platforms, and I would agree to all of them. If you take a look at the individual websites of these platforms, you will come away impressed and would probably decide to use the platform, whichever it is you are looking at.

Full article Reasons Not To Use Your Ecommerce Platform of Choice

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Learning Prestashop properly

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The One Reason To Choose Prestahop or Thirtybees for your E-commerce website?

Choosing a CMS for your online business is not easy. A lot has been said around the internet about this, but the question still haunts many, Why should you choose PrestaShop or thirtybees over the more stablished ecommerce platforms like Magento or WooCommerce?

While both Magento and WooCommerce are great choices, they both have their strengths and weaknesses and it is important to know in-depth which CMS is better for you. Both are open-source platforms, as well as Prestashop and thirtybees.

I was planning to have a technical presentation of this post and focus on the features of each platform. But opted instead to delve on why you should choose Prestashop or thirtybees over those more established ecommerce platforms.

reason to choose prestashop

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How to Change the Logo and HomeSlider in Fresh Prestashop Ecommerce Install

This week, we will begin to really get deeper into the Prestashop 1.6 or thirtybees 1.1.0 ecommerce systems in a concrete way. We will start with how to change the logo at the top, customize some css and many more.

This is the second part of the tutorial series on how to properly learn Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce systems.

Below are the list of what we are going to learn in this tutorial:

• Integrate your own logo, if you do not have one, you can buy one easily and cheaply on Graphicriver (do not forget to have a slogan, so that we remember you).
• Add a favicon to your shop (thumbnail of your logo). We suggest to use Dynamicdrive for conversion or Favicon.cc for manual generation.
• Make changes to the HomeSlide module and configure it to suit your need.
• Configure the contact block to enter our own store contact details.

Read full article at shoptech Media Prestashop or Thirty bees tutorial

The One Thing That Can Get You a Bigger Piece of the Ecommerce Pie?

It’s estimated that there will be 1.92 billion global digital buyers in 2019. That is approximately 25% of the world’s population. That’s 1 out of every 4 people in the world who uses the internet to buy the product they want! The growth of ecommerce is out of this world! In 2017, ecommerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales and is expected to hit $4.5 trillion in 2021.

How do you get a slice of this pie? The one thing that I believe prevents ecommerce websites to have a bigger piece of that pie is credibility built on consistency. Basically, website owners are not known to potential customers. So, that credibility must be built first.

The world wide web is filled with thousands of new ecommerce website a day, some are so much more credible than others. Sometimes on some sites, one even wonders if the company in question is still alive.

Read full post at Shoptech Media

How to Change the Logo and HomeSlider in Fresh Prestashop Ecommerce Install

Here is what we have done so far in this episode for this series, How to properly learn your Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce install?

1. You learned to integrate your own logo, 
2. You learned to Properly add a favicon to your shop. 
3. We made changes to the HomeSlide module and configure it to suit your need.
4. We configured the contact block to display your own store contact details.

Yayyyyy!!!

Hope you enjoy this tutorial. We want you to learn how to manage and use Prestahop or thirty bees ecommerce system in a simple and effective way. There are more to be covered in this series. Look for it next week.

Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest content right into your inbox.

Feel free to give us a feedback using the comment section below. If there is something we should have included in this episode, let us know soonest.

Read full article on how to learn Prestashop or thirty bees Ecommerce system
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How to Properly Install Your Prestashop Ecommerce Website

Today, we would like to begin a new series of content. We feel that there is a great need to provide our users with the optimal knowledge of Prestashop or its fork, thirty bees from preparing the working environment to installation, and to running the webstore.

We will begin Learning Prestashop series with this article on how to properly install your Prestashop ecommerce system on your local machine or on your web server with CPanel and FTP.

We will be here, together with you, we will go through the whole process in building your Prestashop store. We will try to provide you the right knowledge to be able for you to be confident installing and reinstalling Prestashop ecommerce.

Let’s get into the details.

The idea of ​​this series is to provide you a series of episodes at least twice a week, we want to work together how to build an e-commerce store. I will try to show you the best way of doing things, so that you can get to manage your website in no time. We will pass on to you the knowledge we have gained through years of experience at all important change points of your learning the system. The goal is to be interested in what Prestashop offers us. With that said, at the end of this series, we guarantee you, you will become proficient and your knowledge of the system will be unmatched. Today we begin by installing and preparing the work environment.

Let us begin by listing the programs and softwares we need in order for Prestashop ecommerce to run in your local machine. Most of these softwares are available on almost every webhosting servers that runs on a linux machine, about  66% of all web servers in the world.

Read full post Prestashop Ecommerce Development
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Get your markup FAQ pages eligible to be displayed as a rich result on Search

A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page is a list of relevant questions within the context of the type of content or niche your website is, it includes the questions themselves and the accepted answer for each of the question.

Properly marked up FAQ pages becomes eligible to be displayed as a rich result on Search and Markup Action for the Google Assistant, which can help your ecommerce website reach the right users. Below is a screenshot of an sample FAQ rich result:

According to Google developers,

FAQ rich results are available in all countries and languages where Google Search is available. The feature is available on desktop and mobile devices.

Read full post at faqpage structured data for ecommerce website 

Improve Search Results of Downloadable Products By Using Dataset Structured Data

DataSet according to schema.org refers to a body of structured information describing some topic(s) of interest. Dataset stuctured data’s purpose is to improve the discovery of your downloadable products.

Whatever that means. The above definition does seems ambiguous, especially if english is not your primary language like most people. According to this data:

Out of the world’s approximately 7.5 billion inhabitants, 1.5 billion speak English — that’s 20% of the Earth’s population. However, most of those people aren’t native English speakers. About 360 million people speak English as their first language.

So, the definition is quite challenging to decipher. Anyway, in layman’s term – what it says is Dataset refers to an information that Google displays pointing to a downloadable file, usually zipped files in the following formats: pdf, csv, text, etc. Files that contains information of some topic(s) of any interest. Specially information that deals with life sciences, social sciences, machine learning, civic and government data, and more(could be anything, really).

dataset structured data ecommerce website
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Three Most Important Must-have Module For Your Ecommerce Store

Merchants are quite funny, they often look for the best module for their Prestashop ecommerce website store! The cream at the top that is really essential and that no one should miss. If you are a person and a website owner who is like this, this article is for you.

So, What is the best must have Prestashop ecommerce module?

Before answering that question, there is something that you must know first. Often when people look for the best module for Prestashop they are usually looking in the following direction: “What is the best module that will bring me maximum customer visit, optimize my ecommerce webshite, and module that will bring me more traffic? “. In most cases the merchant is looking for a module that will do most of the work for him. Right?

On the Prestashop Addons platform, there are a lot of modules available , but you have to know how to do things and prioritize important modules especially when you start in e-commerce.

Read full post must-have module for ecommerce website

How To Define A Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Ecommerce Website

Ecommerce website have to have a clearly defined social media marketing strategy. Without it, your ecommerce website is bound to fail and will join 90% of small businesses that failed in their digital marketing strategy. But before talking about strategy, you first must have a plan for your Prestashop Ecommerce website social marketing strategy. And …

Read full post marketing strategy for ecommerce website
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Why Corporate Contact Structured Data Help Websites Rank Better in Search Engine?

What is corporate contact? How do ecommerce website leverage Google structured data for corporate contact? How does corporate contact help website rank better in Google search engine?

1. Corporate contact structured data are markup that signals to users that you are the official website of your company.
2. It adds your company’s contact information to the Google Knowledge panel in some searches, for example when a user enters your company’s name into the Search bar. Check the images below to better understand how Google uses corporate contact structured data.

Read full post on corporate contact structured data
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What is thirty bees E-commerce?

E-commerce made easy! That phrase says it all! Thirty bees is a robust but light E-commerce system, it is as easy to use as it can get. It can be hosted in your own web hosting choice or  have it hosted on the cloud. Whichever choice you make, is a guarantee of fast performance and easy of use.

Thirty bees of course is an open-source ecommerce website solution built on PHP and MySql.

As of this article, the recent stable release is version 1.1.0.

Why another E-commerce platform? Here is what the people at Thirty bees has to say,

Read full article at what is thirtybees ecommerce
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What is Carousel Structured Data and How To Implement it?

Structured data can indeed transform your search results from a boring blue link to a rich result with visually-striking elements, the carousel.

Carousel are horizontal list-like display of search results. Google search engine usually presents a carousel of movies with the content image, title, and year it was released. It also uses this for books and many others.

Note that adding these JSON-LD objects to your site doesn’t guarantee that Google will bestow you a rich result or featured snippet but it will make you eligible to be included, (unless you do the one thing that 10% of small ecommerce business do to be successful in social media, markup, structured data, and SEO).

And even if you don’t get a rich result, it’s probably worth the work to signal in a meaningful and legit way what your page is about so Google can rank it accordingly.

A couple of years ago, carousel was only available on mobile devices, and only for certain content types. But as of today, it is now also available on large devices but still not all contents are displayed or included in carousel display results. Check the image below: 

Read full article at What is Carousel Structured Data and How To Implement it?
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Important Tips When Implementing Books Data Structure

Structure Data Book schema type is an actions that make Google Search become an entry point for discovering books and authors. In other words, User will be able to buy books directly right in the result that Google returns in their search. If you are selling e-books and other books in your Prestashop or thiry bees Ecommerce website, you can provide these data to Google by simply implementing and following the structured data schema rule.

You may check this article out, to see if implementing structured data for you ecommerce website will be beneficial to you. And How Schema.org Improves Your Prestashop and Thirtybees SEO Results.

There are 7 important data by which Google determines the Book structured Data:

1. Book
2. Country
3. EntryPoint
4. Person or Author
5. Offer
6. ReadAction
7. workExample

We will go through these 7 items one by one and see how we can implement these to your ecommerce website.

Below are important tips to remember about implementing books data structure. It is essential to follow these guidelines that are specific to books and read actions:

read full article at important-tips-when-implementing-books-data-structure/
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How To install Breadcrumb Structured Data to my Prestashop Ecommerce Website?

By default, since Prestashop 1.6.1 and Thirtybees 1.x, Structured data breadcrumb navigation has been basically implemented.

One can check this out in the default theme of both Prestashop and Thirty bees. Both team of developers  have done a wonderful job securing that out for their releases since.

The question is that, is it properly implemented? or does it follow the guidelines set by google structured data rules according to schema.org schema types?

Read full post structtured data for prestashop ecommerce website
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Important steps to make ecommerce website fight against spammers.

1. Change your FTP access frequently (especially the password).
2. Do not just give access to any developer (which you find on the web) that you do not trust absolutely … they can modify files on your hosting without your knowledge.
3. Change access when a breach is performed then block the Prestashop employee account.
4. Do not install modules found on questionable sites or without approval by the community. Shoptech.media has created performance modules that we installed when you develop your webshop with us. And we DO NOT spam anyone! Going through Prestashop free Addons is a guarantee of security vulnerability. You will never know the extent of security of the source code ( spyware ).
5. Get a real good hosting provider that is big in customer support. Don’t go for cheap hosting. That is a recipe for spam and hack attack.
6. Protect your directory and files by implementing proper CHMOD file permission.
7. Block the IP addresses that are questionable and which you are certain is not where your customers are coming from (Russia, Iran, Morocco etc ).
8. Turn off your computer at night, do not leave it on without you monitoring it, it might automatically install doubtful software or “crack”. Those trojans in your computer will later find its way to your ecommerce website files through your ftp uploads.
9. Backup, Backup, Backup your files regularly.

See full article at Shoptech Media

Why Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO

Have you seen breadcrumb navigation links in your ecommerce website? Have you every wonder what it is there for? Today we are going to be talking about Why Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO.

Well, breadcrumb navigation is like a secondary navigation system available for your visitors. It tells your website user where they are currently located on your website in relation to the home page. It allows your users to go up and down in the hierarchy of your links. It’s primary purpose is to provide your website visitors an easier way to navigate around – keeping them from being lost in the maze, especially if your ecommerce website has a ton of categories and products as well as contents.

If I am navigating around a website without a breadcrumb, it gives me the impression that I am lost and dont know where I am going, and probably, what I will do is make a few clicks on the back button to see were I was previously. Now, that is not smart! An ecommerce website must have a way for potential buyers to easily navigate around it, to know where he is at all times of his experience while in the website. It also helps search engines to understand the hierarchy of links on a web page. Thereby, making it easy for it to present results to web searchers.

Search engines have started showing breadcrumbs in their search results as you may have noticed already, if not, take a look at this image below showing how Google gives the result of a search along with the breadcrumb for each item of the list. It is usually placed under the title of a website in the search results. This gives your ecommerce website more visibility in the search engine results and most importantly increases your site click through rate.

View full article at Why Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO

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What is Prestashop?

Prestashop is a feature-rich, open-source e-commerce solution, and is absolutely free. You can run Prestashop ecommercer website in the cloud(self-hosting) or by downloading and host it yourself with your choice of ecommerce hosting provider.

As of August 2019, Prestashop is currently used by over 300,000+ merchant websites all over the world. Initially available in only 2 languages - English and French - PrestaShop today is translated into 65 different languages, and still growing. Although it takes a bit of work to get a store launched, but the features that this platform offers are simply impressive.
This content management and ecommerce system was started in 2005 as a project by students in Paris, France. Then in 2007, Igor Schlumberger and Bruno Lévêque established the company PrestaShop SA. The built-in features support smooth management of product listing, payments, manufacturers, suppliers and shipping.   A user doesn’t need to be a pro at handling technical stuff as this software is beginner-friendly and one can set things up by themselves without a hitch.

Check out full article What is Prestashop.
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How to make your article and product Google friendly with data structure article schema?

Data structure has now become synonymous with accepted Google schema type. Implementing structured data to your product page, news articles, and blog posts article enhances your prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce website appearance in Google Search results.

First, let us define what is Structured Data or Data Structure?

Structured Data are like “key – value pairs”, where you have a key and the corresponding accepted value.

For example:

Key = Person
Value = Richard

When someone is looking for a person, it usually follow that he will mention a name, take a look at a conversation below:

John: I am looking for a person, can you help me?
Mary: Who are you looking for?
John: I am looking for Richard.

In this case, it is easier to recognize the inquiry and points to the answer, which in this case “Richard”. Mary cannot present not just any person, she must point to Richard. If Mary point John to a dog named Richard, that wouldnt be a nice gesture, would it? Because John is not looking for a dog, he is looking for a person.

Read full article How to make your article and product Google friendly with data structure article schema?

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The #1 Reason Why 90% of Small Businesses and E-commerce Website Fail in Social Media Marketing and how to avoid it

Renowned book author, Robert Kiyosaki once said, “Inside of every problem lies an opportunity.” Hence, by looking at the reality that 90% of small businesses are not doing that well on social media, it will mean that we have the good chance of beating 90% of our industry competitors simply by leveraging on the effective social media marketing and branding strategies. Right? So let’s get started!

Why does at least 90% of small business and startup ecommerce website businesses fail?

Did you know that recent studies have shown that 50 percent of small businesses will fail within the first year? How about the fact that a staggering 95 percent will close their doors before they hit their fifth year of operation? That one seems a bit hard to believe but in today’s economy, it could be true. Here are some additional stats that may surprise you:

40% of small businesses are profitable.
30% break even.
30% are continually losing money.
9% have a chance of surviving 10 years.

Now before you get discouraged, keep in mind that many factors go into the success or failure of any small business. Specifically, we will be talking about social media marketing and what is that one reason that makes small businesses fail in their social media marketing?

In a study of small business that are in social media, for every 25th to 31st company researched, only one company was successful on leveraging social media marketing to their brand advantage. That means there is an estimated 90% failure rate among small businesses on social media.

Most companies doing B2B business, except for the marketing companies, do not have a Facebook page. While for those B2B companies that do have a Facebook page, they do not fully make use of Facebook to target and find their potential customers. Some of them treat their Facebook page like a “personal diary” rather than as a platform for them to build their presence and get customers.

Check out the full article #1 reason why 90% of ecommerce website fail in social media marketing. 
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Should I Place Adsense In My eCommerce Website?

I was browsing early today about adsense placement and I came across this suggested long key word search by Google, “3 tips to place adsense to your eCommerce website.”My reaction was one of amusement. Why would an eCommerce website put an advertisement about a product from probably a competition? It does not make sense, right? I knew you would agree.

I clicked the linked and actually found an eCommerce website with an adSense on it. And where do I see the advertising block appears? You guess it correctly. Right in the top of the frontpage. What are they thinking? Do they even believe in the product they sell? Because, to me, it looks like they don’t! As a visitor, all it is telling me is this, 

“We dont like our product, really. If you want, we want you to go to this place and buy their product, it is a really cool product! So, go ahead get out of our store and never come back! We don’t want you to buy our product, which we don’t like anyway!” Sounds funny, right?

I am not an expert on google adsense or adwords, infact I rarely used it. The last time I worked on adwords was 6-7 years ago. I did OK i guess. But I know for sure what adsense is for.

What is AdSense for? 

Adsense are ad blocks that you place on your site and will automatically serve advertising from Google other advertisers. When users click on this ad you earn money. Below is a screenshot of  sample ad blocks.

View full post at Shoptech Media!

Why did IG Suspends 30M users that Affected Many Social Media Marketers

Over the weekend Instagram purged a host of accounts with a collective following of over 30 million users for violating TOS.

“Instagram told disgruntled users that the accounts were removed for “not following our terms” without providing more specific details on infractions. “We’re unable to restore accounts that are suspended for this reason,” the notice reportedly stated.”

Take a look at their updated policy here:
https://instagram-press.com/blog/201…isable-policy/

The kind of accounts were deemed fake accounts or spam accounts and many were unused, along with meme accounts were targeted. But a lot of legitimate marketing accounts were deleted too as well as some legitimate accounts of ecommerce website that were doing social media marketing.

Instagram’s tweet read: “We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible.”

The last time the social media giant Instagram, which is owned by Facebook did this in February, they say it was a glitch in their system.

Go to the full post!

We’re Prestashop and ThirtyBees ecommerce website developers

We’re Prestashop and ThirtyBees ecommerce website developers, contributors, and enthusiasts, and our goal is to make the world of Prestashop and ThirtyBees accessible to everyone who needed an ecommerce website to sell their product online.

We created cool stuff and addons to make ecommerce websites run smoothly and perform better against their competitors in search engines, and integrate correct data structure patterned after schema.org to better give our clients the edge over competitors in Google and other search engine results.

Where You Reach Us!

If you’d like to reach us directly with thoughts, suggestions, or questions about ShopTech Media or Prestashop and ThirtyBees ecommerce website development—please drop us a line at contact@shoptech.media.

Be the first to hear when we find something cool, follow ShopTech Media on Twitter/@shoptechmedia or find us on Facebook.com/shoptechmedia.

Also, you should definitely join our mailing list! We email out once a week (we never spam you) with our own video and other tutorial, plus the Prestashop and ThirtyBeesnews we’ve found over the week, ecommerce development in general, and best practices on how to market your ecommerce websites on the internet.

What Are We Good At?

1. We run a hosting service specific for prestashop and thritybees ecommerce website systems.
2. We have created our own ShopTech Mailer, a mail server to run your webshop email marketing.
3. We built a full multimedia Prestashop and Thirtybees Masterclass for webshop owners and managers honed from decades of experience(still only available in Danish language).
4. We conceptualize, develop/design performance modules for prestashop and thirtybees ecommerce.
5. We run a cool addons webshop called addons.shoptech.media.
6. And an accounting system to save webshop owners time to manage their sales is on the way, however it is on the earliest stage of development.