Magento Customization: It’s All About Perfect Customer Experience

We live in the age of customer-centric ecommerce. There’s a variety of contested spaces and niches there, and customers have an incredible array of options when it comes to choosing where to spend their money. That’s why ecommerce customer experience is an integral part of today’s online shopping operations. Though it’s all about simply pleasing your visitors and making the sales funnel as short as possible, that’s easier said than done. In reality, designing seamless shopping experience takes adopting a tailored approach to online marketing and sales, web store design, and ecommerce development in general.

These lines are relevant for both B2C and B2B commerce, as today’s business buyers also want to get the same customer experience as if they are buying for themselves.

Below, we offer you a Magento customization guide to help you unlock the full potential of built-in and third-party tools compatible with the platform. With the right team and sense of direction, these features can help you craft visitors’ perfect perception of your Magento store.

A Magento customization guide for ecommerce executives

Design the Web Store for Shoppers’ Convenience

It is hardly arguable that the layout of your web store pages directly influences customers’ purchase decisions. Be it a homepage or a product description, every piece of content your target customers see should convey brand characteristics crucial for them, such as luxury or practicality, trendiness or reliability.

First and foremost, take a critical look at the key pages of your web store. Do they emphasize your key brand values? Do they state how your products are different from competitors’ offerings? Do they look appealing?

Magento homepage customization is necessary to make a good first impression on shoppers. With default capabilities, you can create blocks with banners that will both attract attention to particular products or promotions and increase the traffic to target pages. You can also integrate your product snippets into the homepage to showcase your new arrivals or hot deals. Such practices will make the homepage not only present the brand but also directly increase sales.

Magento theme customization is a default mechanism based on using the in-built Blank theme, UI components, and the Admin pattern library so as to tweak the web store’s pages. Though the frontend is highly customizable and allows you to achieve really inspiring and convincing visuals, it requires coding and thus takes the assistance of professional ecommerce developers experienced in Magento.

Let Your Employees Drive CX

A lot of modern ecommerce businesses are pretty restrictive when it comes to data democratization. Data silos are a severe problem for many companies. But luckily, some of them started realizing the potential of widespread access to data for its employees. Data and access to it can shape the way you interact with customers and score customer experience points. Hypothetically, you have some divisions or employee categories that can benefit from better access to data. These groups include customer care representatives, marketing professionals, salespeople, and any outside developers that you might involve in your Magento customization project. Magento offers you some great options when it comes to backend access with the help of user roles. This functionality allows you to create new roles, like ‘a support rep,’ manage their permissions, and access the rights within the backend. After creating a specific role, you can assign particular role privileges, letting this user type perform specific actions within your backend. It’s crucial to carefully assign these, as you might end up handing out permissions to people not qualified to act upon them.

You can even go further for Magento grid customization, and this way create convenient working spaces per every employee role.

How does role-based data sharing influence customer experience?

It streamlines customer support.
It improves billing and accounting through access to payment information.
It enhances marketing by enabling product and company information updates on the go.
It shrinks the service time as marketing, support, and sales teams can exchange up-to-date information regarding orders, customer credit, shopping cart details, etc.

A carefully crafted set of admin roles at your site will allow you to remove any bottlenecks from the sales pipeline. This will result in an optimized shopping experience with fast response times and precise customer care operations.

Employees are the ones to drive customer experience, and Magento lets them do just that

Refine Search and Navigation for Visitors

A good site search lowers the strain on customer support, makes it easier to discover cross-selling and up-selling items, as well as decreases customer churn as people can quickly find the exact product they were looking for. This is a very powerful tool that improves the general customer experience of your Magento store.

Magento supports ElasticSearch, which is one of the best search and analytics engines explicitly designed to handle large quantities of queries in an intelligent and facilitating manner. That’s why companies like Facebook and Dell use ElasticSearch for their internal and external needs. Its more specific features include the support for:

Multiple languages
Synonyms and ‘negative’ keywords
Real-time analytics
Internal databases and enterprise data lakes

While this will work for most web stores, there are alternatives available on the Magento Marketplace for those who feel the need for deeper Magento customization.

Here are a couple of solutions with the highest user scores:

Celebros Search

This extension offers semantic search based on customer intent and a myriad of other features, like autocomplete (similar to what Google does) and multi-value search.

InstantSearch+

This is another extension for experience personalization that offers product recommendations based on a visitor’s browsing history, as well as merchandising features that let you localize search based on significant dates for those specific locations.

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Take Fulfillment to the Next Level

This is an essential part of any ecommerce experience that encompasses the entire product cycle. The stripped down fulfillment funnel looks like this:

Receiving goods from your suppliers
Managing stock
Processing orders
Shipping products
Managing returns

Magento can efficiently tackle any of these demanding requirements faced by modern ecommerce stores. This is not just about getting the order to the customer. It’s about getting the order on time, delivering it conveniently, and providing all of the necessary additional services and options.

The efficiency of this process improves customers’ satisfaction and guarantees their loyalty. It’s all about their experience, while minimized inventory management costs and fulfillment optimization are extra perks for your business.

Order Management

Magento allows you to see the order status and orchestrate its fulfillment, from splitting orders to making partial shipments. You can also use the built-in functionality to route orders to specific fulfillment centers and handle backorders.

Omnichannel Fulfillment and Inventory Management

By leveraging your logistics software, you can use your stores as local fulfillment centers, with stocks integrated across all of your locations. This enables support for store pickups and the option of using your stores to send out orders. You can also integrate a delivery service into your local fulfillment logistics and manage returns through your local stores.

On top of that, you can track any orders in transit—anywhere in the world, throughout all of your locations.

Risk Management

Magento guarantees fraud protection and streamlined order processing. Yet, as we mentioned above, there are tons of additional features that you can build on top, as Magento customization options are virtually endless.

You can also choose one of the third-party modules available via Magento Marketplace. Let’s review a couple of options.

Extension: Custom Carrier Trackers

This module allows you to extend the number of available order tracking options within Magento. By default, Magento customization capabilities related to order tracking are quite limited, with only a handful of supported shipping carriers. This extension increases the number of available options threefold to support tracking for carriers based in Europe, specifically in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Extension: Multi-warehouse Inventory

This extension improves the breadth of inventory management options available in Magento. It also introduces stock types, like physical stock, stock to be shipped, and stock available for sale. Additionally, it is governed by a sophisticated warehouse selection algorithm, which can automatically select the best fulfillment warehouse based on its location, delivery priority, and customer group.

Extension: Order Number Customizer

While this might seems like a non-priority feature, the ability to customize Magento order numbers can be a useful business tool. By default, customers get a random order ID that they can use for reference purposes and order tracking.

This number simplifies management for your customer support representatives and sales since the order ID would already contain relevant information about the order itself. You can also perform basic and advanced analysis, understanding order ID logic, like distinguishing orders placed during a specific period.

Streamline the Checkout

This part of customer experience ties in perfectly with the fulfillment pipeline, as this is the intermediate stage within this pipeline that’s handled by the customer. The easier it is for them to complete a purchase, the smoother the fulfillment process will be. According to Baymard, 26% of shoppers abandon carts due to a complicated checkout process. For this reason, it is crucial to make checkout as simple as possible.

Magento 2 offers a pretty comprehensive checkout experience by default, including guest checkout, a 2-step order form, rich shopping cart content with product details, real-time delivery cost calculations, and short order form with no ‘billing address’ requirement unless specified by the payment processor.

Using all these tools, you can design a checkout page that contains all the necessary product information, supports easy corrections of the order, and keeps customer data even if they hit the back button. These small configurations will make the checkout much more convenient for shoppers. You can go a step further with one-step checkout extensions available for Magento. Such modules allow collecting all the crucial order data in a few clicks, which means less time to complete a purchase.

Amasty One Step Checkout

This Magento customization module allows you to tweak the layout and design of the checkout page, adding default input for the checkout field and tailoring the order success page.

AheadWorks One Step Checkout

This is another Magento customization extension that is good for tracking checkout behavior and abandonment, the performance of newsletter sign-up forms, and other marketing features.

26% of shoppers abandon carts due to a complicated checkout. There are more than a few ways to streamline it

Explore the Power of API

Magento offers some of the best integration capabilities with its versatile API. You can easily connect many of the data visualization, analytics, customer relationship management, and marketing tools available today.

Use this opportunity to streamline and unify customer experience analytics. This can additionally empower your sales and marketing teams to better serve customers as they will have access to complete customer data from the systems they use on a daily basis—without the need to look it up in Magento.

Afterword

Magento customization package includes a number of default options for basically tweaking each stage of the customer journey. When the standard functionality can’t fulfill the requirements, third-party vendors step up with their extensions to bring in those necessary features. Finishing this quick start guide to Magento customization, we would like to remind that the complexity of the platform can harm your business if you don’t take into account all its dependencies and development peculiarities, especially when you run third-party Magento modules.