The Best Way to Integrate Magento with Google Analytics

(This article was last published on February 26, 2015. It’s been updated for accuracy and completeness by our friends over at 121eCommerce, a seasoned Magento Professional Partner and web development agency specializing in B2B and B2C eCommerce.)

If you run an eCommerce store, data-driven decisions are the best way to improve conversion rates, bring in more sales, and propel your business to new heights.

But how can you get the data you use to make your decisions?

Unlike the owner of a retailer store, for example, you can’t just watch customers and see where they linger – and the items or sections of your store that they ignore. 

So what should you do? 

Google Analytics is a great place to start. It gives you the tools you need to analyze how your site traffic behaves. And, it’s FREE! As a result, it has become the de facto web analytics platform.

And if you use Magento for your eCommerce store, you should definitely use Google Analytics – it’s easy to integrate, offers excellent features, and is totally free.

In this updated guide we’ll take a look at why Google Analytics is such a great tool for eCommerce entrepreneurs and how to integrate it into your Magento storefront. 

Why Magento 1 Users are Sticking with Open Source

(This is a guest post from our friends over at JetRails, a fully-managed white-glove eCommerce hosting service.)

Magento 1 reaches its end of life on June 30th, 2020. Many users of this popular eCommerce platform plan to migrate to a newer eCommerce platform. However, many more businesses are still somewhere on the spectrum between deciding what eCommerce software, such as Magento 2, to re-platform to, and having their new site built.

In many cases, merchants will stay with a platform for as long as possible in order to avoid the costs of replatforming. It can be hard to spend cold hard cash to replace a site that you perceive to be meeting your basic eCommerce needs. This may explain why ~100,000 Magento 1 websites remain active with less than a month to go before Adobe, the owners of the Magento brand, stop supporting the platform. It’s hard to find a Magento 1 merchant that wouldn’t migrate onto something newer if money were not an issue.

As users are prioritizing new site builds to replace their old Magento 1 sites, they aren’t all going to the same platform. At JetRails, we’ve been tracking the choices that our customers make. It’s important for us to understand if our clients were experiencing some sort of friction that we (or our partners) could help to alleviate for other users in the future. 

A majority of our users have consistently chosen to migrate to Magento 2, and those that haven’t, have mainly sought other open source solutions. That’s not to say that our sampling is indicative of what all Magento 1 users are choosing – we mainly work with mid-market and enterprise organizations who have solid hosting and work with great web development teams – but we have found a pattern in why they’re sticking with open-source eCommerce solutions. Here are some of the main themes that we come across:

Magento 1 End of Life: How to Meet PCI Compliance

As of now, many Magento merchants are choosing to stay on their Magento 1 stores despite their June 2020 official end of life date. Now that June has arrived, what can Magento 1 users expect to happen to their webstores in the coming months?

How to Prepare for an eCommerce Project with an Agency

(This is a guest post from our friends over at Trellis, a full-service eCommerce agency providing cutting edge solutions for bold B2B & B2C brands.)

Welcome to our brief “how-to” guide on engaging an eCommerce digital agency for software design, development, and other agency services. This guide is designed to help prospective eCommerce agency clients get the most out of their agency engagements and relationships, while ensuring they are an ideal client in their own right.

Magento vs. Shopify Plus: How to Choose for Your Business

(This post was last published on June 14th, 2018. We’ve updated it for accuracy and completeness.)

Magento and Shopify are two of the leading eCommerce platforms available for sellers. While Magento has led the market for many years, Shopify is the fastest growing platform with no signs of slowing down. Both offer compelling solutions for medium-sized to Enterprise online sellers. The question is then, which platform should you use for your eCommerce store?

Whether you’re implementing a new site for the first time or upgrading from Magento 1, there are many factors that play into your decision. This article compares and contrasts Magento versus Shopify Plus to help you decide which platform is the right fit for you.