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Posted by dani cass on September 13th, 2011

Back in November, I wrote a blog highlighting the Best Magento Features focusing on the frontend, today I want to show you some of the great backend features – the ones you will be using as a Magento Ecommerce website owner.

Magento websites are great because you don’t need a vast amount of technical knowledge to use them, something most store owners will be pleased to hear!

When you sign in to your Magento Commerce backend, you will see this page:

This page is the Magento dashboard and it contains lots of helpful information about how your ecommerce store is performing. The dashboard includes the following information:

• Lifetime sales: This lets you see the total of all your orders, great for checking your websites ROI!
• Average orders: This shows you the average order value, great for working out whether you need to include cross-selling to increase your order value.
• Last 5 orders: This shows you the last 5 orders including the customers name, amount of items and order value.
• Last 5 search terms: This is helpful as it lets you see what people are searching for, perhaps even highlighting a gap in your product range!
• Top 5 search terms: This shows you the most popular search terms, highlighting your customers’ must have products.
• Orders graph: This section allows you to view a graph of your sales based on amount or value of order for various periods of time. There is also a summary below the graph showing you values by revenue, tax, shipping and quantity, perfect for collating your business figures and projections.
• Order summary (see blow): This gives you a summary by Best sellers, Most viewed products and customer, perfect for keeping up to date with your most popular products.

One of the great things about the Magento Commerce backend is that everything is linked to via the easy to navigate menu. I’m sure all online store owners will agree, the most important thing they need to find is the orders screen! This can be found on the 1st menu under ‘sales’:

Clicking on the ‘orders’ option will take you to an overview of your orders which looks like this:

This screen allows you to view the details of the order along with the order status. You will see at the end of the rows there is an ‘edit’ link, clicking on this opens up the full order. The orders (see example below) contain all of the customer, payment and product purchased details, as well as one click options to send an invoice, mark the item as shipped, to cancel, place on hold or reorder.

Yesterday I heard a client asking a very good question about the Magento system, “does it automatically create an invoice for the order?”, well the short answer is yes and the default looks like this:

While this invoice provides all of the information the customer requires, it may not look exactly how you would want it to – this isn’t a problem though as your Magento Web Designer will be able to change the layout, colours and logos to get it just right for your business.

Another helpful menu on the Magento backend is the reports menu. This menu contains the following sub-menu’s:

The ‘sales’ sub-menu lets you create custom reports showing you information about sales, tax, shipping, total invoiced, total refunded and coupons. You are able to create reports for certain time periods, great for checking the success of a special offer campaign or completing sales reports. Once your reports have been generated you can even export them to Excel and csv.

The ‘shopping cart’ sub-menu provides information about abandoned carts and products in carts. These are helpful, especially for email marketing purposes and are perfect for targeted marketing.

You can also compare added to basket v purchased on the items in cart screen, highlighting areas where there may be a conversion to sale issue.

The ‘products’ sub-menu provides information about bestsellers, most viewed, downloads and that all important low stock report – again all of these can be exported to Excel or csv.

The ‘new accounts’ sub-menu contains information about new customers, customers by order total and customers by number of orders. These reports are great for offering special welcome promotions or customer specific pricing for your best customers.

The ‘tags’ sub-menu contains information about customer tags, product tags and most popular tags. Tags are a great way of matching your products to what your customers are searching for. The search report (see below) shows a list of the terms your customers are searching for as well as the number of results returned for that phrase. You can use the information in the search report to create better product tags increasing the chances of your customers finding the products they are searching for.

Below is an example of the search report, this can be exported to Excel or csv.

• Top tip: Why not email a copy across to your Magento Search Engine Optimisation Engineer so they can come up with some new and relevant keywords for your campaign?

Finally, just to show you how easy it is to create and update your products, under the ‘catalog’ menu there is an option ‘manage products’, this takes you to the product management screen which looks like this:

On the product management screen, an overview of the product details is displayed. As with the orders page, you will see there is an ‘edit’ link at the end of the row – clicking this takes you to the ‘product information’ page where you can amend any of the product details.

In the top right hand corner of this screen you will also see a button to add a product.

To begin creating your product you must first choose the attribute set (i.e. the type of product such as clothing, furniture, etc) and the product type (i.e. simple product, bundled product, etc).

Then you will be taken to the screen below where you can enter all of the product details. The additional tabs to the left allow you to add further information such as setting related products and upsells/cross-sells, create meta information for search engine promotion and setting custom designs (each product can potentially have a different design).

To view a live demonstration of the Magento system visit http://ecommercedemo.studio2online.co.uk/ or for more information about how a Magento Commerce Website built by Impact Web Solutions can help your business call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design