LightSpeed was reviewed on Inchoo.net. Check it out.

Thanks for the high marks Inchoo. We’ve put, and continue to put, a lot of time and effort into our modules so they are valuable additions to the Magento Community. It’s nice to know that people are liking what we’re doing.

TinyBrick’s Free-Gift PromoBot, Promotional Package Bundler, and the new Magento Gift Card Suite can all give you an extra edge in the fight for customers this holiday season. This blog post is a review of TinyBrick Magento extensions that can help you entice customers and boost your sales during the busiest shopping season of the year, and grab your share of all those shopping dollars.

Free-Gift PromoBot

During the holidays, most shoppers are all looking for the same thing—a bargain. As a Magento store owner, a great way to gain a competitive advantage is to give shoppers exactly what they’re looking for. This is where deals like Buy X Get Y Free (BXGY) come in handy.

Magento does have some default promotional tools, but they don’t work the way you might expect. Take Magento’s BXGY functionality for example. Whenever you set up a shopping cart price rule to give customers a free product (we’ll use a bottle of shoe polish) whenever they add another product (we’ll use a pair of shoes) to their cart, in order for customers to actually get the free shoe polish, they have to first add the pair of shoes to their cart and then go through the catalog again and find the shoe polish and add it to their cart too.

The Free-Gift PromoBot fixes this functionality. If you run the same “Buy a pair of Shoes, get a bottle of Shoe Polish Free” promotion with PromoBot, whenever a customer adds a pair of shoes to their cart, a bottle of shoe polish is automatically added to their cart with the price set to $0 (or at any other percentage discount assigned by the admin). Customers don’t have to search the catalogue to find the free product and then add it to their cart. It’s done for them. Simply put, PromoBot makes Magento’s BXGY promotion functionality work the way it should.

Magento Promotional Package Bundler

Another…not to toot our own horn, but…amazing promotional tool is TinyBrick’s Magento Promotional Package Bundler. The Promotional Package Bundler allows admins to create fixed-price packaged products across categories, sub-categories, or price ranges with an unlimited number of products per package. Meaning you could create a promotion that is 1 shirt + 1 pair of jeans for $40. Or you could create a promotion that is 12 shirts + 3 jeans + 4 pairs of shoes + 1 pair of socks for $80. You would then define which shirts, jeans, shoes, and socks from your inventory are selectable in each package. Your customers would then be able to build their own packages selecting from the products that you’ve defined. The module also includes a customizable front-end user interface.

In the Magento shop that the Promotional Package Bundler was originally developed for, these packaged products were consistently the top 5 best selling products during the 2009 holiday season.

As a note, we strongly recommend having an experienced Magento developer install the Promotional Package Bundler. This module is very intricate, incorporating admin functionality with a scalable, dynamic front-end UI. With that said, once installed, this module is a very powerful sales tool.

Magento Gift Card Suite

The Magento Gift Card Suite gives customers the ability to purchase, redeem and reload virtual and physical gift cards. Admins can configure the new template to allow customers to check gift card balances. Additionally, all gift cards can be edited or updated by Customer Service Reps through the admin panel. The Magento Gift Card extension also includes a new gift card payment method which allows customers to purchase products from your site using only a gift card. Gift card SKUs, email templates and card dollar values are all configurable, as well as a gift card shipping method for “gift card-only” shipments. Basically, this is the end-all suite of Magento gift card functionality.

So how will gift cards help your Magento shop? Well, in a study conducted by Tower Group in 2007, they found that approximately 7% of gift cards sold in the US are never redeemed. In response to the 2006 holiday season, they called it a “$8 billion gift” to US retailers. Bottom line is that customers still purchase from your shop, but some of those purchases will not take away from your inventory. It’s a win-win situation.

Give yourself and your customers the tools you need to take advantage of all the benefits of physical and virtual gift cards. Check out the Magento Gift Card Suite.

• Fixed a bug with cookie expiration having to do with the admin panel (caused some issues logging into the admin panel)

Those who have already purchased can obtain the newest version from the Account Dashboard on tinybrick.com. Just click on the Download tab of your module of interest. After you’ve downloaded the new version(s), update your installation with a single command from the terminal:

./pear upgrade /path/to/downloaded/(insert upgrade file name)

Every year, online store owners spend thousands of dollars beefing up their infrastructure to handle huge spikes in traffic during the holiday season. Magento is notoriously resource-heavy and gets heavier as traffic increases, amplifying the need for a proper scaling solution. The demand for server resources created by Magento can push the cost of scaling for the holidays out of reach of many Magento store owners.

LightSpeed has been praised for its ability to speed up Magento, but another great feature of LightSpeed is the drastically increased capacity for traffic it provides on your current hardware through page caching. Default Magento caches only configuration settings and your site’s top navigation if you’ve set it up correctly. Each time a user requests a page, a request is sent to the server, Magento responds and returns the appropriate content. Without LightSpeed, each time a user requests a page, a new request is sent to the server and Magento has to serve up all the appropriate content…again. Even if that page has already been served. Because Magento must respond and serve content for every individual page request, the strain on your server gets worse as more people shop your site.

LightSpeed, on the other hand, takes any page that is served and caches it. So when a customer requests a page that has already been cached, the cached page is loaded instead of having Magento serve the exact same content again. This potentially eliminates the need for Magento to serve any content for pages that have already been viewed (depending on how LightSpeed is configured). With Magento consuming less server power, the more server power you have to handle other things, like traffic.

In concept, the more people you have browsing your Magento site with LightSpeed installed, the more pages get cached. The more pages that are cached, the less server resources are required to serve content. With less resources required to serve content, the more traffic you can handle on the very hardware you’re currently using.

So instead spending potentially thousands of dollars scaling your infrastructure up to meet the demands of the holiday season, let LightSpeed help you use the hardware you already have. We can’t say that LightSpeed will remove the need for scaling altogether, but it will definitely get you much further with the hardware you are currently using.

Enter TinyBrick’s Magento Promotional Products Package Bundler, the solution for creating promotional Magento bundled products. This module allows admins to assign an unlimited number of products to a packaged product, independent of categories, sub-categories, and price ranges. That means you can create a promotion for 1 shirt + 1 pair of jeans for $40 – or – 12 shirts + 3 jeans + 4 pairs of shoes + 1 pair of socks for $80. It expands the promotional capability of Magento and gives your customers what they want—a great deal and the freedom to choose.

Here’s how it works: installing TinyBrick’s Magento Promotional Package Bundler adds “Package Product” to existing Magento product types. Admins define the Magento promotional product price for the entire bundled product, then assign components to include in the bundle. Components can include any configurable products in any number (3 trillion may impair performance). Define the number of components in a bundle, and assign products to each component. Customers select 1 product from each component to build their own bundle.

TinyBrick’s Magento Promotional Package Bundler also includes a dynamic front-end that scales to house any number of grouped product components (shown below). HTML & CSS match the default Magento skin, but feel free (i.e. we encourage you) to change it to match the look and feel of your own site.

Now you may be wondering about sales results. We implemented the Promotional Package Bundler for zumiez.com during the 2009 Holiday Season. Within two months, 5 of the top 10 best selling products on zumiez.com were Magento bundled products.

If you want to see TinyBrick’s Magento Promotional Package Bundler in action on zumiez.com, check out any of these links: Guys 5 for $85, Girls 5 for $75, Boys 2 for $25

You can also see the Promotional Package Bundler on a default Magento install on our demo sites: Front-End UI Demo, Admin Demo

Admin Username: packbundler
Admin Password: packbundler1

Feel free to create promotional bundled products in the Admin Demo. For instructions on how to create an manage a Bundled Product, view the General Usage section of our Documentation.

Note: The Promotional Package Bundler can be an amazing sales tool, but the module is extensive. Installation requires an experienced Magento developer who has thoroughly read the Installation Documentation.

Release Notes:

LightSpeed
Various Bug Fixes

True Order Edit
Various Bug Fixes

The newest versions can be downloaded from the your Account Dashboard on tinybrick.com. Just click on the Download tab of these modules you’ve purchased. After you’ve downloaded the new version(s), update your installation with a single command from the terminal:

./pear upgrade /path/to/downloaded/(insert upgrade file name)

A default Magento Store installation, without caching enabled, serves single pages in approximately 3.45 seconds. Enable caching and that time drops to approximately 3.1 seconds. Even with caching enabled, a default Magento installation cannot serve up pages in the time that customers expect pages to be fully loaded. Note that these times are just the time it takes to request a page from the server and for the server to respond. They do not include the time it takes to transfer images and to render the page.

So what are you to do? A simple answer—LightSpeed.

When benchmarking a default Magento installation with LightSpeed installed, dynamic pages were served in approximately 0.25 seconds and static pages were served in about 0.10 seconds. Images still need to be transferred and the page rendered, but the odds of pages being loaded under the customer-defined threshold of 2 seconds are greatly increased.

The bottom line is that LightSpeed is the best way to get content to your customers, fast. The faster their page loads, the more likely they’ll be to keep shopping your site. Don’t risk losing customers this holiday season because your Magento site is too slow.

Don’t take our word for how fast LightSpeed is. Check out LightSpeed reviews on Magento-Connect.

TinyBrick is offering 15% off LightSpeed as a little holiday-gift for you. Enter the promo-code “MAKEMEFAST” in your cart and enjoy. As a note, you won’t see the discount immediately, but you will see it in checkout. This is a limited release promo-code so it’s first come, first serve. Hurry, get yours before somebody else does.

It’s that time of year when ecommerce stores are preparing their infrastructure for the joys of the holiday season — impatient customers, bargain-hunting shoppers, increased customer service and server-crashing spikes in traffic. The next couple of blog posts will be a series discussing how TinyBrick can help prepare your Magento installation to deal with the rigors of the holiday season. Stay tuned for tips, tricks, and great discounts to help prepare your Magento store for the holidays.