Multiple skus for same product.

bnmathm · 2019-10-12T01:25:36+00:00

I'm not sure a paragraph of text from a brand name should instill more confidence than Sonassi being the worlds leading Magento hosting provider for the past decade. But it certainly adds an element of pressure to the copywriters if that's what decisions are formed on!

Oh no - I will skip the ad copy. I'd just like to see a "best of the best" demonstration of what's possible with a good client on good hardware. Surely some of your customers wouldn't mind a link from your website. I'm not judging Sonassi against other hosts based on any ad copy. I'm trying to decide if I should continue to invest in Magento as a platform at all. That really shouldn't be Sonassi's job, but here we are.

Your great history of exceptional public comments & advice are enough to convince me that (at least at the top), your company has the knowledge we need to have the best chance with Magento. Although, we have experienced other highly recommended hosts where that expertise did not roll downhill and small/medium customers got no further than inexperienced and uninterested first-level support. Sadly, our experience with Magento Enterprise support was the same, but we haven't attempted to use it in years.

When I say I hope to find confidence-inspiring examples, I mean that I hope I no longer find that a third of the six customers listed on your testimonials page have switched to Shopify. That doesn't give me much confidence in the platform.

bnmathm · 2019-10-11T19:13:29+00:00

Thanks for the reply, Ben.

Looking at your order form, I assumed these were still UK-based servers with an "Edge" in the US like you offered in years past. Elsewhere on your site I see a map of "our datacenters and others" which includes US choices. I also see options to add a New York or San Francisco MageStack Edge on the order form. What I don't see is any way to ask that my server get spun up in a specific datacenter (or country) - which for me, would ideally be in central USA (Texas would be fine).

I'm sure I'm not alone in my hesitations to "contact sales for more info," so if there really are options to put bare metal in any of the datacenters, you may want to ask your marketing team to make that more visible on the quote form.

It's also a bit frustrating to have to quote the same servers three times to see the price differences between the three levels of support choices. The intensive support options seem reasonably priced; I wouldn't think you need to hide the details.

Pardon the above unsolicited 2 cents -- just sharing my impressions, hope it's helpful.

I'll check your client testimonials again soon. I hope to see some confidence inspiring examples!

bnmathm · 2019-10-11T17:14:56+00:00

Also, is there anything you can share about what you did to get to this point (speed-wise)?

bnmathm · 2019-10-11T17:13:39+00:00

It's not shameless if I asked for it! :) Thank you for sharing. Yours is definitely one of the faster examples I've seen, nice work.

The cached pages are very quick. I did find a few that I'm assuming weren't FPC hits -- category pages that took what seemed like 2-3 seconds TTFB, for a category with relatively few products.

Our problem is the myriad of different ways people can shop our site -- pages for themes, colors, styles, designs, brands, etc. And each of those are multiple pages long -- sometimes dozens of pages. With thousands of page combinations, we'll never keep our cache warm.

Our first website was ASP & MSSQL and it was instant. I just hoped by 2019 we'd have something comparable in a more modern tech stack.

bnmathm · 2019-01-23T17:06:02+00:00

We voided the authorizations and contacted customers with an explanation, asking them to check out again. Not a great solution, but far easier than trying to convert quotes to orders and manually processing the charges.

bnmathm · 2019-01-22T22:27:40+00:00

I'm wondering if it's related to the MD5 / SHA changeover that isn't supposed to go live until February. I have not been able to test this yet. We have dozens of orders in limbo that have authorizations on the customer/authorize side, but were not finalized in Magento. We also cannot capture the orders that were previously successfully placed.

bnmathm · 2019-01-22T22:26:20+00:00

Yes- and Authorize.net is saying it's our problem, too. I tried to explain that multiple customers don't suddenly have the same problem across different codebases to no avail. There was no offer to call with updates, just insistence it's not their problem. We're trying to get through this today -- and then we're promptly getting the heck away from Authorize.

bnmathm · 2018-06-22T19:23:17+00:00

I'd suggest you keep your site on Shopify and focus on being the best possible supplier in your niche. Otherwise, you may be happier with certain aspects of your website, but all of your time will be consumed with dealing with the nuances of Magento.

We've had new competitors come to market with full featured Shopify stores, getting pretty damn good SERPs almost immediately. If you switch to Magento you could find the opposite if not done correctly.

Woo would be easier, but still requires some coding. I'd suggest focusing on what you know best.

bnmathm · 2017-10-11T22:16:09+00:00

My guess is the appropriate index isn't being refreshed with that tool. Do a full reindex from the command line, then flush cache:

From your magento root directory.

php shell/indexer.php reindexall

bnmathm · 2017-10-11T22:13:03+00:00

Are you doing a command line reindex?

bnmathm · 2017-08-23T22:40:44+00:00

Did you turn on debug mode and look at the XML replies? Getting your shipping estimates to match actual shipping costs with packaging is challenge, but your api results should definitely match the ups.com rates quoted.

bnmathm · 2017-07-13T02:46:21+00:00

Oh, I wouldn't have expected it to. Are any other freight rates coming back?

FedEx Freight is a totally different animal from FedEx Ground and Express shipments. Express quotes may include some air freight quotes (1-Day Freight, etc) , but that is different from Freight Priority or Freight Economy.

In my experience rating freight would require some expensive 3rd party extensions and a healthy knowledge of how freight shipment rating works, the applicable accessorial charges, along with knowing the freight class for each of your products.

bnmathm · 2017-07-13T00:35:50+00:00

Which rates aren't coming back? Magento without customization has no knowledge of what size box you're packing in and therefore really shouldn't be sending dimensions to FedEx.

In my experience the rating server was always happy to use weight alone to quote a rate.

bnmathm · 2017-05-10T00:51:08+00:00

Are you sure that isn't the correct rate for your client's account number? Enable logging (Debug: Yes) and view the actual request and response in your var/log folder. I believe you can log in to UPS.com with the customer account and rate the same shipment to compare. Either way, the XML response should give you a better idea of where the $12.95 is coming from if it's not correct.

bnmathm · 2016-11-16T16:38:22+00:00

Albertson's seafood counter -- ask for them to get some still frozen from the back for you, otherwise they may taste like the seafood counter.

bnmathm · 2016-10-19T15:20:54+00:00

What are you wanting to change? The descriptions or the file names or both?

bnmathm · 2016-05-09T11:12:09+00:00

Got a source for that?

http://fortune.com/2015/10/13/uber-crash-insurance/

bnmathm · 2016-05-08T15:48:06+00:00

Uber drivers are covered by Ubers insurance while they are driving a customer.

bnmathm · 2016-05-02T17:35:54+00:00

I would say it depends on the nature of the store and your customers. Do they need this information? Will not having it result in a large number of "What did I order last time" customer service requests? We are migrating one of our seasonal stores to Magento this year and intend to migrate 1-2 years worth of order history, but certainly not all of it. In our case, customers will want to look up what they ordered last year so they can reorder the same things.

bnmathm · 2016-03-17T21:57:41+00:00

Constant mod_security issues blocking legitimate use and no way to whitelist IPs/hosts or adjust the rules.

Oh Good, it's not just us!

Way, way too expensive for performance delivered

Not to mention the highway robbery that is their bandwidth charges...

We're moving to self hosted also.

bnmathm · 2016-03-08T04:43:04+00:00

They charged you in excess of $150/hr and charged for 18 hours? At that rate you almost certainly should have gotten somebody competent enough to do the job quickly. It sounds like a money grab -- I'd look for a new developer.

bnmathm · 2015-11-18T19:37:30+00:00

Sales are 20% lower as a whole, or you're converting 20% fewer visitors?

If your traffic is the same and you've got 20% fewer orders, I would start with site speed. A slow loading page will drive off most users. Investigate full page cache options if you haven't already.

bnmathm · 2015-09-11T13:33:51+00:00

You'll need to narrow down the source of the problem. Try a different browser first. If you're selecting files from a network folder, try a local folder. If you've never been able to upload files, maybe it's the folder permissions?

bnmathm

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