In September, 1/3rd of RLTSquare’s team attended the Meet Magento Dubai conference scheduled on 3rd and 4th of September. We landed on the 1st of September in Dubai and stayed for 10 days at the beautiful Dubai Marina View which overlooked the beautiful Dubai Water Canal.

On 2nd September, our team toured the city and went to the famous Burj Khalifa. Over there, we went all the way to the 160th floor to witness the beautiful Dubai city from the highest point. The view was breathtaking and we stayed there for the sunset which was equally mesmerizing.

On Sunday, we prepared for the conference and studied the agenda in thorough detail so that we were up to date with the latest happenings in Magento. Then, Monday was the conference day and you can read more about that on Meet Magento Dubai – Day 1.

On the second day of the conference, the agenda was technical in nature with speakers like Henryk talking about omnichannel in the world of Magento where he claimed: “Retailers lose $1.75 trillion due to overstocks, out of stocks and preventable returns” and left the audience with some good insights. Other highlights of the event included a panel discussion on the progressive web apps and the day came to a close with an in-depth technical PHP lecture by Gabriel Somoza (3rd from left).
And of course, how we can forget, the energetic Ben Marks. He was all over the event, hosting the event and sharing his insights on Magento. We have been in direct contact with Ben for over 3 years and it was an honour for us to have him laud our progress as Pakistan’s leading Magento agency.

After a successful event end, we took our time to relax over the next 3-4 days visiting attractions like Wild Wadi Water Park, IMG Park and going to Desert Safari. This was a much-needed vacation after our team had worked tirelessly to meet their deadlines and getting Magento stores live for our valuable clients.

Meet Magento Dubai kicked off at the beautiful Westin Mina Seyahi Beach. The event was planned to perfection by the infamous RedBox Magento Development Agency. The conference began at 9:00 a.m. sharp, prior to which the participants were welcomed with delicious breakfast and some lucky early-birds even got their hands on Magento bags with goodies inside.

The conference was hosted by the one and only, Magento Evangelist, Ben Marks who lit up the entire event with his constant energy and passion you could almost sniff. The first speaker, Jonty Sutton, CEO of RedBox digital, kicked it off by explaining how there is room for much more expansion for the eCommerce market in the Middle East.

This was followed by one of the most entertaining speakers of the day, Omar Chihane, CEO of SellAnyHome. He beautifully explained how the real estate market is going to boom in the future by giving the idea of driverless cars and compelling the audience to think how it would reduce the need for parking places in malls and other places, all this leading to unused space which will eventually mean further growth of the real estate market. The audience was captivated by this 20-minute prese

Next up, it was Gary Specter, VP Commerce Sales and Customer Success, to give another detailed talk on ‘Experience Driven Commerce’ that last 25 minutes. Moving on, there was a panel discussion with Joseph Noujaim, Ryan Fernandes, Hussam El-Hage and Mona Ataya. The topic was ‘The Changing Role of Online Platforms”. The guests had some good insights on the topic and it was an interesting 25-minute discussion leading into the ‘Networking Coffee Break’.

This was perhaps the most interesting time for all participants as they got to meet people from over 40 countries. The diversity was phenomenal and the fact that all this talent was combined under the Magento umbrella was heartening to see. There were people from renowned companies and the friendly atmosphere meant that everyone learnt about each other.

After the break, it was another exciting talk titled “3 Simple Words”. This was an ingenious concept to solve the delivery hassles of online eCommerce businesses in terms of the accurate addresses by having a custom 3-word phrase that defines your exact address. This can be integrated with online stores and is truly something to look forward to.

Apart from the talks, there was a 1-hour lunch ‘on the house’ where everybody connected with different people in a hall while enjoying delicious Dubai cuisine. The management was on point and the volunteers and waiters were within reach.

Apart from that, for RLTSquare, the conference was yet another feat in our company’ history as 1/3rd of our entire team attended it and took part in networking with brilliant minds that had come from across the globe. The most beautiful experience was definitely the session we had with Ben Marks who whole-heartedly appreciated our services for the Magento platform.

Stay tuned for more on this thread and also Day 2 tomorrow!

The extension for the integration of M&P couriers with Magento 2 hasn’t been developed yet by any individual or agency. Moreover, we provide the facility to calculate different shipping charges depending upon payment method selected. It contains backend configurations to calculate shipping cost by order’s package weight. This extension uses M&P Soap APIs and is independent of any third party module.

It is a proud moment for us to introduce our monthly blog named “MageSquare Monthly”. Here, we will cover our monthly activities in the field of Magento, progress on our Magento projects and an overview of what RLTSquare is all about.

Imagine 2018

The highlight of the month was our participation in Magento Imagine 2018 in Las Vegas, the only Magento agency in Pakistan to do so. We attended the keynote sessions, caught-up with old friends and made some new along the journey.

We also had interesting meetings with the influencers of the Magento world, such as Kalen Jordan and Ben Marks. Kalen was particularly happy on receiving ‘pure honey’ from Pakistan and gave us a shout-out on Twitter as well. On our tour, we met some old and relatively newer clients as well; Chris from Dr Nutrient, Jarod from 911Custom etcetera.

Berg Project – Migration From Magento 1 to Magento 2

The highlight of this project in April included a creation of a fine report of the orders received on his Magento website. The default report does not include the filters that the client wanted so a customization was done to introduce: duration in which orders were received, order status, categorization of orders by country, region and city, tax and shipping calculation in each state etcetera. So, for instance, taking an example of an order, the client can check the numbers of orders in California, and break it down to Los Angeles and compare the tax calculation for the orders received from the New York region. This can finally be taken to another level in the sense that client will be able to see how much profits are being generated from each state/city.

One challenge that we faced in the above was the sheer size and number of orders for which this was to be done. This was causing the memory to be exhausted, so we needed to optimize the server and imported only those fields that were required by the client. Other tasks for the month included website styling, homepage design, cart page customization and website responsiveness. Another feature wanted by the client was the appearance of the page load icon, while this would have taken 1-2 days in Magento, we achieved this within a couple of hours using simple jQuery/Ajax.

Moreover, the client’s second requirement is to create a multi-site. We have started to work on this, and have edited the homepage design so far. While creating the multi-site, we faced hurdles as the server was nginx and configuration files were altered to make it work. This requirement will take at least couple of months in May. His second multi-site is going to sell ice-creams. Yum!

EEZY – Local Magento Build And a Complete ECommerce Solution

EEZY is a one of its kind online grocery and shopping solution like never before for the Pakistani market. Powered by two enthusiasts, EEZY aims to disrupt Pakistan’s online eCommerce market by having in-house logistics and warehousing facility.

This month was quite challenging in terms of the back and forth exchanges from the client. The PSD designs given by EEZY management were created. However, after creating pixel-perfect designs, the client claimed that the PSDs were not according to his vision of the store and we need to copy what major stores like Daraz.pk have done on their online websites. Then, we had to overwrite all the work done and created designs similar to the leading stores of Pakistan. This was a challenge at first since the client wanted some features from one store and some from another store, although it did take some time, we managed to paint the client’s vision on Magento’s canvas. As a process, we kept the previous instance as well and incorporated the new changes as a child theme.

On the backend, two Magento soldiers are working on vendor selection module for EEZY. This basically included work on the radius around the customers’ location to select the nearest and most profitable vendor (for EEZY). The factors considered here were the cost of the product, distance, weight and price charged by the vendor. Moreover, work has started on creating a subscription model as well that allows weekly, fortnight and a monthly subscription of grocery items.

In addition, extensive work was done on the checkout customization for EEZY. This was a challenging part as the checkout is going to be 180-degree of the Magento core checkout process. Also, there were 10 different shipping methods integrated depending on which group the ordered item belongs. If any product group overlaps, then in that scenario, the shipping method would be same and a discount will be given on the cost. Lastly, work on ‘hot deals’ and ‘trending products’ was also done on the product page and code for user location was improved.
All in all, it was a good month in terms of progress on EEZY and we managed to meet the client’s expectations for the month.

J. – Magento 2 Store Ongoing Maintenance

This was a vital month for J. as they had a sale planned on their Magento 2 store. The last sale, on 23rd March, had issues and lessons and as a result, a checklist was created to overcome past mistakes. These included the creation of one-click TCS label shipment print, the addition of order weights and elimination of the phenomenon of duplicate orders by identifying same session ids. Also, to avoid breaching the limit, Amazon email server was configured as well prior to the sale.

There were issues on the admin panel as well, the J. team was unable to see which admin had what access rights and what action are they performing. So, a check was created for this to monitor all admin activity and introduce admin roles in the backend admin panel.

Another thing that we worked on was customizing how the header total appeared because previously the addition was such that a product was of 500 PKR but the header total displayed 1000 PKR. This resulted in customer confusion and after pointing this error in the UI we proceeded to make it user-friendly. Moreover, categories and CMS blocks were created to display a new catalogue magazine on J. website.

Stichmob – Magento Website Customization

For Stichmob, we are in the second month of this project and the tasks included customization of the progress bar while running shirt campaigns. Moreover, performance optimization of the site was a major landmark as we were able to increase the pagespeed insight score from 20 to around 70. For that, we engaged in the following processes:

• Varnish Cache Management
• Nginx server with browser caching
• Minify HTML, CSS and Javascript
• Cleaning code from back-end
• Gzip compression in Nginx server
• Enabling flat catalogue
• Implementing a CDN

We also introduced a featured category for the designer with the most successful running campaign for his shirt design. Furthermore, there were some routine bug fixes, homepage design revamp, addition of new blocks UI fixes etcetera. More to come on this in May.

If you have ever planned to start a Magento ECommerce store then the first question that struck you has to be “How to hire a good Magento developer”. because let’s face it you cannot hope to run a Magento store smoothly without a certified and expert Magento developer. Before we dwell further on the topic, let us first answer the question that why should you choose Magento for your ECommerce store.

Migration to Magento 2 has been one of the most discussed topics in the Magento community since its launch in November 2015. Merchants and store owners all over the world have been debating the necessity of this migration. The most asked questions include; who should migrate to Magento 2? Why should you migrate to Magento 2 and How much money is needed to migrate to Magento 2 platform?

If you already have your Magento eCommerce platform set up or you are planning on building one, you might be aware that the default Magento features do not fulfill all your business needs. Magento is an open-source platform which is why it has extensions to support and extend its functionality. Extensions are necessary for boosting your conversion rate, sales and improving user interface for the ideal customer experience.

One of the best things about working in magento is that if you are comfortable with an object oriented style, you start seeing patterns everywhere. If a new functionality calls for it, you can add a child class and with a little bit of magento-xml-config-magic, you can add virtually (well, concretely) anything new by replacing the existing class. Recently, one of the interesting things one of our clients asked us to do was to add an extra column in the orders grid in the magento admin.

Top link in magento can be added/removed by creating custom xml files. In this xml file you will add code to remove these top links. You can add/remove top link in magento using following method.

In Magento 1, if you wanted to insert any block on the home page, you would open theme’s default.xml file and add cms_index_index action and insert block inside a reference tag.

After the release of  Magento 2, default.xml is gone. In order to add a block to the home page or any other page, there are many ways.
One way we use is to create a new module. This is how we are going to proceed