Summer is long gone and everyone is getting back to their usual schedules and daily routines after taking the well deserved rest. It's important to stay focused. The abundance of information online can help you with that. But you have to be able to sift through tons of blog posts and articles, in order to find something really useful.

We've got you covered on this. Check out this list of great Magento-related tutorials, which we came across within the last 2 weeks. These will help you prepare for the holiday season, manage your inventory in Magento 2 and do tons of other things. Even if you're not yet using Magento 2 - some of these materials are still important, because sooner or later you'll have to familiarize yourself with the platform.

2015 Holiday Commerce Marketing Guide

This short, but sweet 28-page document will have you updated on the latest trends in eCommerce and get you ready for the upcoming seasonal online sales boom. It shares some detailed about the growing mobile market and what you could do in order to more effectively tap into it. There are some great tips on payment and fulfillment management, which are crucial in times like these, when your business might experience the violent seasonal sales growth.

Some last year's stats from the report:

 Cyber Monday is the biggest holiday in terms of online sales - over $2 billion.

 Over 34% of online sales were generated by mobile users.

 Around 70% of brands allocated over 50% of their marketing budget for the season to search and social media marketing.

Get the full report at eBay's blog.

How to Manage Inventory in Magento 2.0

Time to get yourself ready for Magento 2. We found that BelVG always shares some great tutorials for anyone interested in the next version of Magento. This specific tutorial will teach you how to manage your inventory in Magento 2. It's pretty informative and contains a lot of illustrations. 

Some of the things that you will learn: 

 Learn to ship parts of the product separately in Magento 2.

 Learn to configure inventory for individual products.

 Learn how to work with 'out of stock' items.

Check out the full tutorial here.

Creating a Magento Theme from Scratch

A nice and clear Magento theme is absolutely crucial for your conversion rates, ROI and any other real business benchmarks. Without a working interface that allows your users to properly navigate and use your website, your business is going to suffer. There are tons of Magento theme templates out there, but not all of them will work for your business. Especially if your niche is very narrow and your products are very specific. In case, if you need a custom theme it is important to know how Magento theme design works in order to be able to either create one yourself or properly give the task of making it to a developer. This tutorial is also great, if you simply want to learn more about the internal structure of Magento and its design properties. 

Here are some of the things that you'll learn: 

 How to work with 'design' and 'skin' folders.

 What is the fallback system and how you have to work with it.

 The 3 rules of Magento theme creation.

Get the tutorial here.

Magento 2 Payment Gateway API

Do you know what Payment Service Contracts are in Magento 2 and how to work with them? If the answer is 'no' then this tutorial might not be right for you. It is designed for a more advanced Magento user, who at least knows something about Payment Gateways. Nevertheless, it might serve as a great starting point, if you really want to know more about this topic. 

Some of the things that you'll learn: 

 Magento 2 payment gateway structural peculiarities.

 Gateway commands.

 Interfaces and classes within Payment Service Contracts.

Read the full tutorial here.

How to Enable Paypal Payment in Magento 2.0

Another great tutorial by BelVG. PayPal is one of the biggest payment processors that is deeply integrated with Magento and Magento 2. Even if you're not an IT guy, learning more about how PayPal works with Magento 2 might be really educating. Again, everything is greatly illustrated by screenshots. 

Some of the things this tutorial will help you with: 

 Navigating PayPal payment setting in Magento 2.

 Learning more about the Debug mode and SSL certification requirements.

Get this tutorial here. 

Did we miss a great Magento tutorial that came out this month? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below