If you're running a Magento store, it's important to maintain its productivity. Your conversions and customer satisfaction depend on it. If your store is sluggish, your visitors have to wait for a long time for the pages to load or if your store goes offline randomly - you have to be able to diagnose and fix the causes of these problems.

Our friends from Mofluid.com offer a handy guide that can help you maintain your store in a healthy state. So you could keep it running at all time and grow your business without being afraid of any unexpected technical issues. By the way, Mofluid is a great tool for building high quality mobile apps for eCommerce businesses. Check them out.

The holiday season is understandably a stressful time for retailers, but ultimately it can also be the most rewarding. You have 11 holiday shopping days that require careful marketing strategy planning. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that some of you may unwillingly drop the ball when it comes to the state of your inventory.

However, it should always be one of your priorities. Research from the IHL group shows that the worldwide retail economy is worth a staggering $14.5 trillion. However, this figure could actually be substantially larger. Poor inventory management is one of the issues that stand in its way. The same report mentions that companies worldwide lose $634 billion a year from items that aren’t in stock and $472 billion from overstocking items. Combined, this leaves us with an astonishing figure of $1.1 trillion. Lost due to inventory management issues. Now that's a pie that you might want to have a piece of. 

This week's additions to Magento Connect aren't very abundant or particularly interesting. That's why we decided to showcase some of the great Magento themes that have been added to the various theme marketplaces around the web.

Some of them are designed to work for specific niches, but we're sure that with the right skills and attitude - you can make all of these work for your specific website.

As you probably know, EMV network rules are changing within a couple of months, in October. The chip cards will be introduced through all of the issuers, which should decrease the number of fraudulent transactions and make credit card payments more secure. While this makes it a lot harder to steal credit card info in ‘card present’ situations, the issues with online sales still remain. 

In fact, online transactions may become the focus of criminal activities, involving credit cards. As criminals will find it harder and harder to steal from chip cards, you can expect more of them to turn their attention towards online credit card payments. 

So now is a good time to think about your online store’s fraud prevention tactics and how you can improve them. We’ve prepared a short list of great Magento solutions, which can help you fight fraudulent transactions. 

There are thousands of online stores like yours. Your potential clients have thousands of choices at the tip of their fingers and the numbers keep growing not in your favor. That’s why it’s important to use every little opportunity to be ahead of your competition. Every little detail that you implement in your eCommerce business may have a significant effect.

As a business owner you may consider these small, sometimes simply cosmetic, tweaks to be irrelevant to the prosperity of your enterprise. However, numerous other store owners and online shoppers may disagree with you. Product descriptions, SEO structure and backend image processing are parts of this great array of issues, which you have to address. Here are some tips on how you can make your online store a friendlier place for potential buyers. 

You have spent countless hours of hard work on making your website work. You’ve created tons of features and functions for your clients. But amidst all of the hustle it’s very easy to forget about the basic things, the fundamentals that make your website work. What can you do to make sure that your launch goes smoothly?

We’ve got you covered with our great pre-launch checklist. Use it before launching any Magento website.