Top 6 Challenges Faced by Magento Ecommerce Stores and How to Resolve Them

Magento is a very popular platform used for creating both simple and complex e-commerce websites. It allows the owners of online shops to have highly customized and unique online shops specially adjusted to meet their and their clients’ demands and needs.

But, there is also another side of the medal when dealing with a Magento powered ecommerce website. The platform is robust and it can present quite a few challenges to e-commerce owners. Some of the challenges won’t require your immediate attention, but some will cause your website to stop working properly.

Therefore, we have compiled the top 6 challenges faced by Magento ecommerce stores and solutions to these challenges.

Website not showing in Google Search Results

A place in Google’s search results is very important. In the world of ecommerce, you must establish the best digital presence possible. There are a variety of reasons that may cause your website not to appear in search inquiries of online shoppers. Here is what you can do:

• Always make sure to implement the best SEO practices on your ecommerce website.
• Make sure to optimize the loading speed of your web pages. To improve the speed of your Magento website, you want to enable the Magento Compilation function: Admin Area > System > Tools > Compilation > Run Compilation Process
• Start leveraging the potential of content marketing. Regularly update your website, post relevant articles to your niche and make use of social media pages
• Keep up with the latest trends in the ecommerce business, keep your website simple and functional

Magento Admin Notifications Spam

At the start, the number of Magento Admin notifications will be very small. But, over time, as your website grows and your ecommerce business starts expanding, the number of these notifications will turn into spam which can affect your everyday activities. You can disable this notification by doing the following:

• Access Magento backend, Backend > Configuration > Advanced, and then click and disable Mage_AdminNotification

Unable to See Some of the Products in the Store

It is quite common to experience some of the products disappearing from your ecommerce website. Sometimes, you can see them when you visit their exact URL, but when you access category view, they are not showing. You want to do the following to solve this:

• First of all, make sure that these products are in stock
• If they are out of stock and you want to display them, make sure to set the inventory configuration to display all items with the out of the stock flag
• If you uploaded the products manually, make sure to check if you have assigned them a proper category
• To avoid this problem, keep caches and Indexes up to date

Invalid Username or Password

This can easily happen, even if you are absolutely sure that you know the user ID and password. This can sometimes happen if your website couldn’t store cookies. Since localhost is not a real domain, the majority of web browsers won’t store cookies for this domain. How to solve this?

• Edit the Varien.php file.
  It is located in: pp/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract;
  add the following 3 lines while making the following inactive (//):
  $cookieParams = array(
  ‘lifetime’ => $cookie->getLifetime(),
  ‘path’ => $cookie->getPath()
  // ‘domain’ => $cookie->getConfigDomain (),
  //’secure’ => $cookie->isSecure(),
  //’httponly’ => $cookie->getHttponly ()
  );

Common “503 service temporarily unavailable” Error

This error commonly comes as a consequence of installing Magento extensions. You can address it by doing the following:

• Check with your hosting provider if the issue originates from their side
• Use the FTP manager to access your Magento root installation and then delete the maintenance.flag file.
• Still encountering 503 error? Give it one more try by deleting cache and sessions.

Redirect Website to WWW

Your website visitors should access your website via www. This will get you better visibility on search engines. To do this, you have to do some backend editing:

• Access the Magento root and open the .htaccess file. Locate the RewriteEngine section and then add these two lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebstore.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mywebstore.com/$1 [R=301,L]

After you save the .htaccess file, you should access the Magento admin page: System > Config Menu > Web Button (located on the left panel). Tweak the base URL to the one containing the www prefix. Click Save Config and your customers will now be able to access your store via www.

These were the top 6 challenges faced by Magento ecommerce stores. We really hope that these solutions will help you get the better of them. If you hit another wall while running a store powered by Magento, feel free to look for a solution online.

Finoit Technologies is a renowned mobile app development company providing web application development services, IoT application development solutions & services and iOS/iPhone app development services. We have developed over 450 mobile apps, and have assisted many solopreneurs in their journey of startups by functioning as a tech partner and rolling out their product ideas.