What to Expect in 2014

Howdy,

The last couple of weeks have probably been crazy for you with oodles of orders and hopefully with no major headaches along the way. yay!

Normally this time of the year is quiet for me, as soon as November hits, that’s it all major changes are in and we’re thinking about the next year. But this year has been quite different.

With the pending launch of the video guides for UnderstandingE on January 1st, things have gone from crazy to manic.

In this article I’m going to share with you an insight into UnderstandingE, share with you one of the guides that we have been working on and give you a glimpse of what to expect from the UnderstandingE project in 2014.

 

In the video guide below (it’s a little further down this page) you’re actually catching up with myself & Dave far into the training guides in a section we’ve called “Creating, Managing Products & Listing to eBay”.

You’ll be able to see first hand the format we’re following which is theory then practice and we’ve adopted a simple Crawl > Walk > Run approach to all the guides as the only one assumption we can make is that you have an existing eBay business.

No prior knowledge of Magento or M2E Pro required

Together we learn to crawl by showing you how to install Magento (takes about 3 clicks!), use Magento and how to configure it correctly for your country.

Then how to use Magento, we’ll show you how to create your first product, show you how variation products are handled, then we move into the more fun topics, such as installing extensions such as a grids extension that makes managing inventory a lot easier, then M2E Pro which adds in the multichannel side for eBay, Amazon & Rakuten.

We’ve done our best to ensure that we’ve removed any requirement of a “Degree in Nerd” and to describe everything in “Plain English“, so that anyone teach themselves and their staff how to use Magento & M2E Pro for their business.

One of the cool features in M2E Pro is the ability to create groups of listings. This may not sound very exciting, until you realise what they enable you to do.

With listing groups in you can:

• Create groups of eBay listings so that you can manage large numbers of listings easily
• Have standard policies or templates as you may know them that are applied to all listings in that group
• Break out different eBay accounts & also listings to different eBay sites too

You can view this guide in the video below, hit the play button.

In the guide above you’ll see that we’ve adopted a “conversational style” and we go off-topic at times on purpose.

One of my personal fears has always been is that we’re going to miss something really obvious and it’s the wider insights that we cover that can add the most value as you’re going through the guides.

This is why you’ll hear us discussing the naming conventions used in M2E Pro because if either of us sense that there may be any chance of confusion, we’ll point this out to you.

Just like we did with the poorly named “Listings” or “Listing Groups” as we call them and also have included a screenshot of the transformation of a user selecting a colour option on an eBay listing and why this looks better for your customers.

Also, the Magento administration panel that you can see in this guide is not the standard Magento admin screen.

One of the areas we identified very early on was that Magento’s admin panels are, well, “a bit Nerdy”. And it doesn’t have to be this way, so after a few weeks of coding & design changes, the theme that you see in this guide is the pre-production version that we have been working on.

This theme makes using Magento on a daily basis a lot easier.

Dangerous buttons, like “Delete”, “Refund” or “Cancel” are clearly displayed in bright red, while action buttons are in brown (following the UnderstandingE site theme) and major action buttons, like “Add Listing”, “Create Order” & “Create Product” stand out clearly as they’re twice the size of the standard buttons. Making Magento usable by everyone, especially for users of differing skill levels (eg staff!).

January 1st is now for us only a few days away and frankly I can’t believe how much we’ve been able to create over the past few months.

But January 1st is just the beginning, we’re humble enough to know that while we’re showing you how to “Crawl > Walk > Run” with Magento and how to build your own multi-channel software, we’re at the Crawl stages ourselves when it comes to the guides and UnderstandingE as a whole.

Essentially what we’re showing you in these guides is how to build the system I needed 10 years ago for myself, but this time around the vast majority is open source and build on a platform that can be extended by anyone. You can add the parts that you need and nothing that you don’t.

Quite a curious approach :)

If you’ve not registered yet, you can do so here and we’ll see you soon!

Matt & Dave