This article was written as a collaboration with Josh Duggan, who runs the paid advertising side of the business. Josh is hugely experienced with Google Shopping and paid advertising in general and has worked with Google, Nintendo, Aston Martin, O’Neills and lots of others. The collaboration is based on how we’ve managed shopping feeds and campaigns with clients recently, as well as Josh’s recent experiences with Magento.

For the last ~6 months, the eCommerce team of one of my favourite clients has agonised over not being able to visual merchandise product list pages – after Magento purchased OnTap’s Visual Merchandiser module and made it a part of the core in Enterprise Edition (previously available to buy for both CE and EE from OnTap).

The native Magento 1 checkout was a laborious 6-step process and was widely criticised by merchants and partners, with most opting to use a third party module or re-build it. Unsurprisingly, merchants sought more compact checkout alternatives, and often opted for One Step Checkout, which provides a clean one-step solution that also has a lot of freedom to edit fields and the front-end:

Magento is the world’s leading eCommerce platform, with a huge market share across most sectors of online retail. In addition to having more than 250,000 live stores, they’re also the leading eCommerce for the IR1000 and IR250.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked on lots of specifications for new Magento stores – for merchants migrating their existing Magento 1 store over to Magento 2, and for merchants moving from a different platform altogether. In order to provide context for an agency before you into discovery (depending on the size of the project), I believe it’s important to provide enough detail that you can obtain an indicative cost, which then allows you to differentiate between the different partners.

I’ve been working on various Magento build projects recently that have required commerce-focused Instagram functionality in some form – be it curated Instagram on the product detail pages or the ability to purchase items from an Instagram feed on the site.