FAQs
Ekky works with businesses to deliver high impact results. Our current digital portfolio of work is over thirty million dollars in value.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
General Questions
There are any different options and depending on which options you choose, it'll affect the outcome of this question. But assuming you are after a Standard Mangento Community installation, then all you'll need to decide on is your store name, store domain name, budget and which products you are wishing to sell.
Once you've made those decisions, then we can the help you decide on the maze of options which is the best for your website. Like determining which host would be the best suitable for your expected traffic. If in doubt, just contact us and we'll help you.
There are many third parties supplying Magento theme and most of them are suitable for any needs. The simplest way to find one is just to google "Magento themes" and you'll be confronted with many suitable suppliers of Magento themes.
Some of the third party suppliers that we have successfully dealt with in the past are:-
The main goal of a Magento website is to allow you the end user to have the most control over the day-to-day running of the website as you can. We do our best to make the website as configurable as possible, enabling you to adjust the content of the website where you can. This is the power and flexibility of Magento enables you to have, and to have those changes reflected on the website at the moment you decide to change them. This is the best solutions as it doesn't require you to request us to make the change for you.
This power and flexibility does come with a caveat however, if you are unsure of what the change may do to the website, it is very easy to delete content, users, products from the website and do so without any warning. You should expect to ask questions about how to do things and request our help if you are unsure. We do our best to secure your data, but at the end you can change it.
Ekky Services
Generally speaking there are no initial fees for the initial meeting and quote, unless there are some extenuating circumstances, such as been far away from Sydney and requesting a personal consultation or outside of normal business hours or just wanting us to double check an existing quote.
We will try to understand your personal situation and design the best solution for you. We do this without any agreement to continue, so we don't charge for that initial expense.
Yes, all packages are flexible to your individual needs. We offer the basic packages to give you some sort of cost expectation for what you are likely going to receive. We generally quote an expected budget for all additional cost and services, but assess the bill on a costs and material basis, where it is very possible to actually deliver any additional requirement under budget.
We do our best to maximise the value to you, our client, even when that includes services that are our outside our speciality of Magento. We want our clients to be a successful as possible and have seen in the past the unique benefits of special requirements, such as customised animations for implementations of special promotions for example.
If you are an existing client and need the additional requirements, then just contact us and we'll look into how much it is likely to cost to achieve your additional goals.
Yes. Our full custom package is designed for clients that need a Magento installation to match their unique sales model and marketing niche. We have for a number of our clients, written large scale custom Magento extensions.
Third party extensions can seriously reduce the costs of your overall system, gaining months of bespoke work for only a few hundred dollars. The costs of reproducing the extension would be far too cost prohibitive for most of our clients.
We have also modified existing third party to meet our client needs and make those extensions work in a manner that our clients want. For example our client wanted a POS system to integrate with their online Magento store, but the existing third party didn't quite match our client needs, so rather than totally re-writing a new POS system, we used the existing solution and adapted it to our client's needs.
We generally work with existing hosts of your choice, as long as those servers can be configured in a manner we need. Magento is a high resource application and needs additional services that most cheaper hosts do not provide. In order to install Magento, we may need particular versions of MySQL or PHP and if the server doesn't allow use to change the installed software, then we may not be able to use it.
There are two main groups of hosts that we generally use. For our smaller clients starting from $20/month, we suggest two host providers:-
- Linode; or
- Digital Ocean.
And for our larger clients who can spend upwards or more than $500/month, we suggest
- AWS;
- Google Cloud; or
- Microsoft Azure.
These platforms have the proven ability to meet any client's requirements.
Our Magento starter package is the quickest to get up and running once you have decided on your theme. It normally only takes about a day to build new server and install all the services and software required for Magento, after that it's up to you how long it will take to enter all the content and upload images.
The Custom Theme Design package can take much longer, as there are more details to work out. First we'll need to sit you down with a graphic artist who will develop your custom look and feel from your requirements, and then we'll need a couple of weeks to schedule the work with one of our developers. I might take as much as a week for the developer to implement your designs. From beginning to end, it could take as much as a month to complete.
The Full Custom package can take even longer. Not only do we need to create the custom themes, but to design and implement the custom extensions. In past experiences, we have aimed to get the website up and trading before all the custom extensions are complete, to minimise the time from the investment and payback as much as possible. Depending on your specific needs, it could take over 3 months of work before the website is launched.
We don't generally write the website page content or product descriptions. We can however arrange for someone more appropriate to get the content created. There are freelance copywriters that we can engage on your behalf to create the page content and there are oversees workers we can employ for you for the data entry of your product information.
In the past, local copywriters create the best work, with the correct Australian language. While employing people from other parts of Asia is the cheapest option of manual data entry of the product information.
If however your data is already in an existing database, we might be able to enable the importation of the data directly, although this has never been a perfect solution, as errors are common and will still need someone to go through the data once imported and fix any error caused by noise in the original data.
There are cheaper options then paying a software developer to do such remedial work. We can arrange for the work to be outsourced on your behalf, or you can arrange it yourself.
If however your data is already in an existing database, we might be able to enable the importation of the data directly, although this has never been a perfect solution, as errors are common and will still need someone to go through the data once imported and fix any error caused by noise in the original data.
Technical Questions
There are three main groups of online ecommerce solutions. First is to use an existing online solution such as Bigcommerce , Shopify, Ebay or Amazon. These solutions are good for the individual trader who is just selling standard products. These options often impose one sales model and force you to directly complete against your competitors, where the only point of difference is the price and shipping times.
Once you make the jump to selling products via a unique sales method, then the above options are unable to help you. You need to host your own online store where you control it. Having that control will enable you to create the outcome you need. There have been a number of open source solutions providers that you could choose from, but Magento is a clear front runner. Magento will provide you with a system that is highly configurable and customisable and with only a little effort you can create exactly your requirements. Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms. There are many reasons why Magento is sought after by big brands - Olympus, Samsung, Nike, Ford, Nespresso and Lenovo etc.
And lastly is a totally bespoke solution written from scratch. This option is highly expensive and will take many months, if not years to complete and receive your first sale. This option is highly prohibitive to most client who would need to spend tens of millions of dollars to get the site they want. Additionally, a hand writing a solution does not mean that the code would be any better. Magento is in use on millions of online stores and the combined experiences of all those people have accumulated into Magento source code. It’s hard to believe you’ll find a more experienced developer to design your system then Magento already have.
Magento provide the market two different versions. The smaller of the two versions is called the community edition and it is free for anyone to use. While the large and more complicated version is call the enterprise edition and has an annual fee of about $10,000 US dollars.
From our experience there is very little value in the enterprise edition except for those philanthropists out there who are grateful for the amount of hard work the Magento developers have given them.
There are many third party products out there that have existing Magento extensions. For example, Magento can export its order into Xero or Unleashed. This enables you have you pick of witch accounting system you want to use for the rest of your business.
Ultimately, even if there is no existing third party extension, we do have the ability to create a connection between your Magento store and what every third party or in-house systems you already have.
There are costs to third parties for require services that we can't provide. Like domain name, SSL certificates, server hosting or data entry costs. There are also services that we can organise but don't provide ourselves, such as copywriters or some graphic artist work. And there are also third party costs such as Magento theme or extension writers that we can purchased on the open market.
These additional costs will passed onto you, as they are not quoted for in any of the quotes we provide.
Ekky and Magento don't charge an additional fee for each transaction or on the value of your monthly turnover. However, to have your store directly charge credit cards, you'll need to use a credit card processor such as eWay, Stripe or Paypal. Each of these credit card processors will charge a small fee for each transaction, or failed transaction.
To workout which is the best credit card processor for you, it'll depend on your usage and the total value of your average orders. The finial bill from each of these processors can be keep quite small depending on your choose and your requirements.
Yes. There are a couple of existing providers of EDM such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor that we have already integrated into most of our clients. With these third party systems, you can easily control your online direct marketing campaigns.
Also we have integrated our existing client to use other third party system such as SMS to receive messages via the phone and web push notifications so customers can be notify of events even if they are not visiting your website.
