Category: Natural Bar Soap

I’ve been setting up a Magento E-commence website for my sisters new Natural Soap company for the last two weeks and while I love many of the features of Magento there are also a number of items that make absolutely no sense.

Today’s Gripe:

Magento E-mail templates.

Just about the time you think you have the store up and running and start processing test orders you realize that the confirmation e-mails are branded with Magento icons, Magento  contact e-mails, Magento alt tags and the wording “Thank you for shopping at Demo Store”.

At first I thought this is no big deal, there has to be one section of the admin area where I can change all of these settings in one fell swoop. No such luck.  There are over 20 e-mail templates that have to be manually updated and then selected in another section of the admin to make them function properly. Rather than a two minute click of the keys to add a default email address, store name, logo image, alt tag and phone number prepare for at least half an hour even if you know exactly what you are doing and as much as two hours if you have to figure it out on your own + another hour of testing to make sure all of the e-mail forms work and go where they are supposed to when the submit button is hit.

In the end it’s all good, Magento is an $8000 piece of software if you purchase the enterprise edition and full support.  I guess if I get something almost as good for free I should not be complaining too much. Still, three hours is three hours that I could have been doing something productive like watching TV;)

I remember one of the 1990’s motivational speakers saying something to the effect of “Most successful people have failed at dozens of business plans before they were able to succeed and what separates them from most people is that 1. They actually try in the first place and 2. They continue to try after repeated failures.” If this is true maybe my third attempt will be a success.  I’ve done the keyword research, I’ve checked out the competition and found a supplier to work with.  BarSoapNatural.com will be an online Handmade Natural Soap store. I’m a big fan of exact match domain names and I was surprised at how few were available in the soap field. BarSoapNatural may be a mouthful but the traffic is decent and the competition is mild. I’m thankful that most of the other soap sellers are better at making soap than promoting it.