Overview

Effective: 26th March 2013

Edmonds Commerce is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This webpage tells you the data protection and privacy practices for EdmondsCommerce.co.uk, specifically:

• What personally identifiable information is collected
• Which organisation is collecting this information
• How this information is used
• Our policy on sharing this information
• How we protect your information
• How you can correct any inaccuracies in this information

PLAIN ENGLISH SUMMARY

We take your privacy very seriously.

Children (under 18s) are not eligible to use our services and should not submit any personal information to EdmondsCommerce.co.uk.

EdmondsCommerce.co.uk does not actively track you as an individual.

Should you send us an email via this site, your name, email address and message will be emailed to us (as you would expect). This information is kept private. We will store this information within our own email system so that we are able to respond to you.

Should you comment on a blog post or web page on this site, then your name, email address, IP address and message will be stored in our website database (as you would expect). This makes your name, website address and comment (but not your email address) viewable by the general public on the website.

The website does use some cookies when you browse this website. These are used to ensure proper running of this website, and also to help us improve your experience when browsing.

We do not use 3rd Party / Tracking / Advertising cookies.

None of the Iinformation we Gather via Cookies Identifies you as an Individual – it is all Entirely Anonymous.

The cookies we use are detailed below:

Google Analytics

To understand how people use our site, and to discover areas on our site with issues, we use Google Analytics. Most websites use some sort of analytics program like this. The data it collects helps us see things like how many people visit our site, which country they are from, how many pages they visited, how fast our site loaded, and so on. All data collected is completely anonymous, it does not identify you as an individual in any way.

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add.this

add.this is a JavaScript library that adds widgets to easily allow our content to be shared on social networking sites

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Which Organisation is Collecting this Information

EdmondsCommerce.co.uk is a website owned by Edmonds Commerce, a UK-based web development agency.

How This Information is Used

If you have chosen to share it with us, we use your email address to contact you in reply to your message, or to send you our newsletter. f you have entered your email address to leave a comment on the blog, it is used to identify your comment, however it is not displayed on the website or shared with any third party.

We may also use your email to help resolve issues or disputes, for example if you tell us that you cannot see any of your posts on the website, we would probably search our database using your email address to help diagnose the problem.

Our Disclosure of This Information

We do not share your personal information or email address with third parties.

Protection of your Information

EdmondsCommerce.co.uk uses best endeavour to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information but we do not use encryption (such as SSL) or firewalls to further protect the information as it travels across the Internet. We do not believe that the personal information we collect warrants this level of security. It is important to be aware that there is no such thing as “perfect internet security”.

How to Correct Inaccurate Information

Once posted, you cannot change or remove any comments you have submitted on our website pages and/or posts. However, if you would like to have this information removed please contact us and we will do this for you.

You should know that because of technical constraints, all information is never completely removed from our databases. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personally identifiable information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests that it be removed. We will aim to remove all publicly-facing information.

How to Contact Us

Please use the contact form on this site to contact us.

Changes to the Privacy Policy

From time to time we may update this Privacy Policy in line with website changes that may affect the personal information we gather about you. It is assumed that you accept such changes if you continue to use the site and services. If you do not accept such changes then you should stop using CookieLawInfo.com’s website and services, and contact us (details above) if you would like any information removed.

Mobile internet usage is perhaps one of the defining revolutions of this decade.

People love how quick and easy it is to quickly look up something on their mobile that they carry around 24/7.

Signs of mobile usage are now all around us. People scroll through websites on tablets, smartphones, notebooks and other web-enabled mobile devices to pass their time.

According to the BBC, almost 50% of people have used the internet whilst away from their computer in a survey last year. In fact that article was published in 2011 so the reality now is probably much higher.

Have a look at these statistics which clearly show how mobile use is climbing year on year and now well over 10% of total usage:

So if you are wanting to increase access to your site this is definitely something to consider!

Developing World

Mobile use is truly becoming a global phenomenon. Whilst China and India have the majority of mobile connections, the use of mobile phones by developing nations is also under a period of rapid growth.

Many people in the developing world are unable to buy or charge a computer but they can afford to use internet on their phone; they often lack a wired internet infrastructure, however the mobile technology is much easier to implement.

Mcommerce

As people have more access to sites on their phones, it is not surprising that they want to buy the things that they see on their phones.

According to a report by SAS and Verdict Consulting survey m-Commerce “is growing fast and will become an integral part of shopping for all ages –
retailers need mobile capability to engage with shoppers as well as sell to them.”

App

Building Apps is quite a bespoke task which means you can modify your app to your specific modifications.

However designing the app means that you need to create it individually for each type of device, so this can become expensive as you will need at the least both an iOS (iPhone etc) app and also an Android app. You might also want a Windows Phone app giving you a total of three separate apps that need to be coded.

The popularity of mobile Apps has not gone unnoticed by Magento themselves as they have launched their own Magento mobile integration.

If you would like to find out more about Magento mobile app capability here is the link to their website.

Mobile Version of your Website

Rather than opting for an app, we always recommend that instead you focus on having a mobile friendly web site.

There are two ways to optimise your site for mobile devices: these are responsive themes and mobile versions. They have positive points and drawbacks and it really depends on what you are looking for.

We offer both types of mobile optimisation so whatever option you decide, we are happy to implement it.

Just in case you are not sure about what the differences between responsive themes and mobile versions is, I shall give some more detail on this below.

Responsive Theme

Responsive themes are basically your current website but with the capability to scale itself to the size of a mobile device. The idea is rather than having one web page you can shape,size and place the elements of your site to fit any size browser.

According to google responsive themes are great for SEOs and for ease of updating the site. This may be because they minimise bounce rate which means it minimises problems of when a visitor presses the back button when the site is unresponsive. This in turn will improve your site ranking. Another SEO benefit is that it directs the user to one URL. It is also easier to update than a mobile version of your site.

Mobile Version

A mobile version is literally a completely different website. This means that you can edit your site to be completely how you want it rather than tweak an existing site. The disadvantages of this is that it can time consuming and expensive.

A mobile version is served up as a completely alternative version of your website if a mobile user agent is detected. For Magento there are some modules that do a nice job of offering a fairly bog standard mobile version which is optimised for slow connections etc. These days with large screen powerful smartphones running on 3G networks, the issues that prompted the mobile version are less of an issue so we tend to lean more towards the responsive strategy these days.

Summary

To summarise it is a great idea to optimise your site with mobile capability so that your customers can properly view your site. Responsive themes are best if you want to have a mobile version of your site that is easier, quicker and cheaper to update, while mobile versions are better if your aims are to have a bespoke mobile version of your site that you would not need to update regularly.

What EC2 is and how it differs from standard hosting

Aside from shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers, another form is cloud hosting. EC2 is Amazon’s answer to this

EC2 allows you to run “instances” which are prebuilt images which from your perspective is just like a virtual machine. The difference being that it’s in no way fixed to a physical machine, or even datacentre.

Using Magento with EC2

Obviously there are prebuilt images for various platforms (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian etc) and Magento can be installed on these as with any server.

If you’d like to avoid that Bitnami provides a very nice Magento EC2 instance which has Magento running out of the box, and it’s really the best way to get started with Magento on EC2.

One issue we have previously hit is the machine reporting itself to be out of disk space, but actually the issue was down to running out of what are known as inodes. We’ve documented this previously, but should be a very rare case

If you have a Magento site then there are no doubt certain aspects of the maintainence and management of the web site that you would appreciate a little help with. This might range from things like upgrades down to one on one training and support in using the platform. If that sounds good to you then read on about our Magento support service.

Edmonds Commerce provide this kind of ongoing monthly support services to a number of clients. We work with you to get the most out of your store, assisting with things like getting it running as quickly as possible, updating plugins and investigating and fixing issues and bugs.

With a powerful and complex platform such as Magento, we find that this kind of wrap around support is really valuable to our clients so that they can ask us when things don’t make sense and generally make sure they are doing things the best way to get the maximum advantage of the platform.

Magento Support Monthly Package

Monthly support packages include a discounted hourly rate for a set number of hours. We will agree with you a number of hours per month and will then schedule this in a way that suits your requirements. For some people a small number of hours every week is best. For others it makes more sense to have a chunk of time once a month with time in between to build up a list of requirements for the next batch.

Find out More

If you would like to discuss our Magento monthly support arrangements, please fill out the contact form below or give us a call on +44 (0)1274 590036

Buckley is a UK based company that prides itself on designing and manufacturing high quality fashion & costume jewellery at competitive prices since its inception in 1989. The company has rapidly expanded into a worldwide brand with jewellery collections available to a vast market of over 200 stores including more than 60 Duty Free shops and 120 airlines . We are glad to hear that Buckley has contributed over US$3 million to the funding of the Royal British Legion through the sale of its elegant Buckley Poppy.

The development idea:

Buckley Jewellery was initially launched using WordPress and used an ecommerce package called ShopperPress. As the company grew and they started to expand their business to Duty Free shops and airlines, it became apparent that WordPress could not provide enough support for their complex modifications and customisations. This is when the idea of re-building the site in Magento was suggested.

We started working with Buckley in 2011 and have been providing them with continuous support since then. Some of the main requirements were broadly to do the following:

1. Magento implementation and migration from previous platform

We installed and configured Magento onto Buckley’s chosen hosting platform and installed the essential extensions such as shipping and payment gateways including PayPal and SagePay. We also migrated all of their products, customers and orders database from the previous platform into Magento. A clean and clear design was created and customised to their specification and we have been tweaking it per their needs and requirements ever since.

2. Magento training

After successfully migrating the site to Magento, we did an on-site one day introduction course with Buckley, where we gave them the background understanding and some useful skills required to get the most out of their new Magento store.
Here is a quote from Mark at Buckley Jewellry: “The day was extremely useful with just the right amount of content to set us on our way.”

3. Magento upgrade and Magento security patch applied

It is important to make sure that your Magento site is up to date. We have done two upgrades for Buckley so far and they all went really well.The upgrades were done in three separate phrases – exploratory upgrade, bugs fixing and deployment to live. We hit a few bugs but managed to fix them within hours.
Around mid July 2012, a serious security hole was found in Zend Framework which allow hackers to gain access to mysql server credentials. A patch was quickly applied to Buckley live store using a nice Bash script we put together. We offered this free security patching service to all Magento sites with a voluntary charity donation and had a lot of sites take us up on this offer.

4. Ongoing support

Buckley have joined our retainer scheme where we provide them with daily maintenance supports, bugs fixing and consultation services. Various firesale promotions, extensions and marketing exercises were installed and configured into their website.
Recently we had migrated Buckley and its sister site Attwood & Sawyer to a dedicated server, which is faster, more secured and gives them better control over the sites.
Buckley also engages in designing beautiful vintage inspired pieces in the silver Bouton rages and we are currently managing the merger process of Bouton into Buckley main sites.

Testimonial

Here is a quote from Mark Noble, IT Manager at Buckley Jewellery:

“Buckley Jewellery originally approached Edmonds Commerce to take our existing site and develop it onto a Magento platform. Since this first project we have used Joseph and his team for a further website and additional work to develop & expand our ecommerce business. The offer of installing the Magento patch across our websites was typical of a company who provide an honest and refreshing approach to website design. I would not hesitate to recommend Edmonds Commerce for any ecommerce development and advice”.

As part of our retainer services we offer Ritesim.com an ongoing monthly support service for their busy Magento site. This includes assistance with things like upgrades and bug fixes along with phone support and much more.

Ritesim.com International Phone Cards

If you have a bash script that you want to make sure there is only ever one instance of, for example something triggered by cron that might not have finished the next time cron tries to trigger it then you might like this little snippet:

This is built for running Magento shell scripts (if you don’t know about these, check them out) that are run on cron.

Also note the logging that keeps log files

Note the use of a character class in grep means it wont match itself – nice eh

#!/bin/bash
HOUR=<code>date +'%H:%M'</code>
RUNNING=<code>ps waux | grep &quot;longrunner[.]php&quot;</code>
if [ &quot;&quot; == &quot;$RUNNING&quot; ]
then
    echo &quot;Its not running, we can now run it&quot;
    php -f /home/my/public_html/shell/longrunner.php -- import &gt; /home/my/public_html/var/log/mylog.txt 2&gt;&amp;1
    cp -f  /home/my/public_html/var/log/my.txt /home/my/public_html/var/log/${HOUR}.my.txt
    echo &quot;COMPLETED&quot;
else
    echo &quot;It is running, aborting running this time&quot;
fi

As part of our white label service we provided the development and design implementation requirements for a large London agency to deliver a high quality Magento site on budget and time.

The site required some customised functionality along with a full bespoke design implementation.

Magento comes in two main versions, the popular and freely available Community Edition and the more rounded and fully featured Enterprise Edition which is targeted at larger enterprises that require extended features, warranty and support that come with the purchase of a Magento Enterprise licence.

For the very large enterprise the best solution is the Magento Enterprise Premium bundle which included multiple licences for running a server cluster and also includes greater support and guidance to ensure that your web site is built to the highest standards and avoids any pitfalls.

Edmonds Commerce are Magento Silver Partners which means that we keep a foot in both the Community and Enterprise camps and are happy to service both of these kinds of clients. Our close relationship with Magento as a partner allows us to access support and resources to assist us in providing you with the highest levels of service.

If you are looking to purchase a Magento Enterprise licence then we will be able to provide this to you at the best possible prices.

For all of your Magento Enterprise requirements contact Edmonds Commerce today and we will help you to get the best out of this excellent platform.

As standard Magento comes with some excellent SEO features meaning that with little effort your site can be highly optimised for SEO. That said like anything there is always more that can be done. In the world of SEO this is generally always true, its an ongoing effort to keep your site at the top of the listings.

There are two main aspects to SEO which is ‘on the page’ SEO meaning the content and structure of your Magento site and then ‘off page’ SEO which involves building links and content external to your site. A modern SEO strategy involves careful application of both SEO methods to give you a natural and rounded SEO boost which avoids pitfalls of over optimisation and potential penalties from the main search engines and gives you a stable base to build strong rankings now and in the future.

Edmonds Commerce are happy work directly for you or closely with any SEO specialist or agency that you have involved to improve the on page SEO of your Magento store. Often an SEO specialist will be able to provide you with a list of issues that need resolving on your site to improve things and solve problems such as duplicate content.

There are a variety of common issues which we are able to advise on and resolve for you with well practiced techniques. If your site has some customisations or structure that is a little more unusual then the solutions may need to be a little more bespoke.

Whatever your SEO requirements Edmonds Commerce are very well placed to help you achieve the best search engine rankings for your Magento store, simply get in touch today.