Export Fraud Scores from Sage Pay Suite

Recently, a client of ours upgraded their accounting package used by their business. Aswell as taking care of their office based accounts and physical shop orders they also wanted to export all of their orders from Magento into their new accounting package. Fortuneatly, their new accounting software already had syncing orders, customers and stock levels with Magento sewn up, via the Magento API. One thing not covered by the Magento API is accessing data collected by other non-core extensions, such as ebizmart's excellent Sage Pay Suite.

The Sage Pay Suite provides a fraud score for each order, which according to our client, saves them hundreds of pounds a week and they most certainly want to import fraud scores to their accounting package.

As the Magento API can't grab this score, we created an extension to export this from their tables. It exports the scores to a URL, using cURL. This was the specification from the client. Thus, we created this extension to allow you to enter any URL and have the scores exported automatically via a CRON schedule.

The extension is currently going through the approval process on Connect and should be available soon for free. Maybe it will save you a little time at some point?

Your feedback or suggestions are much appreciated.

Enjoy

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest shipping manifest automation extension, Royal Mail Despatch Express for Magento.

Our shipping extensions help store owners reduce the amount of time they spend shipping their orders and automatically print hundreds of labels each day. Our first automated shipping extension for Magento was UKMail, followed by our DPD and Interlink extensions which are now the only Geopost approved UK DPD and Interlink extensions for Magento.

After requests for a Royal Mail Despatch Express Magento extension, we started to develop our latest extension. Now released for public use.

Our Royal Mail Despatch Express Magento extension allows you to automatically print shipping labels to your Royal Mail label printers, retrieve tracking information back from Despatch Express into Magento and email it out to your customers automatically, using your own branded Magento email templates.

Additionally, our Royal Mail Consignment Recovery Console (screen shot below) allows you to see messages sent back from Despatch Express direct from your Magento admin panel, such as "Label printed" or "Label printer out of paper". It is also possible to cancel labels and re-print labels all from within your Magento admin panel.

Other features include: Print labels on remote networked printers, overwrite shipment weight per shipment, fully compatible with Magento's native shipping pricing matrix aswell as the most popular third party shipping price matrices.

A full list of features can be found on the extension page here and a Live Demo can be found here.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Magento's osCommerce migration tool may well save you hours, if not days or work when it comes to migrating sales and customer data from your existing osCommerce store to your shiny new all singing, all dancing Magento store.

The migration tool was contributed by the core Magento team, and according to Connect, the last release was Tue, May 6, 2008 and works across all versions of Magento. With that in mind, I'm both surprised and delighted it still works.

The osCommerce migration tool for Magento grabs all of your customers from your osCommerce store and adds them to your customer database on Magento, it also imports all of your orders however adds them to a separate section entitled "osCommerce Orders". This is not perfect for a few reasons. One reason is that we had some orders fail to import so we added them manually but out of the box there is functionality to add orders to the "osCommerce Orders" section, so we had to add it to the normal orders section. Thus splitting up the data. Of course we could have added functionality to add orders to this section or even done it directly in the database, but the idea in the tool is to save time.

Another problem is that the "osCommerce Orders" section is not available in the user permissions / ACL found under user roles. Easy enough to add, the code you need is below.

With these two problems in mind, this free osCommerce Migration tool still beats everything else I have personally came across, even the services that carry quite a large price tags as they all seem to still need tweaks and manual intervention at some point.

How to Add the osCommerce Orders page to the users ACL in Magento

As you may or may not know, the control of menu items in Magento is dealt with by the adminhtml.xml file found in the /etc folder of said extension. It used to be governed by /etc/config.xml and as the osCommerce migration tool was released back in 2008 it still takes the old approach of using config.xml rather than adminhtml.xml. You can swap this over if you like in an effort of forward compatibility. We have not in this case, however.

Open /app/code/core/Mage/Oscommerce/etc/config.xml and find the code that adds links to the admin menu. Should be line 118 and will look like this...

Code:

Now, right under the closing of the menu tag and before the opening of the event tag add the below code and save the file.

XML:

Refresh cache, reload role resources page and you should now see "osCommerce Orders" under the sales section of the available user permissions. Click it, save. Done. Re-login as your desired user and all should be well. You can also add the osCommerce Import and export sections to the permissions available using the code above. We did not need it so have chosen to leave this as it is.

If you are confused by the code above and wish to know more, Alan Storm offers an indepth tutorial on Access Control Lists in Magento. It can be found here.

This shouldn't ever really be needed except in the following scenario(s)....

You don't have current access to an admin account.
You are running Magento on a localhost/computer that has no internet access to send out reset passwords.
Or you need to reset a password that requires that the email address registered no longer exsists.

Anyway it's pretty simple but to stop you hunting for tables and columns...

In 1.5x

Code:

In previous versions

Code:

Note due to the nature of MD5 you cannot select or view the passwords saved in the database, with the exception of some simple passwords can be 'cracked' with some tools out there, but thats another conversation completely.

Hope this can help somebody.

Magento offers you a platform to sell your products online, it's up to you what you do with it. And thanks to the effecienty of the Magento Connect system there is a whole world of exciting new functionality available to extend your store, just waiting for you to install.

The following article intends to make you aware of some of the great free and commercial extensions that could help you increase sales. I don't document here the exact functionality of any of the extensions we suggest however we have provided a link to each so that you can explore for yourself.

If you would like to add to this article or let us know results of installing any of the extensions we mention, we would love to hear it. The below ideas are in no particular order.

• #1 - Google Shopping - FREE
  O.K so the first item on our list is not actually an extension, its core functionality. None the less it is very worth mentioning. No doubt many of you have noticed when you search for a product in Google, a handful of online stores are suggested to you at the top of the results with a link to compare prices through Google Shopping. Wouldn't it be great to have your products there? Easy. Rico Neitzel created a screencast that instructs you on how to add your products to Google's shopping feed. Your products will be rotated with all your other competition so you won't appear every time nessacarily.

• #2 - Loyal Points - $400
  Everybody loves something for nothing, and loyalty should be rewarded in such a competitive age. The Sweet Tooth extension by WDCA allows you to give loyalty "points" to customers based on their purchases which they can then trade in for credit - This tactic has been tried and tested for years in supermarkets and stores across the world, why miss out? You can purchase the extension here. It is at the higher end of the market in terms of price though Magento have been featuring it on Connect so the extension must be doing something right.

• #3 - Personal Recommendations - FREE TO TRY / FROM $89 P/MONTH
  Developer Blueknow have a extension that they garantee will increase your sales. Up to 30% in some cases. The extension generates a list of recommended products to the customer based on their viewing habits on your site. There are a small handful of extensions that require a monthly or annual payment, usually this approach is used when a third party database such as post code lookup has to be maintained. Blueknow have to decided to addopt that pricing structure here, so this could work out quite pricey. It is free to try though. Their trial can be downloaded here.

• #4 -Give Money Off Customers Next Order - £25
  As keeping return customers is often as hard as finding new customers, it is worth returning to the loyalty idea for this tip. Return Discounts is an extension that can be setup to automatically email customers a coupon code when they complete checkout that gives the customer money of their next order. The return discounts extension can be purchased here.

• #5 - Review Reminders - $59
  Actively seek reviews from your customers with this extension that will email customers to follow up from an order and ask for a review. You will ofcourse need reviews enabled on your frontend for this to be useful to customers which brings us to another point; customers love review stars. It has been proven to work, positive reviews and colour star rating systems can go a long way to ensuring your customers decide your product is the one for them. You can purchase this extension here.