The Top 10 Problems Magento Store Owners Usually Face with

Magento has been people’s favorite choice when they have to create an eCommerce website. Starting a Magento eCommerce website is not too complicated because of its simple installation and global configuration. But for advanced configuration, things may get tough.

When you start operating your Magento eCommerce site, you may face several problems with the passing time such as website crashes, 404 Not Found, extension conflict, compatibility issues, etc. All these problems hamper your business and create unnecessary chaos. To assist you, 10 typical Magento store problems are explained here below (with their practical solutions). Let's skim through these points now.

1. Products are not Getting Displayed

While operating Magento e-shop, you can find that Magento products got disappeared in a particular category, but they are visible when you visit the exact URL. It happens frequently with eCommerce websites having several products.

Solution:

• Make sure they are in stock,
• You may consider setting the inventory configuration to display out of stock products,
• Just ensure that your products are enabled and visible,
• Make sure you have listed the products in the appropriate category while uploading them manually,
• Ensure your caches and Indexes are not out of date,
• If possible, add any associated products in stock as soon as possible.

2. Problem with Admin Panel Login After Installation

When you install Magento and provide the right admin username and password, it sends you a message about the completion of the installation process. But, when you use the wrong credentials, Magento shows the message “Invalid Username or Password”.

If you have tried many times, but still can't sign into the admin panel of your site, it may be because your site could not store cookies. Always keep in mind that the localhost and “127.0.0.1” are not actual domains. Most of the browsers allow only real domains to collect cookies. This is the reason why your login attempts to the admin panel fail without giving you any clue.

Solution:

• Make sure you are using the correct admin username and password
• Go to your Magento pp/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php file and write 3 lines of code as shown here below:

Save the changes you have made and try to sign into the admin panel once again.

3. 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Error

Magento shows this error when you install Magento extensions. There might be two reasons of this error.

A. Problem with your site's server:

Solution:

Call your hosting company to fix the issue.

B. Your eCommerce store is put in maintenance mode

Solution:

Go to the Magento root installation, find maintenance.flag document and erase it using FTP or Filemanager. After this, Magento will not display maintenance mode message. If you still face the problem, delete your sessions and cache to make one more attempt to solve the issue.

4. Code is Behaving Strangely Despite Using no Third Party Extensions on Your e-Etore

Just look into the Magento system modifications and check whether the core file code is changed or not. Make use of a standard Unix diff command and compare all Magento files with similar files of the default Magento. If you discover a difference between them, you can solve this problem.

5. Installed Extension are Not Getting Displayed on the Frontend

When you use a custom Magento theme and you face the problem of getting the extensions displayed on the front-end, it seems to be a case of file location. Generally, extensions are installed to default/default/ or base/default for the reason that extension developers don't know which theme you are using.

Solution

To sort this problem, just make sure that the extension’s .phtml, .xml, and .css files are in their exact locations. Just look into the base and default directories and find out if there any CSS, XML, or PHTML files for the extension. If you find that, relocate the files to the corresponding location in your theme. Delete the cache and check the extension output on the front-end.

6. Irritating Magento Admin Notifications

When your e-store grows and you expand your E-commerce business, tons of Magento notification irritate you and can disturb your usual e-commerce activities.

Solution

To fix this problem, just disable notification by going to the Backend – Configuration – Advanced – Advanced and disable Mage_AdminNotification.

7. Rapid Logging Out from Magento

You face this problem because Magento cookie has a limited lifetime. You need to extend the life of cookies. To do that, go to the Backend – Configuration – Web – Session Cookie Management – Cookie Lifetime.

8. Magento Emails are Termed as Spam

SEO professionals use Email marketing as an effective tool to communicate with their customers and increase the conversion rate. But, you may lose your cool when you see your business emails getting labeled as SPAM in your subscriber's email. It's a fact that 90% of all emails available on the Internet are spam. But, marketers want to increase their sales at all costs (through email marketing).

Actually, people and business organizations use filters or buy company services (that deals in Email filtration) to stop the bombardment of unnecessary emails and receive only those that contain meaningful content for them. So, it's up to you to check whether your emails are legitimate or not.

Solution

• Stop sending unnecessary newsletters to your subscribers. Send only personalized emails to them.
• Keep the content simple, straightforward and precise.
• Make sure you follow CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 strictly. It stops your emails from being termed as spam,
• Activate Email Authentication as it stops the generation of spam emails from your email address,
• Consider using third-party email services.

9. Activating One Coupon for Several Shopping Carts

You can't activate one coupon for several shopping carts as Magento doesn't allow you to complete this action by default.

Solution

You can easily change it by using the following database:

DROP INDEX `UNQ_SALESRULE_COUPON_CODE` ON `salesrule_coupon`  

Open /app/code/core/Mage/SalesRule/Model/Resource/Coupon.php, locate 43-46 and write them like below:

/*$this->addUniqueField(array(

'field' => 'code',

'title' => Mage::helper('salesrule')->__('Coupon with the same code')

)); */  

10. Google Doesn't Show Your Site's Pages in Search Results

eCommerce field is quite volatile and new trends keep emerging from time-to-time. There may be several reasons why your eCommerce site is not performing such as slow loading speed, duplicate content, weak social media presence, lack of blogging, email marketing, etc.

Solution

Google always prefers the most relevant pages for its users. So, do following ASAP to ensure your site's presence in Google's top 10:

• Keep your eCommerce simple and update it regularly, which reflects the latest trend in eCommerce business,
• Never use mediocre content. Always update your site/blog/social media pages with meaningful and useful content that is likely to attract visitors and drive sales,
• Make your site light & faster.
• Apply the latest practices of the SEO to help Google find your web pages.

Endnote

Running a Magento eCommerce website is just like a hard nut to crack as online merchants and retailers constantly face several problems once they set up an E-store. Many stores flourish on the web and they end up being unnoticeable organizations in the crowd of several eCommerce websites. The above-mentioned challenges do come in the way of every Magento site owner. Solving all these are essential to run Magento e-stores easily and smoothly.

Author Bio

Emily Benson is an experienced CMS developer, currently working an HTML to Magento Company. While she is not coding, she enjoys writing articles on CMS, Web Development etc. You can follow her on Twitter.