Do you have a favorite password? Maybe three? I do.

Here's the thing though: Data isn't safe, especially when you spread it around. Security usually isn't a concern until it has to be, and even then it's easy to miss something. Just ask Equifax--they just lost 143 million Americans' social security numbers. Companies get hacked *all the time*.

How many accounts do you think you have? Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Target, PayPal, bank, credit cards? the pizza shop down the street? and on and on. Now, how many separate passwords do you have across all of those?

Less? Probably less.

That's the problem with passwords.

The moment any one of those gets hacked, that username and password are vulnerable. Over 4 billion logins already are. Maybe you don't care about your old MySpace or LinkedIn account getting hacked--they can have it. But where else do you use the same info? Gmail? PayPal? If they got into your email, what else could they get into?

Welcome to Part 2 in our Holiday eCommerce series. As you may recall, we have been gathering and discussing holiday eCommerce stats for the last few years. In this second post, we will discuss an eCommerce marketing timeline to help you make sure you have everything in place when the major shopping days roll around (spoiler alert: you need to start now).

September

• Review data from last year
  Dig in to your sales numbers, analytics, site performance, and any other data you have from last year’s holiday season (or go back a few years, if you have the records). Look at best-selling products, biggest sale days and times, shipping times, site traffic, ads, and more.
• Select your goals/metrics
  Based on your historical data and overall goals for the year, establish your goals for the holiday season and the metrics you will use to measure your success.
• Develop a budget
  Before you can plan your marketing strategy, you need to know how much you can spend. Calculate your budget for social media ads,

As you may remember, Magento announced at the end of last year that it was acquiring Bluefoot, a CMS and page builder. Since then, the first version of Bluefoot for Magento, v1.0, was made available for Magento 2.1. With the release of Magento 2.2 on the horizon, here’s a quick look at the Bluefoot integration and how it can help your Magento store.

Here’s what we know:
- There is no support for Bluefoot in Magento 1
- Bluefoot v1.0 is currently available for Magento 2.1 Enterprise Edition
- Bluefoot will be compatible with Magento 2.2
- Bluefoot will be included in the core code and standard functionality of Magento 2.3
- There’s no guaranteed migration path for Bluefoot v1.0 to Magento 2.3

So, what is Bluefoot?
Bluefoot is a content management system and page builder. This allows non-developers to create customized pages without having to write code. For Magento 2, Bluefoot offers the following features:

- Drag and drop WYSIWYG editor: Drag and drop blocks from a simple menu, easily

Magento News

Magento Marketplace moved to Magento Cloud
Magento has updated the Marketplace to run on Magento Commerce, AKA the Cloud. This change includes faster speeds, better search options, and improved differentiation between Magento 1 and Magento 2 extensions.

Magento Connect is closing
With this Marketplace update, and its ongoing success, Magento has decided to close Magento Connect and redirect traffic to the Marketplace. All extensions and themes should be moved to the Marketplace.

Solution Partners Reward Program
Magento has announced a new Partners rewards program, designed to recognize Magento community members who make significant contributions to the platform. The program will track these contributions by monitoring GitHub pull requests and using a point system. Awards will be made across four categories: quantity, complexity, special achievements, and area of expertise.

Google News

Search Console
This month, Google has been releasing new Beta features in Search Console to

Welcome to our 2017 Holiday eCommerce Series! This is the first in a four-part series to help you increase sales and gain loyal customers this holiday season. These stats have now been updated with data from the 2016 holiday season. This new information provides great insight into the tips and trends your business needs this year.

• Holiday revenue increased 11% compared to last year
• eCommerce increased 20%
• $91.7 billion was spent online from November 1 to the end of the year
• Half of web traffic was from desktop
• Compared to 2015, online purchases increased 12%
• Mobile eCommerce sales reached over $28 billion
• Spending between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday increased by 15% over last year

• 78% of Thanksgiving traffic was mobile
• Black Friday 2016 was also the first day ever to hit more than $1 billion in online mobile sales
• Despite this record, 64% of purchases were made on desktop
• Cyber Monday was the biggest online sales day ever
• The average retailer got 29-59% more customers during the holidays

As we discussed in our recent What's Coming in Magento 2.2 post, Magento 2.2 is debuting in September of this year and comes with many additions and improvements. One of the most exciting new components of Magento 2.2 Enterprise Edition is the out-of-the-box B2B functionality. Let’s check it out.

Magento 2.2 EE has several company account management features that make buying easier for merchants and customers alike. It empowers buyers to manage their own accounts by allowing them to add and remove users, create a hierarchy structure to define roles and permissions, and view account balances. M2.2 has also improved the quote request process. B2B shoppers can now start a quote from their cart and view the status of the quote anytime. The quote can also include comments, attachments, and an expiration date. Buyers can order by SKU, order from requisition lists, or reorder products from previous orders.

M2.2 will also include the new Payment on Account feature, which allows merchants to extend

For eCommerce merchants, paid search has become less of a choice and more of a necessity. Most use PPC in some form, usually text ads. However, in our experience, clients have had greater success for less money with Google Shopping ads and PLAs, as compared to traditional text ads. Google Shopping campaigns differ from text ads in several key ways, so you can’t use all the same optimization techniques. Let’s examine 6 ways to optimize a Google Shopping feed for more conversions.

1. Complete product data attributes
One of the most important parts of your Google Shopping feed is the product data attributes. These attributes help Google know when to display your products and help shoppers find what they are looking for. Leaving attributes blank can result in lost sales because your competitors may be filling them in, giving more information to customers. For example, if a customer is looking for women’s red pants, but your product data does not include gender of the correct color attribute,

This is a multi-part series of blogs detailing our own Sandee Hart's experiences marketing her work as a writer. Part 1 of the series is an introductory overview of the series, and Part 3 takes a look at defining your target audience as an author or business.

Define & Build Your Brand

In all aspects of life, we are judged, assessed, and evaluated by others. Your significance and the value you offer by what you intentionally (and unintentionally) share makes a difference.

Everything you write, say, or do comes together to create the bigger picture- the picture of who you are and what you bring to the table. Through social media posts, blogging, article contributions, interviews, and all other collaborations, your visibility increases, providing a path for people to form an impression

The latest version of Magento 2, Magento 2.2 is expected to be released in September. Magento recently offered a sneak peek into some of the improvements and new features we can expect in 2.2. Here’s a quick summary of the highlights.

1. Advanced Reporting panel

The new advanced reporting module in the admin panel, available in both Community and Enterprise, will provide better reporting for products, orders, and customers. For example, you will be able to view orders by region, status, order value and more. View product data based on revenue, quantity sold, and best-selling products. The dashboard is very user-friendly and displays data using tables, charts, and graphs. Data can also be viewed using customized date ranges, much like Google Analytics.

2. Fraud Protection integration

Magento 2.2 will include integration with Signifyd, a fraud protection service. This tool will identify and reject fraudulent orders and provide reimbursement to the merchant. A Signifyd subscription is required

This post was originally published on August 6th, 2015 and has been updated. All information is valid as of August 2017/Magento 2.1

If you haven’t heard the news, the Magento 2 is here, and Magento 1 will, in time, be on the way out.

With it come a lot of questions, like:

• What year is it?
• Where are all the flying cars?
• How much should I be worried?
• And what’s all the bother, anyway?

I don’t have all of the answers, but the year is 2017, the flying cars are conspicuously missing, and Magento 2 is the future. I’ve been following Magento 2 for a while and I’d like to share some of what you can expect as a developer going through the transition.

There’s no avoiding it: Magento 2 will be intimidating at first look, if not downright scary. It uses new tech all over in order to become the best platform it can be for the next ten years. But, if you already know Magento 1, there are a lot of similarities. I’ll walk you through some of what’s new:

1. Module separation

If you know Magento 1, you know