Count Down for Akiba Mart Launch

We are going to launch Akiba Mart, our online store for Japanese goods, in next few days. There were a lot of things we overcame, both operational and technical matters. However, all of these directly connected to increase service level of our store and everything is aiming to maximize consumer’s satisfaction.

Other posts you might be interested

• Akiba Mart Is Open Today!
• OMG! Akiba Mart Is Broken
• Choosing Ecommerce Application
• Once upon a time…
• Recommended Magento Plugins

OMG! Akiba Mart Is Broken

I tried to update Magento from 1.2.1 to 1.3.1 via Magento Connect, but installation process ended up with error! Damn! I’ve searched the internet and tried to find out some solution to resurrect Akiba Mart, but no good answer was there.

OK, then let’s try clean installing and see how it goes.

But clean installation did not work. Magento requires “Safe Mode Off” in PHP5 to run, but my contracting hosting service does not support that. Do I need to reinstall 1.2.1 again? I made some research in the service of the hosting service and found that they had newly started to support “Safe Mode Off”!

I configured PHP5 and tried to access to backend. It worked! But for the frontend, the top page shows white screen while other pages placed deeper are fine. It took a lot of time to figure out that the reason was that the upgrade of magento overwrited /app/code/core/Mage/Cms/etc/config.xml file that is used for installed skin.

To conclude, I will reiterate the reasons of the problems:

• PHP5 Safe Mode
• Overwritten config.xml

Now our site is back online

Other posts you might be interested

• Akiba Mart Is Open Today!
• Choosing Ecommerce Application
• Count Down for Akiba Mart Launch
• Recommended Magento Plugins
• How Is the KIMONO Business Card ?

Recommended Magento Plugins

Magento is strong eCommerce platform and has plugin feature to enhance functions. There are many of them registered in Magento Connect. Below is the list of plugins that I use in Akiba Mart so far.

» Read more about this topic.

Other posts you might be interested

• Choosing Ecommerce Application
• 2010 New Year Sale!
• Akiba Mart Is Open Today!
• OMG! Akiba Mart Is Broken
• Count Down for Akiba Mart Launch

Choosing Ecommerce Application

When we kicked off our Akiba Mart Project, one of the most important thing is to create the infrastructure to realize online shopping. I did not have any knowledge about eCommerce, so I had to study about that first.

There are several open source shopping cart application available free, but total cost (including initial cost, variable cost and manpower) spending to create shopping cart infrastructure have to be considered carefully. Even though we use free application, if it takes too much time and effort to implement it, we rather choose pay service.

» Read more about this topic.

Other posts you might be interested

• OMG! Akiba Mart Is Broken
• Recommended Magento Plugins
• Count Down for Akiba Mart Launch
• Akiba Mart Is Open Today!
• 2010 New Year Sale!