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Learn how to build a lightweight, LLM-powered business intelligence (BI) tool directly within nopCommerce. By leveraging natural language queries, OpenAI’s API, and a simple SQL execution layer, you can turn everyday questions into real-time reports without traditional BI tools. The tutorial walks through combining AI-driven query generation with intuitive data presentation—making insights accessible even to non-technical users.

This blog post is the first in a series on running nopCommerce on a Linux VPS. It walks readers through setting up a production-ready environment using .NET, MySQL, and Nginx, including step-by-step instructions for installing dependencies, deploying nopCommerce, and configuring the server. The guide targets users looking for a cost-effective alternative to Windows hosting while maintaining performance and flexibility.

Over the past 2 years, site loading speed has become an important factor for SEO. Google is placing so much attention to it that they actually published the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to help people guage their site speed. Site speed is even more important for e-commerce platforms like nopCommerce, because buying decision can happen in split second. Often time, if an e-commerce site is not loaded fast enough, potential buyers may leave the site resulting in loss of sales.

And lost of sales is the last thing every site owners wished. That's why CDN (aka Content Delivery Network) has gained popularity over the years. 

So what exactly is a CDN? CDN is a network of servers located around the world that take care of one thing - to ensure fast delivery of static content such as images (JPG, PNG, GIF), CSS and JavaScripts.

So why is it so important? If you think about it, static files actually makes up about 80% of a web page. If static files cannot be delivered in a consistently quick manner, site speed will be greatly affected.

But most site owners are not convinced to deploy CDN on their e-commerce stores, usually due to the following reasons...

You probably know that SSL / HTTPS is one of the "must-haves" for all e-commerce stores. Not only does it offer an extra layer of protection to the store users, it also results in higher SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking!

Yes, Google actually takes this into account. So it's very important to implement SSL / HTTPS on your nopCommerce stores.

In this video tutorial (transcripts prepared), I am going to show you step-by-step how you can get SSL cirtificate for FREE! I'll also show you how to install it on your server (taking Azure App Services as example).

I've recently asked by many of you how to make nopCommerce optimized in terms of loading speed.

The reason why so many people are concerned about page loading speed is because

1. Users can get distracted if a page is not loaded fast enough
2. Google has placed much importance on page loading speed in the SEO ranking factors

To answer the question once and for all, I have prepared a free e-book for you all who are interested in the topic of nopCommerce speed optimization.

Being an nopCommerce MVP (AKA nopmvp) myself, if often see people asking, repeatedly, about the similar questions. These questions are related to nopCommerce / C# exceptions, and can actually be solved relatively easilly if you know what the error messages mean. Unfortunately, many developers are not trained to properly read C# and ASP.Net exceptions and make sense of them.

So, in this blog post, I'll try to lay out a few common exceptions that nopCommerce developers face, and provide insight on each of them.

We at Pro nopCommerce like writing blog posts and tutorials about nopCommerce themes, nopCommerce plugins and nopCommerce customizations. But sometimes we can get overwhelmed by works that we have very little time to write blog posts ourselves!

In view of this, we are happy to feature Robert Bourne in this blog post, who happens to be our first guest blogger! Kudos to Robert!

Below is what Robert has to say in our second installment of nopCommerce SEO Pitfalls and How To Solve Them.

nopCommerce is a great platform for quickly (and cheaply) setting up a new e-commerce store. As you get started, seeing new traffic on your website is always exciting; but there is nothing more disheartening for a business than watching those visitors leave without becoming new customers.

How can you convert those clicks into cash? Enter Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Check out these five great tips for enhancing your site's conversion rate.

nopCommerce is a great way to get started cheaply and easily with your online retail route. But merely getting your nopCommerce stores up and running is not good enough, even with a beautiful nopCommerce theme. You need to win customers and make profit!

Every successful e-commerce business has one thing in common: happy customers. But how each business interacts with their customers is unique. In 3 years, the annual revenue for online retail will hit $370 billion. How a business passively or actively engages with their customers will determine how big a piece of the pie they'll take.

For e-commerce businesses, customer satisfaction is becoming more and more paramount to good reputation, success, and revenue. Here are 3 e-commerce best practices to engage your customers and increase conversions.

Being a popular e-commerce platform, it is very common for store owners to want to migrate to nopCommerce for its powerful features.

One common problem developers face is to migrate old, existing links (from some other e-commerce platforms) to new links (nopCommerce). Especially for old sites which are already getting tons of traffics and are having very good SEO rankings, it is very important to make sure the old URLs are 301-redirected to new nopCommerce URLs.

If it's static URLs (e.g. those for content pages), you can already use IIS URL Rewrite to do the migration manually. But the problem arises when it comes to product and category urls. Because the URLs are dynamic (and there are tons of those URLs), it is usually impractical to manually add URL Rewrite entries one-by-one.

Take the following URLs for example:

• http://oldsite.com/product-slug-one-p1234.htm
• http://oldsite.com/product-slug-two-p4567.htm
• http://oldsite.com/category-slug-one-c12.htm
• http://oldsite.com/category-slug-two-c34.htm

If you look at the URLs, they are pretty dynamic. Product URLs follow a pattern of {product-slug}-p{product-id}.htm. Category links also follow a similar pattern.

And to make the problem worse (which happens very often), old product IDs (and category IDs) do not correspond to new product IDs. That means in old system, product ID 1234 is product ID 4321 in new system.

So the question now is - how can we make sure old URLs, such as http://oldsite.com/product-slug-one-p1234.htm, will be 301-redirected to new nopCommerce URLs, such as http://nopcommercesite.com/product-one-new-slug?