Pod1 Blog

I finally got round to watching the Varien webinar on Magento Mobile, and specifically the iPhone application they’re launching as part of their Magento Mobile strategy.

Different people will have different views on what mobile strategy retailers should follow: eConsultancy recommend building a mobile site that works cross-platform first, then building apps if the analytics suggests they will be supported, whereas Varien recommend building a combined mobile site and app strategy. Clearly the cost of building apps is a factor in the eConsultancy recommendation, and it looks as if Varien have developed a really cost-effective strategy for Magento Professional and Enterprise clients, which will increase the range and quality of mobile eCommerce applications considerably.

How does it work? As far as I can see:

• The retailer (or their agency) installs the Magento Mobile extension on their Enterprise (1.6+) or Professional (1.8+) website
• They configure their mobile app preferences and submit the configuration and initial data XML to Varien (through an admin function)
• Varien bundle their iPhone app, configuration and data into a new app, which they upload to iTunes on the retailer’s behalf
• The consumer downloads the iPhone app and starts interacting with the retailer using it, with the same account details as their normal web interaction (so CRM can link the iPhone and web interactions together)
• The retailer can change product data, configuration and design in the admin interface, and these will be updated on all iPhones using their app automatically

The app looks very capable and well-designed, and there is a lot that can be configured in terms of visuals and functionality. All the integration with back-end systems, payment gateways etc is taken care of, as the app interacts with your Magento app directly, almost as if you were using it through a web page. There are likely to be restrictions on which payment methods can be used, but other integrations should work out of the box if they’ve been implemented well.

Costs are very low: retailers who already have Magento Enterprise or Professional edition can get a Magento iPhone app up and running for a lot less than they would have paid via any other route.

We’re signed up for the early adopters program, and I’m hoping we can launch a Magento iPhone app very soon for one of our clients.

Varien have confirmed that the Magento Payment Bridge will be available for Magento Professional Edition as well as for the Enterprise Edition. We also know that the Payment Bridge launched with support for the following payment options:

• authorize.net
• paypal direct
• paypal uk direct and
• payflow pro

More than 30 people came together over beer and pizza to talk Magento yesterday evening, at Brilliant’s office in Shoreditch. I spoke about Magento and PCI compliance, and what we’ve worked out about the Magento Payment Bridge so far. There is a range of opinion (understandably) on this topic, and I’ll write another post that covers the field soon.

Jon spoke about our experiences building a multi-lingual (English and Arabic) Magento site, and all the support Magento gives the developer and the retailer in that area: again this is something we will write about at greater length soon.

Hannah spoke about Magento’s theme building capabilities, and the ability of Magento to fall back on default themes, which means developers don’t need to build an entire theme every time they create a website.

In the “any other business” part of the agenda, there was some good discussion about scaling Magento to large websites, and the use of cloud versus physical hosting.

There was a lot of discussion throughout, in fact, and we’re definitely going to host another event, probably in October. If you’d like to be added to the mailing list for an invitation, please email magento-meetup@pod1.com

The discussion ended with a brief chat about what we love and hate about developing with Magento. There are lots of loves, of course, but the things picked out as concerns or niggles were:

• Updates to community edition often breaking the website you’re updating
• Varien can be quite hard to get information or feedback from
• Performance, though it has improved a lot with recent releases
• The CMS not being as good as Drupal or Wordpress – it has one box for formatted content not flexible, structured content pages
• The need for a really good technical user guide
• The performance of the software running the forums

It’s important to be balanced about lists like this, and it’s widely agreed Magento is a great improvement on any of the alternatives, but it wouldn’t have been a proper developer meeting without the gripes!

Varien have launched version 1.9 of Magento Enterprise Edition: the details are on the Magento website at this link.

I watched the webcast that announced the release. There are some interesting new features, which I’ll summarise in this article.

Gift registry

There is a gift registry in the latest release that allows shoppers to create gift lists (a bit like wishlists) and then distribute them to their contacts. As items are bought from the list, they are removed from it, and they are all allocated the same shipping address, so they can be shipped to the owner of the list. This looks like great functionality for weddings and such like. We’ll be evaluating it properly soon, as some of our clients will definitely be interested in it.

Recurring purchases

Using Paypal, customers can now set up recurring purchases of items they want delivering every month, for example. We have a client who wants to offer a monthly delivery of one of their products to customers throughout the year, and this is perfect for them. The fact that it’s tied to Paypal may be an issue for some, but once again it’s something that will help many retailers.

Enhanced search

Varien made Solr an option for search in version 1.8 of Enterprise Edition. They’ve enhanced the search in the latest version with the option to have suggestions appear as searches are being typed in, and with auto-correction of mis-spellings in search terms.

Pod1 tends to implement Enterprise Edition with Fact-finder, a merchandisable eCommerce search solution that is comparable to Omniture Merchandising, Fred Hopper or Endeca, so it’s unlikely we’ll be implementing Solr for any of our clients soon, but it’s great that Varien are working with one of the leading open source search solutions, rather than trying to create a solution themselves: search is an often over-looked area of complexity in eCommerce, and it’s a good thing to get specialist help with.

Magento Connect

Magento Connect is now available in Enterprise Edition. Until now, if you wanted to install a Magento extension in Magento Enterprise you had to do it manually, which is a fairly complex task, best left to developers. Site owners can now browse and install extensions that have been developed to work with Magento Enterprise, in the same way they could with the Community Edition. We expect to see lots of development in this space: one example is that we’ll soon launch a version of our Sagepay extension that will be installable in Magento Enterprise using Magento Connect.

Full Page Caching

Varien have enhanced Magento Enterprise Edition’s full page caching so it will work with pages that contain dynamic content: the dynamic content will be generated on demand, while the static content is cached. They expect this enhancement to significantly improve site performance once again.

Payment Bridge and PCI Compliance

The last (and largest) enhancement I’m highlighting is the implementation of the Magento Payment Bridge, which is a step towards achieving PCI compliance for retailers. This is a very complex area. I’ve spoken to Varien about their intentions with the payment bridge, and I’m consulting with other industry experts as well, to formulate a clear position for our clients, but the key points I’ve identified so far are:

• Using Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 isn’t going to ensure you’re PCI compliant: Magento itself no longer handles payments if you’re using the Payment Bridge, but you still have infrastructure and process work to do to achieve compliance.
• The Payment Bridge encapsulates all the payment functionality for payment systems that Varien have integrated it with, and at present that list is very short: none of the payment systems Pod1’s UK clients use has been integrated yet. Third parties can’t integrate other payment systems with the Payment Bridge.
• Retailers can still use other payment extensions, such as our Sagepay extension, and can still achieve PCI compliance through that route.

I’m preparing a presentation on this subject for our Magento Developers’ Meet-up tomorrow, and I’ll share that through the blog later this week.

Conclusion

Varien have come out with another very interesting and useful upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Some of its features are very useful to our clients, and we’ll be implementing them over the coming months. The PCI situation remains complex, and we’re continuing to provide advice to our clients on an individual basis.

The numbers are so high for next Wednesday’s meet-up we’ve decided to move it to Brilliant, our sister agency in the Pod1 group. If you’d like to attend, please email magento-meetup@pod1.com for all the details.

Beer, pizza, Magento, geeks… who could ask for more?

The Magento developer get-together on July 28th is filling up fast, so please email us at magento-meetup@pod1.com if you’re planning to come.

It looks like there will be talks about best practice theme building, internationalisation, PCI compliance, and the different versions of Magento you can now use (Community, Professional and Enterprise). If you want to talk about anything else, or lead a discussion, let us know in an email or a comment to that post.

The event starts at 6:30pm, there’s beer and pizza, and it’s in Westbourne Park, 2 stops from Paddington Station.

If you’re a South African on your way home to Cape Town soon, we could help you getting your new job sorted out before you leave the UK.

Pod1 is hiring front-end (HTML / CSS / JS) and back-end (php / Zend / Magento) developers for its Cape Town office. If you’re interested, send your CV to iwanttowork@pod1.com.

If your CV looks relevant, we can do the interview and even agree an offer before you leave for home. Details of the roles are here.

Sagepay have launched their e-business benchmarking report, which is now available here: http://www.benchmarkyourebusiness.com/

The report is based on stacks of interviews, including some with the Pod1 team and clients, and it’s full of useful information for anyone working in online retail.

Pod1 is the developer of the official Sagepay module for Magento, which is available for download at this link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Pod1/extension/2004/sagepay-server

Pod1 are hosting a get-together of Magento developers at 6:30 pm on Wednesday July 28th, at our offices in Westbourne Park, London W10.

The plan is to have a series of short talks, with discussion and Q&A between each, but it’s also a networking opportunity for Magento developers to talk to each other. We have some ideas for topics we’d like to discuss, such as:

• Best practise community module development
• The differences between community, professional and enterprise editions
• Multi-channel eCommerce with Magento

But if there are topics you’d like to hear about, or speak about, please drop us a line or make a comment on this blog post.

There will be beer and pizza: the essentials for any developer get-together.

Please email magento-meetup@pod1.com if you’d like to attend, speak or suggest a topic for a talk.

IBM have bought Coremetrics, a major vendor of hosted analytics services. Since I’ve been implementing eCommerce sites, Coremetrics has been one of the few serious alternatives to the (free) Google Analytics service that most people use, and it’s now going to join the IBM world. The competition in the analytics space is now dominated by big Internet companies:

• Adobe own Omniture
• Yahoo own IndexTools
• Google owns Google Analytics (which used to be called Urchin)

And now IBM own Omniture. Webtrends remains independent, but it’s telling that these major companies have decided they need to own serious, serious analytics offerings. Data is key to CRM, to site personalisation, to content optimisation, to so many things, so the company that has the best data has a strong competitive advantage.

Incidentally, this is an interesting turn in the evolution of the IBM product set as well. They’ve been acquiring companies for years and adding their capabilities to Websphere, and this is another one of those stories. What that has led to (according to the experts I speak to) is a rather loosely integrated set of software tools, that don’t have the same origin architecturally, and aren’t therefore all that consistent in user interface or structure. They do get assimilated to an extent, but obviously one doesn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a company to rewrite its code, so the whole collection is a bit of a mixed bag. Very functionally rich, but quite hard to work with.