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.

Gave this presentation at the Ecommerce event held by Figaro Digital on Wednesday. Lots of pictures, very few words….

It looks at new and emerging trends that are changing the ecommerce landscape. Take a look:

Areas covered include:

- Ecommerce Platform
- Crowd Commerce
- Online/Offline
- meTail
- magCommerce
- mCommerce
- Distributed Commerce
- Social Commerce

Magento commerce has the ability built in to run test with Google Website Optimizer. But these are limited to the default style templates and limited to the category and product detail pages. This is less than ideal if you want to go onto the big guns and test your checkout for example.

At Pod1, the Magento Development team and the E-Commerce Strategy Team have come up with a simply way of testing all aspects of a page or section within magento.

We simply use the cascading element of Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, which allows us to overwrite styles. We leave the control variant untouched and simply use Google Website Optimizer scripts to load an additional stylesheet with corresponding styles in. These of course are altered in a way that allows us to change the layout of the page quick and efficiently. Either hiding elements or repositioning them or adding to them. If setup that way, you can do the same with JavaScript using the DOM model. Change the “Add to bag” button to a “Buy now” without the need for having graphical representations produced.

This way, we are able to reduce the cost of producing variants dramatically as all you need is a front-end developer and not the whole team. This makes for remarkably quick turnaround that yield results much faster than changing the whole site using all skill sets of your agency and implementing costly multivariate software that requires you to produce every page two or three times.

If you’re interested how to get the most out of your Magento Commerce Package, have a click around our blog.

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.

We’re very happy to announce the launch of Dia, the first fully comprehensive Arabic (and English) fully transactional ecommerce website on the Magento platform.

Dia has a unique proposition in that it’s aimed at showcasing and selling middle-eastern style to the world.

The site is also the home for a major online magazine ‘Dia Magazine’, a borderless urban guide to a region that is not defined by geography as much as it is by a collective desire to broaden the frontiers of contemporary fashion, design and art. Cool.

Even though this isn’t Pod1’s first foray into the Arabic language (Chic Outlet Shopping), it’s certainly our first into Arabic ecommerce.

Watch out for further developments.

And here’s what the English version looks like: