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Lessons From The Recent S3 Outage for E-Commerce Store Owners

Content MarketingLast week, Amazon’s S3 storage service suffered stability and availability issues that had a wide-ranging impact on tens of thousands of companies, ranging from small eCommerce merchants and publishers to some of the largest sites on the web. S3 is used to store static assets like images and scripts. When S3 suffers availability issues, those assets may become unavailable.

A pointed example of what happens when a service relied on by so many suffers availability issues comes from Amazon itself — static assets for AWS’s status pages were stored in S3. The service designed to tell users about any problems didn’t function properly because it was hit by the problems it was supposed to be reporting.

Hours-long availability issues can have serious consequences for busy websites and eCommerce stores. For as long as a service isn’t available, its users lose money, customers, and reputation. This isn’t an S3 problem, an AWS problem, or even a cloud problem. Complex systems experience failures from time-to-time — that’s a universal truth and it’s something everyone doing business on the web should understand and account for.

The best way to avoid being bitten by a failure in a platform is to plan ahead. Proactively consider how to deal with failures, rather than reacting when they happen. Does your business’s disaster recovery and business continuity plan include contingencies to handle failures in the services it relies on? If not, here a few things you should be thinking about.

  • Design for redundancy or don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The availability of your business’ online presence should not be entirely dependent on one service. Ensure that your data exists in more than one place. Design server clusters such that a failure in any one server doesn’t bring down your site. Avoid single points of failure.
  • Use managed services with responsive support. For CEOs and CIOs, one of the most frustrating aspects of downtime on services like S3 is that they have no insight into the problem and there’s nothing they can do except wait for it to be fixed. With a managed hosting solution that includes great support, there will be a trusted advisor you can call when something goes wrong. A managed hosting provider will build redundancy into their systems and help you to create a resilient platform that can better weather failures.
  • Cloud isn’t the only option. Cloud storage solutions offer many benefits, but cloud isn’t the only way to go. Consider resilient high-performance alternatives like redundant dedicated servers.

The key lesson to be learned from this most recent outage shouldn’t focus on the reliability of any particular platform or hosting modality.

Instead, eCommerce merchants, publishers, and business site owners should consider the negative consequences of relying too much on the resilience of any one platform. An infrastructure monoculture isn’t good for the web. Infrastructure and vendor diversity are essential to building available, reliable, and stable online services.

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Magento Introduces Stricter Quality Checking For Marketplace Extensions

Marketplace ExtensionsThe Magento Marketplace is a rich source of extra functionality for Magento eCommerce stores. The core Magento application can’t fulfil every requirement an eCommerce merchant might have: every store is unique and a Magento that could be all things to all retailers would be a bloated and unwieldy application.

Instead, Magento is a modular system with a strong core and a large extension ecosystem. Magento’s developers focus on building an unbeatable core experience, while third-party developers focus on building specific functionality.

Modularity and a deep ecosystem powered by a dedicated community of developers are part of what makes Magento so popular, but a marketplace to which anyone can contribute is not without its difficulties. Developers vary widely in ability and commitment to providing a great experience. Extensions may be of mixed quality, and there’s nothing quite so off-putting to a new Magento user than to install a extension from the Magento Marketplace that doesn’t provide the promised functionality or breaks their store.

That’s why Magento is so careful about the extensions allowed into the Magento Marketplace. As Bhavin Rawal, Magento’s Head of Marketplace and Technology Partnerships, discussed in a recent blog post, in order to be admitted to the Magento Marketplace, extensions undergo a quality control process. Rawal’s post also announced several ways in which that process is being augmented in 2017. The additional quality checks will reduce the likelihood that subpar extensions are accepted into the marketplace, improving the confidence of Magento users. The new controls may also require developers to invest more time in bringing their extensions up to the required standard.

Before the changes, the quality control process included a number of checks, including a business review, malware scanning, code standard review, and a plagiarism review to ensure that extensions don’t simply repackage the work of other developers.

The new processes augment the existing quality control workflow to ensure that all extensions reach an acceptable standard. Using a mixture of scripted and manual testing, every extension will be subjected to an installation and compatibility verification. If the extension won’t install and run, or if it isn’t compatible with the PHP versions it’s expected to run on, the extension will be rejected. The developers of rejected extensions are free to make the necessary changes and resubmit. Extensions will also be checked to make sure they don’t break any Magento functionality and that stores that install the extension will continue to functions as expected in the development environment.

These checks apply to all new extensions and new versions of existing extensions, but also to extensions that are already available in the marketplace.

The extension marketplace is a vital part of the Magento ecosystem, and it’s great to see that ensuring that the quality of extensions available from the official marketplace remains a priority.

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Pinterest’s Expanded Retargeting Helps eCommerce Retailers Maximize The Value Of User Engagement

Pinterest RetargetingPinterest has always been one of the most eCommerce-friendly social networks — at least in theory. The image-based sharing services allows retailers to engage with relevant audiences, many of whom use Pinterest to find their next purchase. Pinterest is well-aware of its value to retailers, and over the last few years has been steadily rolling out new features to help retailers make contact with the right audience.

Earlier this year, the company introduced a number of targeting options for Promoted Pins. These included list targeting, which allows retailers to promote content to their existing customer base; lookalike retargeting, which helps target audiences similar to retailer’s current audience; and visitor targeting, which targets previous visitors to a retailer’s store.

In October, Pinterest further expanded its range of targeting tools and introduced new options for retargeting potential buyers.

The changes to targeting are relatively minor — lookalikes have been renamed actalikes because the company believes relevant audiences don’t just appear to be similar — they act in similar ways too.

But it’s the new retargeting features that are of particular interest. Retargeting is all about re-engaging with users who have previously shown an interest in a product or promotion. Let’s say a Pinterest user saved a pin shared by your company that included a picture and details of a product you sell. Because the user expressed a specific interest, there’s a greater likelihood that they have an intention to buy than a visitor targeted for other reasons — that they follow the same Pinners as a “typical customer” for example.

Pinterest’s spin on retargeting allows retailer to build engagement audiences based on a series of different interactions with a brand’s Pinterest presence and website.

Retailers can target users based on a set of five actions:

  • Clicks
  • Comments
  • Saves
  • Likes
  • Closeups

If a user clicks on or saves a pin related to a previous campaign, you might choose to retarget them in the future with a specific campaign of related products.

Usefully, Pinterest also offers website retargeting. If you include Pinterest’s tag (a JavaScript snippet) on your web pages, you’ll be able to retarget visitors to your store with Promoted Pins.

According to Pinterest, users who have clicked on Pin are 4.4 times more likely to take action on a Pin than other users. Pinterest doesn’t specify how often that action is a purchase, but retargeting has proven a useful tool for many retailers — retargeting tends to produce more accurate results than targeting based on interest or category.

Have you had positive experiences with Pinterest retargeting on your eCommerce store? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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Magento Introduces Magento DevBox — A New Local Development Environment

DevBoxLocal development of any web application can be complex, especially if the developer works on several projects at the same time. To make it easier for developers to get up-and-running with a standardized Magento installation on their local machine, Magento has released Magento DevBox Beta, a Docker-based tool for local Magento development.

If you’re not familiar with Docker, it’s a lightweight alternative to virtual machines. Each Docker container is a complete isolated server environment with its own filesystem, libraries, and applications, but sharing the kernel of the host operating system (or in the case of non-Linux machines, a lightweight virtual machine running on the host).

Containers are very fast to start and consume fewer of the host machine’s resources, making them the perfect option for building replicable, isolated development environments that can be shared.

The benefits of using a tool like Magento DevBox instead of installing Magento onto the developer’s laptop include:

  • Fast creation of a development environment that doesn’t interfere with the developer’s local environment, something that can be a real headache when you need to install different versions of libraries than those the host system relies on.
  • A consistent and easily replicated development environment that can be shared between everyone working on a project. This is a big win for teams working on a Magento site. Every developer can have exactly the same development environment, avoiding all the “but it works on my laptop!” problems.
  • Everything the developer needs, installed in seconds. That includes Magento itself, the web server, database, Redis, Varnish, Elastic search, RabbitMQ, and everything else that might be needed by a project. Because the containers are entirely self-contained, developers are free to choose which versions they install.

DevBox configuration is handled via a web interface. Developers choose the mix of settings they want and the result is a zipped file that can be used to launch a local Magento environment. The project source files — everything needed to recreate the site in testing and production — are kept outside of the container on the local file system.

Although there are already plenty of tools that achieve more-or-less the same thing as Magento DevBox, its introduction is a positive move for the Magento developer community. As Magento grows more complex, significant amounts of developer time are wasted creating and maintaining local development environments. DevBox is built by the people who know Magento best and will be promptly updated as Magento development continues.

It’s worth stressing that Magento DevBox is still in beta, although I experienced no problems with it. If you’re a Magento developer, or anyone interested in having a Magento installation to play with on your local machine, Magento DevBox is definitely worth a look.

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What Does the Bluefoot Page Builder Acquisition Mean For Magento Enterprise Users?

Bluefoot Page BuilderTowards the end of last year, Magento announced that it had acquired the technology behind the Bluefoot CMS and page builder. The acquisition is intended to enhance Magento’s existing page-creation features and make it easier for eCommerce merchants to build and deploy bespoke product and landing pages on their stores.

Bluefoot, a young project which was launched early last year, has proven popular with the Magento community. There are several alternative page-builder extensions available for Magento, but Bluefoot combines an intuitive experience with deep integration into Magento’s product management features.

If you’re familiar with page builders, you won’t have much trouble envisioning the functionality Bluefoot provides. The interface offers a number of content blocks, including blocks for arbitrary content and media, as well as blocks for products in the store’s catalog.

Building a new page is as simple as dragging blocks onto the page and arranging them as appropriate.

The major benefit of a page builder is that it allows merchants to quickly create and deploy bespoke pages without requiring any understanding of PHP or Magento’s template system. Without a page builder, merchants were fairly limited in how creative they could be with page layouts unless they were able to edit their theme directly.

This is particularly useful for building pages related to ongoing promotions. A store owner might, for example, choose to build a bespoke landing page for a Facebook promotion, integrating the content and products displayed on the the page with promotional creative displayed in posts on Facebook. The ability to quickly build and deploy new custom pages empowers merchants to implement cohesive promotional strategies.

Bluefoot is designed to be extensible, so if you do have an understanding of PHP, it’s straightforward to modify the content blocks and functionality on offer through the drag-and-drop interface. That’s particularly useful for agencies, who can add new functionality to Bluefoot and make it available to their clients.

The functionality exposed by Bluefoot won’t make Magento developers and professionals superfluous, but it will make it much easier for Magento merchants to create compelling and creative pages without having to call in a developer.

It’s not yet clear exactly when the functionality will be available in Magento Enterprise Edition or whether it’s coming to Magneto Community edition at all, but we can expect to see the drag-and-drop technology made available in Magento EE in the near future.

The acquisition of Bluefoot is an interesting example of Magento’s initiative to invest in technologies the company believes can enhance the experience of Magento users and shoppers. The goal of the investment strategy is to accelerate Magento along the company’s roadmap, and this most recent acquisition bodes well for the future of Magento and the company’s dedication to creating a modern and flexible eCommerce experience.

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Amazon’s Holiday Lockdown Of FBA Was Great For Established Retailers

AmazonTowards the end of 2016, Amazon announced that the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon service would not be available to new retailers during the holiday season. If a retailer hadn’t sent their first shipment by October 10th, they had to wait until December 19th to start shipping. The restrictions meant that new and seasonal retailers missed out on the bulk of holiday season shopping.

Fulfillment By Amazon is a hugely popular service for smaller eCommerce retailers. It allows retailers to outsource one the most time-consuming and tricky-to-manage aspects of eCommerce to a company with extensive infrastructure and an established reputation for getting fulfillment right. And, of course, it allows Amazon to generate revenue from goods sold by other merchants.

But even Amazon can’t cope with the huge increase in demand for its warehousing services during the holiday season. That’s partly because demand from established retailers sky-rockets in November and December. But it’s also because many new retailers that only sell during the holiday season create ephemeral eCommerce businesses that leverage Fulfillment By Amazon.

In previous years, the combination has meant that Amazon had limited ability to store goods from established retailers and seasonal retailers alike, directly impacting their ability to order, store, and deliver goods to customers.

But, last year, established merchants had a clear run. Because the new rules were announced fairly late in the year, many ephemeral retailers were caught out and were unable or unwilling to start making shipments much earlier in the year. Although, unavoidably, FBA was pushed to its limits during the holiday season, established merchants enjoyed a better experience than in previous years.

The limitations on seasonal retailers weren’t entirely new last year; Amazon has had the same rules for products in the toys category for a number of years, but this was the first year those rules had been applied more widely. Amazon has signaled that it’s likely to implement the same arrangement in the future.

Seasonal eCommerce merchants are a huge part of the eCommerce economy. For many retailers, it simply doesn’t make sense to run and manage a store all year round — especially when there’s almost no chance of that store generating a profit for most of the year. In fact, the myth of Black Friday’s origin focuses on this: Black Friday is the day stores that are usually in the red balance the books.

Setting up a complex fulfillment operation for seasonal eCommerce isn’t economically viable, which is why FBA is so popular with seasonal merchants. It’s likely that if Amazon continues this policy, seasonal merchants will look elsewhere for fulfillment or be forced to alter their business model.

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Facebook Brings The Buy Now Button To Messenger

Buy NowWith the release of Messenger Platform v1.2, including a new “Buy Button” for Messenger, and the improvement of its enhanced CTAs, Facebook continues to build out the eCommerce capabilities of Pages, the Newsfeed, and now, Facebook Messenger.

Not long ago, the social media giant introduced enhanced call-to-action buttons for Facebook Pages and the Newsfeed, which eCommerce merchants could use to send Facebook’s users to their eCommerce store. But it’s in Facebook’s best interest to keep users within the Facebook ecosystem as long as possible, and that means letting them buy without clicking away to an external retailer’s site.

Facebook recently augmented its platform’s eCommerce capabilities so they integrate smoothly with the company’s other big push: mobile messaging.

Messenger Native Payments from Facebook on Vimeo.

When I’ve written about social media eCommerce in the past, I’ve expressed mixed feelings. On the one hand, eCommerce merchants benefit from Facebook’s massive user base, advertising clout, and a simple conversion process. On the other hand, as publishers have discovered, being overly reliant on a single platform has risks.

Until a couple of years ago, Facebook’s Pages were largely inert — they were great for directing social media users to a store’s web presence and for building an audience, but if users wanted to make a purchase, they had to leave Facebook and visit the merchant’s store.

With the introduction of the “Buy Now” button and other calls-to-action on Pages and in the Newsfeed, the potential of Facebook Pages changed enormously. Merchants can sell direct from Facebook with the minimum of clicks. Those capabilities have now been extended with the addition of a call-to-action that opens a conversation in Messenger.

Once in the Messenger app, customers can interact with a retailer’s bot and make a purchase with the “Buy Now” button. Facebook now offers eCommerce customers a seamless journey from a merchant’s Page to the Messenger app, and from there to a purchase with a couple of clicks.

With over a billion users, it’s exciting to see that Facebook’s ambitions for Messenger go well beyond the chat apps of old. It’s now a powerful eCommerce platform that allows merchants to sell direct to customers using an application that’s already a major part of their daily lives.

Nevertheless, I’d caution eCommerce retailers before they put too many eggs in Facebook’s basket. Facebook is becoming ever more impressive as a sales platform, but it’s a platform that will never be entirely under the control of retailers, unlike an owned asset such as a Magento store. Social eCommerce should be one part of a broad eCommerce strategy that leverages multiple sales channels, including a wholly-owned online storefront.

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eCommerce Trends Show A Strong Holiday Season Likely For 2016


eCommerce TrendsAccording to a recent report from comScore, the first half of 2016 was a particularly strong period for American eCommerce. Although the year started out with a less than impressive performance compared to last year, performance has picked up considerably, which bodes well for the approaching holiday season.

In April, desktop eCommerce sales increased by approximately 19 percent, followed by a 15 percent boost in May. Of particular benefit for eCommerce retailers in the holiday season is the increase in discretionary sales.

“On discretionary products, [total] retail sales were up 5.3% in April, which is the highest level seen in years,” according to Gian Fulgoni, chairman emeritus at comScore, which carried out the survey.

As we’ve come to expect in recent years, mobile eCommerce growth has been stellar over the early months of 2016. In Q1, visits for mobile web sites increased by 40%, and mobile app visits showed an even more impressive 70% increase.

That’s news which should be taken with circumspection by small and medium retailers. Although mobile app use has increased considerably, actually getting your app onto the home screens of enough customers is very difficult — not to mention influencing them to actually use it. For most retailers, a mobile-friendly web presence with search and social media promotion is the most effective way to get a piece of the mobile pie.

The mobile-friendly message seems to have made an impact on retailers. The number of customers who report a positive web experience is on the rise. Mobile satisfaction ratings are an important indicator that eCommerce merchants are focusing on the mobile experience. They’re also a warning to less solicitous eCommerce merchants that the time has come. Mobile eCommerce stores will benefit from the rising tide of mobile, but only if they provide the experience that customers demand.

Other heartening news from the report includes the revelation that 17% more of the respondents intended to shop less in stores, preferring to shop online.

Finally, social media eCommerce went mainstream over the last year, with platforms ranging from Twitter to WhatsApp creating eCommerce sales and promotional tools that give merchants access to huge audiences. I’ve been somewhat hesitant about social media eCommerce in past posts, because it has the potential to remove much of the control merchants have over the sales process. However, 23% of the survey’s respondents indicated that they’d made purchases through social media sites. That’s hard to ignore, and eCommerce merchants may miss out if they don’t at least dip a toe into social media selling.

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Are Conversational User Interfaces The Next Big Thing For eCommerce?

Instant messaging is hugely popular. Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeeChat, and WhatsApp have billions of users. Paying for products and services inside chat apps is commonplace in many parts of the world. Users of Facebook Messenger can easily send money to other users. Apps like WeeChat provide a platform for successful eCommerce applications. Beyond instant chat, platforms like Amazon’s Echo are taking natural language processing for eCommerce to the next level.

A natural consequence of the popularity of chat applications and their bots, and of natural language processing advances, is the conversational user interface. Companies can build bots that are communicated with via messaging applications.

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Thoughtful Branding Can Help Your eCommerce Store Shine

What is the difference between Apple and a generic PC manufacturer? Or the difference between Ralph Lauren and Target? It’s possible to make a list of the differences between a prestige brand and its market peers, but for the most part, they’re summed up by the nebulous concept of brand. Ask five people what “brand” means and you’ll get five different answers, but from a buyer’s perspective, a brand is a feeling about a company and the objects that elicit that feeling. The products sold by a prestige brand may not be superior to its competitors’ products, and the prices will almost certainly be higher, but the intangible quality of a well-regarded brand can override rational calculations. Read More »