Introduction
Somehow I’m still amazed at how quickly things change in the land of the internet, application development, and technology in general. Not long ago, building an ecommerce website was a time-consuming, costly project that many small businesses simply could not afford to invest in.
All of that changed very quickly, however, and seemingly overnight merchants and developers were presented with a flood of quality options for shopping cart solutions. WordPress users now have viable plugin options to add a complete ecommerce solution into their website. For those interested in full-fledged online store solutions out-of-the-box there are options like Magento, OpenCart, osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart for Joomla!, and many more.
These Things Rock!
These open source ecommerce solutions are great! They offer a tremendous head start for a merchant or a developer looking to build a quality online store, and the best part is they’re FREE!
Okay, sure, a free solution. How great could it actually be? To answer that question, consider the time and cost involved in building a custom solution that includes all of the following features:
- Marketing Tools
- Discount Codes
- Upselling of Items During Checkout
- Cross-Selling on Product Pages
- Email Wishlists to Friends and Family
- Newsletters
- Search Engine Optimization
- Auto-generated Sitemaps for Search Engines
- URL Rewrites
- Meta-information for Products and Categories
- Analytics and Reporting
- Easy Integration with Google Analytics
- Sales Reports
- Tax Reports
- Abandoned Cart Reports
- Top Viewed Reports
- Sales and Refund Reports
- Inventory Management
- Import Products from Existing Data Sources
- Easily Add / Update Products from Control Panel
- Google Base Integration
- Downloadable Product Integration
- Backorder Items
- Item Attributes and Options
- Special Pricing Options
- Shipping, Checkout, and Payment
- USPS, UPS, FedEx Integration
- PayPal, Credit Cards, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, and more!
Those bullets only represent a portion of what these solutions offer immediately after installation. All those features could cost thousands of dollars if quoted out as a custom job from a web consulting firm. You get it all for free with these open source solutions.
Also, the modular design of these solutions allows for developers to easily build plugins and add-ons that further enhance the capabilities of these platforms. There are thousands of plugins available to easily add functionality to your store, and they are easy as a few clicks to install in most cases.
These Things are Kind of a Drag
As a web developer these days, one must deal with a little bit of a catch-22. It’s fantastic that there are so many thriving solutions available today to choose from, however, each one of them is slightly different in its own way. For example, Magento was built on the Zend Framework, so if you’re not familiar with Zend you may have a tough time with it.
The learning curve for customizing such platforms is a little steeper than most, and developers must stay current with all of them in order to handle the wide range of merchants out there using these different solutions. One quick tip I can provide here would be to understand the basics of MVC frameworks. Most of these solutions are based on the MVC model and if you understand how this works you can generally find your way around any of them with some time and reading effort.
Another small down-side to these solutions is that while features like payment processing are included, they’re not always maintained 100%. For example, PayPal is now up to version 76.0 with their web service API’s, but many of these solutions are still at 52.0 or lower. This means that features like Parallel or Chained Payments, Preapproved Payments, etc. are not yet provided.
When this sort of thing comes up, merchants and developers are faced with a decision to make. Wait for the core application files to updated and released in a future version of the shopping cart solution you’re working with, or spend the time and money involved in building custom modules to handle these solutions on your own. It can be a tough decision to make.
Beyond some of those simple short-comings, there are larger aspects of these solutions that are not yet available. For example, the demand for an automatic sync between a website and eBay is high, but developers are spread so thin across all the different platforms that it’s tough to decide which one to focus all of that time and energy on. Also, none of the current solutions consider the point-of-sale aspect of sales. Rather, they focus on web-based transactions and internet sales in general. As such, merchants are forced to utilize separate solutions for their retail stores and mobile credit card processing solutions.
X.Commerce Open Platform
It looks as though there are some more big changes coming from the eBay / PayPal team. eBay and PayPal have always had their own sets of web service API’s, however, they were really kept separate from each other for the most part.
The eBay Developer Center has always been a great source of information for working with the eBay Platform, while PayPal’s Developer Network was the place to go for PayPal’s wide array of payment processing services. With the announced acquisition of Magento Inc. by eBay Inc. we’ve seen the Developer Network become a funnel for each of the eBay Inc. platforms: eBay, PayPal, and now Magento.
In his message to developers, John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, states that eBay understands developers want “access to our full set of commerce capabilities to build complete soultions for your customers, and you want to be able to monetize those solutions. So, we’ll enable you to do just that through our open commerce platform group which we’re calling X.commerce.”
It sounds pretty exciting on the surface, but what exactly does all of this mean?
My Initial Reaction – All the Pieces Come Together
When I first learned of the Magento acquisition and saw the immediate update to X.com I was very excited. Suddenly, I no longer had to ponder which shopping cart solution I would devote my time to. All of the pieces seemed to fall right into place.
First, the Magento community has always been one of the larger of the bunch, and now that can only grow with the eBay and PayPal communities being included in the mix. It’s always nice to have more people in forums, chat rooms, at conferences, etc. It just helps get things done.
Second, as I mentioned before, Magento is built on the Zend Framework. Zend is obviously very well known in the PHP industry with their popular products like the framework itself, the Zend Server stack, and the Zend Studio IDE. If you’re not already familiar with Zend there will be a learning curve involved, but it’s well worth it. If you are familiar with Zend then you’re well on your way to fully utilizing the open X.Commerce platform because it leads directly into my next topic: mobile development.
Mobile application development is hot these days. When I discuss new ideas and plans with clients, friends, family, and random people online the primary response I get is “let me know when I can download it on my iPhone.” I could write an entirely separate article on developer options with mobile development, so I won’t get into much detail here, but I will say that Adobe Flex has recently sparked my interest in a big way.
Adobe and Zend have partnered and released Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP. Flash Builder is Adobe’s IDE for building Flash and Flex applications which are compatible on computers running Windows, Mac or Linux as we as mobile devices running Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, or iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch). Now built in to the Flash Builder IDE is the popular Zend Studio IDE based on Eclipse which makes it easy to build and debug PHP services right along-side your Flash / Flex application development.
Are you beginning to see where I’m going with this? eBay and PayPal are big time players in the ecommerce industry, of course. They’ve now got plans to acquire Magento and plan on releasing an entirely open platform for developers to have access to all of the services that these three platforms provide. Magento is based on the Zend Framework, and Zend has partnered with Adobe to make it simple to build applications that work on most all devices whether desktop, laptop, or mobile.
For me, all signs point to Adobe and Zend for application development which leads to the X.commerce platform and has made it easy for me to finally decide which direction I’d like to run.
Let Our Imaginations Run Wild
What could this mean for the future of eBay, PayPal, and Magento? Will there be immediate changes? How much are they going to do for us and how much are they going to leave for us to do? The demand is high for a variety of things…which direction will we see this whole thing going? Could we see any of the following ideas?
- The Magento platform replacing the eBay Stores platform.
- The ability to automatically sync eBay items with Magento website inventory.
- The ability to launch a new website for yourself with a few clicks utilizing your eBay inventory.
- Integration of eBay and Magento notification systems to automate back-end tasks for both eBay auctions and website sales.
- Complete merging and introduction of a single set of API’s to handle everything eBay, PayPal, and Magento offers
- All-in-one auction management, online store, and point-of-sale payment systems in a single solution.
Nothing is set in stone as of yet so it’s really tough to say, but it’s sure fun to speculate!
Conclusion
Excitement is definitely in the air surrounding the eBay, PayPal, and Magento communities. While it’s tough to see exactly where things are going right now there is plenty of potential for developers to jump on board and start building tools around these platforms. As time passes and questions are answered things can only improve.
Hopefully, many of the un-answered questions will come to light at this year’s developer conference being held in San Francisco on the 12th and 13th of October where they’ll cover content from PayPal, eBay, and Magento. I know I can’t wait to hear all about it, and I hope to see you there!