PRWD

On Friday 19th of February, I gave a presentation to the North West Drupal User Group on the Features module for Drupal.

The Features module was created by Development Seed, and provides a powerful mechanism for packaging certain changes to a Drupal-based site that normally only exist in the database. By moving the locus of change from the database to code stored in files, these changes are made available to version control systems and are made much more portable between installations.

Features makes it easy to create chunks of functionality, packaging together related Views, Content Types, Contexts and more. As I mentioned on my personal blog in December, this can be very useful in deployment scenarios, but it also has the potential to allow developers (and power users) to create features that can be distributed just like existing Drupal modules. Features is powerful enough that it’s possible to use it to create something useful and powerful without writing any code.

There are, of course, still plenty of ‘gotchas’ and Features itself is still technically a beta release, likely to change and improve before a final 1.0 release. Without doubt, there are improvements to be made. But we’re using Features in production at PRWD, and we’re confident that it will be a big part of Drupal development for all of our new projects. More than that, I would expect that Features will grow in popularity to provide a platform for packaging functionality that becomes a standard part of any Drupal developer’s toolkit.

The slides from my presentation are visible below (from Slideshare):

Over the last few months, we’ve begun using the Magento e-commerce platform. As leading suppliers of usability analysis, training and evaluation, as well as software development, we’ve worked with a wide range of e-commerce platforms and technologies and are now focusing on Magento as our primary e-commerce platform.

What is Magento?

Magento is an enterprise-ready open source e-commerce platform. What that means in practice is that it provides an equivalent feature set to big-budget e-commerce platforms, but at a substantially lower cost. In place of a single vendor selling licenses and support, there is a global network of providers with skills and knowledge necessary to create and maintain new sites using Magento, headed up by Varien Consulting, the founders of Magento.

What does PRWD bring to Magento?

What we bring is our relentless focus on creating effective user experiences. We’re the North West’s leading usability company – the only North West company to be listed in Econsultancy’s buyers guide – and we’ve also provided training to other digital agencies based here. Visitors to your site might not know anything about the technology you’re using, but they will care about how easy the site is to use. Our usability work ensures that once people are on your site, everything is set up for them to buy as much as possible, as easily as possible.

PRWD’s User Experience Director, Paul Rouke, has written extensively about best practice for online retailers, and gives a training course in that subject. You can find Paul’s blog here – be sure to check out the ‘Most Popular Posts’ in the top right-hand corner for some instantly applicable insights for retailers.

We also bring the technical expertise necessary to get the best out of your Magento site. We’ve begun developing Magento modules which extend the functionality of the system. Having the design and development capacity in one firm means that we can work quickly to update and improve websites once they’ve launched.

How flexible is Magento?

Whilst there are certainly best practices to stick to in e-commerce site design, there’s nothing worse than a fashion site that looks like it should be selling fridges, or a cookie-cutter e-commerce store that fails to build on a company’s brand and marketing strategy. Magento’s modular design means that we can customise design and functionality without limits. Custom shipping charges? Discount vouchers? Twitter or Facebook integration? Advanced analytics and CRM? All of these are possible with Magento, often much more easily than they would be on any other platform.

How can I find out more?

If you want to know more about Magento, or about our e-commerce usability training and consultancy, give us a call on 0161 918 6729 or contact us via our website. Our offices are in Manchester so we’re well placed for anyone in the UK, especially the North West.

Update: you can find more information about our Magento services here

We’ve recently delivered an e-commerce site using the Magento e-commerce platform, which has been very enjoyable to work with. But one key concern for us, with our focus on usability best practice (PRWD’s Paul Rouke delivers a regular training course on exactly that subject), is to ensure that the sites we deliver meet the same high standards that we would recommend to others. Fortunately, Magento provides excellent usability in many of its features and with some careful work on the site design and layout, building a high-usability site proved fairly straightforward.

However, we did encounter one serious usability issue. One of Paul’s recent tips for increasing e-commerce conversion rates was to ensure that delivery costs are displayed to the customer before the checkout process has begun. A last-minute shock during the checkout, as the price leaps due to shipping costs and taxes, can be one of the key factors causing a high drop-out rate during checkout. And Magento does not, by default, show shipping costs on the shopping basket page. What it does show is a ‘shipping cost calculator’, but this is much too complex for ordinary customers, and is unnecessary in most cases. For the case of a retailer shipping within a single country, the standard shipping costs are likely to be predictable and there is no good reason for not showing a standard shipping cost on the basket page.

With that in mind, I set out to create a Magento module that automatically applies the most suitable shipping charge to the customer’s order before it has been placed. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I imagined, but it has been very educational for me and has resulted in our first open-source module for Magento: the PRWD Auto Shipping module.

How it works

What now follows is a fairly technical description of how the module actually works. If you’re just interested in how you can use it on your own sites, follow the link to the module and read the instructions there.

Magento provides an implementation of the ‘observer pattern‘, a software design pattern which is used to allow different elements of a piece of software to ‘observe’ events that occur elsewhere in the software. In my case, I was interested in observing the events that occur when a customer adds a product to their shopping basket, or updates the contents of the basket. Only once we know what’s in the basket can we calculate which shipping option to use.

Setting up an observer in Magento involves specifying the class and function to call in an XML configuration file and once this has been done, that function will be called every time the event occurs. The Auto Shipping module has a function set up for precisely this purpose; when either a new product is added to the basket, or the contents of the basket are changed, the function is called and the shipping costs are calculated. Thus, when the user visits the shopping basket page, the costs are ready to be displayed.

Magento includes a system for specifying shipping methods and for ranking these shipping methods in order of preference. For example, a ‘Free Shipping’ method may exist for orders over a certain price, and if this method is available (that is, if the order qualifies) then we want to apply that shipping method. We therefore rank Free Shipping as #1. The second option might be a default Flat Rate, a standard shipping charge for normal deliveries. If we rank this as #2, it will be applied only if Free Shipping is not available.

Let’s assume that we’re applying free shipping to any order over £50 in value. If the customer adds £40 worth of goods to the basket, free shipping does not apply and so the standard flat rate for shipping is displayed. However, if the customer adds an extra item to the basket, taking the total over £50, free shipping is then automatically applied. Conversely, the customer then removes an item from the basket and takes the total value below £50, the free shipping will be removed and the standard rate applied in its place.

It’s not a hugely complicated module, but it takes good advantage of Magento’s object-oriented and patterns-based design to provide a usability benefit which should help to boost conversion rates. If you’ve used the module yourself and find it useful, it would be great if you could leave a comment or give some feedback. And if you’re interested in talking to PRWD about Magento-based e-commerce sites, or e-commerce usability needs, you can contact us to discuss those further.

This post is part of a series on the real-time web and its use for retailers. In this first, post, we’ll examine some of the possible use cases.

The phrase ‘real-time web‘ has been getting a lot of interest in the web industry recently. In computing, the term ‘real time’ refers to a system that has to operate within time constraints, where it’s important that the system react quickly and keep up-to-date with data arriving. Traditionally this has only been applied to mission-critical systems such as medical devices or financial trading systems, where a few missed milliseconds can make a huge difference.

The ‘real-time web’ uses the term more broadly, to refer to sites and applications which update very frequently, and which rely on that time dimension for a competitive advantage. Many new and popular web services, such as Twitter, are built around the notion of fast-moving data and this is changing our experience of the web from one where we browse mostly static pages and receive only occasional notifications – perhaps a weekly email – telling us about new content, new offers or new products. In the real-time world, content can be constantly shifting and customers and users will increasingly expect to see up-to-the-minute information.

So, how might this be relevant to retailers?

1. Real-time offers

Dell's Twitter feed

An innovative new time-sensitive sales tactic is to offer discount codes and coupons via real-time messaging services such as Twitter or Facebook status updates. These codes can be limited in number, so that only those customers who order promptly can benefit from them. This creates a unique incentive to place an order, with the prospect of losing the discount if the prospective customer waits too long to place the order.

This technique can has been used by Dell and Zappos, amongst others. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has gained a phenomenal 567,000 followers on Twitter at the time of this post, and can use this network to broadcast coupon codes and other promotions to his entire audience, prompting surges of shoppers towards the Zappos site.

2. Real-time purchase information

The Book Depository's 'Watch people shop' feature

One of the key insights for retailers is that customers are more likely to buy an item if they know that other people are buying it too. This is one of the reasons why a high number of reviews on products can help to drive sales, and why charts of best sellers have been a major part of retail promotions for decades. The web creates the opportunity to speed this up, giving customers information about what others are buying right now.

This is a good way of encouraging customers to make a buying decision, because they will feel more safe making their purchase knowing that others are doing so too. It’s possible – though not especially likely – that they might purchase the same item that they observe someone else buying, but the main benefit is in proving that the retailer is genuine and has an active customer base. The reassurance given to the customer is all-important.

The pictured example is from The Book Depository, which shows a series of notifications on their front page, illustrating recent purchases. In a nice twist, they use a Google Map to show where the buyer is from (enhancing their reputation as a global brand), pulling in a thumbnail image and title of the book bought. They also mention the free delivery given.

3. Count-downs

The shipping countdown on Naked Wines

Many retailers make use of a count-down facility, letting customers know that if they order before a certain time they will qualify for next-day delivery or reduced shipping rates. Again, this adds an artificial sense of time pressure for buyers, who know that buying now will be a better deal than buying later, even if the saving is just on the shipping or on getting the product a day earlier.

A live auction on Swoopo

Another more innovative, but also more controversial, approach that has been successful for a certain type of retailer is to introduce competition amongst the site visitors, with a time-limited auction. Sites such as Swoopo have pioneered a simple but effective tactic of charging users a small fee to bid on what appear to be highly under-priced items. In fact, the retailer makes almost all of their profit on the accumulated bidding fees and can easily afford to sell products at a ‘loss’. Whilst the ethics of this form of retailing might be dubious, it’s a perfect example of the use of time constraints – bidding is most frenzied when the auction is about to close – and the use of live feedback, as visitors can see the fresh bids appearing in real time.

4. Live shopping assistance

Zappos Live Help

Another feature that is becoming more commonplace now is live shopping assistance, enabling visitors to talk directly to customer service representatives via a chat window. Although web chat systems have been in existence for some time, the technology has often been poorly implemented, making the experience a frustrating one for customers. But web chat is now back on the agenda, with systems like Facebook Chat making it ‘normal’ to hold a conversation via a browser window rather than a standalone instant messaging application such as MSN Messenger or Skype.

Live Chat systems are unlikely to be suitable for small-scale retailers, but for those retailers that already employ large customer service teams, a live chat option can provide the customer with extra reassurance, help and advice. The human touch can be more effective than any number of FAQ pages or inline help messages.

The common thread

What most of these uses of real-time technology have in common is that they all serve to make the individual customer aware of other people and their actions. Customers seeking to take advantage of limited discount codes know that they have to do it before others get there first. Customers observing the purchases made by others can feel reassured by the fact that others are shopping at the same place that they are. Ultimately, this use of the technology is all about giving individuals access to extra information that they wouldn’t get from an old-fashioned, static e-commerce site. In many cases, real-time update technology provides a means of keeping a site fresh even without requiring much intervention.

In the next post in this series, we will examine the technologies behind the real-time web, and the future developments that will change things even further.