Background

Josh is a partner at an agency in Cincinnati, OH called Ample. His client, ClassWatch, wanted to create a shopping experience that personalizes high-end wrist watches with school logos, initials, and graduation year. Adobe Scene7 seemed like the perfect tool to manage images. And Magento is one of the most powerful ecommerce platforms on the market today. But there was just one problem: no one had integrated the two web services with each other yet.

Solution

Not one to back down from a challenge, Elias rolled up its proverbial sleeves and went to work setting up a store, installing a custom theme, and integrating the watch configurator with Scene7. It was a tight deadline, which required outstanding teamwork between Elias + Ample. Personally, I’m proud to have met and worked with the Ample guys. (disclaimer: I tend to think that way about all of our clients)

Lee is documenting the technical side of this story in a series of posts. Our current project load has stalled the remaining posts in the series so far, but I’ll update the following list as he adds the next two posts:

1. Part 1 of 3: Scene7 Integration with Magento Ecommerce

Results

The final product is an impressive personalized shopping experience. Eric made a quick screencast to showcase the integration with Scene7 + Magento.

Houston, we have a problem

Elias faces this tension on a daily basis. Let’s say we receive an estimate request with project description from a new potential client. Ok, now what? We try to get more information. The potential client is trying to understand price. And agency partners want a faster way to incorporate Elias development costs into their bids for client Magento ecommerce opportunities. So I created packaged services to frame scope and help clients see the effects of feature configuration/development on price.

Solution (v1)

• Package services for typical client requests to quickly set expectations for scope and budget.
• Reduce package variation to minimal number of factors.
• Establish a conversational starting point when discussing a project with a new client.
• Make the purchase decision easier for clients.
• Distill scope differences between packages into an easy to consume format.

Result (v1)

Packages v1

While this initial version of our Magento service packages did set expectations for scope and budget upfront, it failed on multiple levels of design:

• The pricing was not simple.
• Awful borders held the table captive.
• Don’t even get me started on my poor original names

Solution (v2)

Tyler Tate recently featured a fantastic article in Smashing Magazine about minimizing complexity in user interfaces. He illustrated one of his points with a pricing chart from Typekit. Their example gave me the inspiration I needed to create version 2 of Elias’ packages:

Result (v2)

Packages v2

The great part about healthy teams is that a foundation of trust and respect makes it easier for conflict to lead to a better outcome than any individual could arrive at on their own.  In our case, Lee’s concern slowed down the conversation and made for a very healthy reality check with the partner .  After a quick conversation with his client, the partner modified the project scope to something more realistic and asked us to throw together an estimate for it.  Not only will we create an immediate benefit for the partner by finishing the project and creating cashflow, we will also built a solid relationship with this partner who likes us and will most likely choose to work with us on future Magento stores.

I am convinced that this type of interaction would not have happened even 2 months ago.  This is the sort of trust and mutual respect that is developed over time.  If you are looking for this type of team to interact with for your Magento store, theme, customization, or module then we would be happy to speak with you.  Just drop us a message on this form and we’ll be in touch.

James Turner: Just to be balanced, what are some of the perils that companies need to watch out for when they start to adopt open source?

Jeffrey Hammond: I’ll tell you: The number one peril that I run into is an overinflated set of expectations. And it usually goes something along the lines of, “Well, we’re going to dramatically reduce our software costs.” And there are some scenarios where that can happen. But in reality, what open source does, especially at the start, is it tends to shift your software costs. So, yes, you’re reducing the capital expenses and expenditures that you are paying for software bits and bytes. But, in most cases, firms that are starting with open source are still buying support contracts from organizations.

Given the typical expense for ecommerce systems, an enterprise etailer will still come out way ahead in the switch to Magento.  But it is important to note that the spending shifts from software costs to labor cost.  This is why it is imperative to work closely with your selected development team on the front end of a project to map out a solid solution.  As our lead developer at Elias, Lee, likes to say, “We want to have this project won before we get started.”

1.    Not sure what we really need
2.    Too many vendor options and not clear on how to evaluate them
3.    Not sure how much it should cost or what is affordable for me.

Translation: the market is confusing.

Let me try to add clarity to expectations.  If you picked up the Internet Retailer Guide to Ecommerce Technology, then you would having the following cost considerations for your ecommerce platform (based on FitforCommerce survey):
•    On average, a new ecommerce platform costs $50,00-$100,000 minimum.
•    Mid-sized e-retailers need to spend $150,000-300,000 to re-platform, especially if the project calls for a lot of integrations.
•    The top 200 retailers ($50 million+) might spend over $500,000 if they want a total custom solution with maximum flexibility.

Given these expectations and more than 30 pages of ecommerce platform vendors, I can understand the frustration.  However, I want to propose that market confusion is due to more than just a quantity of selection.   You have to factor in the rapid speed of innovation at all levels of the cost spectrum…and open source.

Open source ecommerce software like Magento is game-changing.  Just reread the cost ranges above and contemplate what it would have cost even 2 years ago to compete with your own sophisticated online store: $50k buy-in, minimum.  Now the cost is 70-80% less using Magento and customizing it to your business.

Drop us a note today here at Elias if you are interested in learning more.

Since we are small, every penny counts and every minute saved is valuable to us.  Our objective was to create a form on our website where new potential clients can submit a request for more information.  We have been slammed lately with currect clients (a good thing), but feel like we are not able to be as responsive as we would like to be with people who are trying to make a decision on who to use for their Magento ecommerce installation and Magento customization (a bad thing).  A CRM tool was desperately needed in order to collect the new contacts, file them in on-demand software, trigger an immediate email to let them know we will follow up soon, and send a notification email to me with the info that they filled out on the form.  Turns out this was harder to find than I expected.  Enter Zoho.

Other companies out there do this sort of thing, Zoho just does it for $25/month/user.  So far I have customized the lead fields, mapped them to a form, and pasted the HTML to our “Request a Quote” landing page.  Also, the software is set to automatically send me an email with the completed fields and create a follow up task due the next day (screenshot of admin below).  Next week I plan to set up the triggered email response to the interested client.

Hopefully this is helpful to you if you are looking for a CRM application.  It would be interesting to know what everyone else is using to manage their client relationships and why they selected it.  Anyone have a better find than Zoho?

1. Magento hit its 500,000th download about 3 weeks ago
2. A couple months ago there were usually about 300 people on average at any given point signed in to Magento’s website. Recently that number has more than doubled to 1200.
3. Release 1.1.7 just came out.