Podcasts

Talk Commerce Jared Loftus

The importance of engaging content with Jared Loftus

Do you want to create more engaging content in your newsletters? Jared Loftus helps us to understand the importance of a fabulous newsletter.

Rasa enables marketers to create newsletters that engage customers through curated content that helps to build relationships. They give businesses a way to provide a real benefit regularly for everyone on their email list. And not just regularly, but relevantly. Through automation, companies can engage with a new level of frequency without spending more time, effort, or money.

Talk-Commerce Chris Chasteen

Don’t Abandon Your Blog With Chris Chasteen

Imagine doom scrolling through Netflix, looking for the ideal show to binge-watch this weekend. Not the mind-numbing, watch while playing “Candy Crush” content, but the great shows that you really want to burn through 24 hours watching.

After reviewing thousands of low-budget horror movies and sitcoms, you finally stumble upon a hidden gem that you enjoy… but wouldn’t it be easier if these incredible shows appeared automatically? Or if the entirety of Netflix was customized for your exact specifications? That’s what Content Cucumber does (Well, they sort of do this)

Content Cucumber is a writing company. Their clients are metaphorical directors since everything they create keeps the individual wants and needs in mind. Their subscription-based service even lets business leaders update their blogs without lifting a finger, giving them more time to focus on their company (or watch Netflix).

We speak with Chris Chasteen, the co-founder of Content Cucumber.

Transcript

All right. Welcome to this super content-filled episode of talk commerce. Today, I have Chris chess Dean. He is the CEO of content cucumber, and I had the pleasure of first meeting Chris a long time ago, 2018, maybe at retail, X, or IRC at the time. Chris, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing.

Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions. 

Sure. Yeah. So just recently got the CEO title added on for the longest time it was just co-founder focused on growth, but I’ve actually now I’m working on all areas of our organization. So that means, running a contact, cucumber, running everything from finance to innovation, to growth the operations and making sure everything’s moving in the right direction.

And then as far as passion, I love music. I play music and I’m actually working on recording an album. 

Oh, nice. So you could come out with another service called title turnip, or something like that for your 

albums or? Yeah. I think that my indecision would get in the way of that one, but, 

So just for, so everybody gets some background content.

Cucumber is a service that, that, that writes content for people like us. So I’ve been using your service for a number of years. And you have a staff of writers that help entrepreneurs and business people and content people on e-commerce people, great content for their site. 

Yeah. Yeah. And I actually came from an e-commerce background.

The reason I started content cucumbers, cause I was helping grow an e-commerce store and I realized that we could reduce our ad spend and grow our revenue. If we just had focused a little bit on some organic. 

Yeah. And I can just speak from experience that developing that organic content has been the best decision that we made in the last, four years now.

The the SEO traffic that you generate just from that consistent blog post, or just consistent content that’s being generated is something that Google really likes. Maybe you could speak a little bit to how how that service has worked and maybe some of the benefits that some of your other clients have seen from it as well.

Yeah. So just the idea of posting consistently and like showing, proof of life to Google yeah, I’m still here. We’re still here. We’re still here. That definitely is rewarded. And Google looks at you as a thought leader. The more you’re talking about CapEx, where you’re diving deep on.

And really in any business, if you’re starting to get some traction, content is a really great way to shift the focus away from the short term gains, like advertising and sales, and really start to focus up on long-term because it’s very much a long-term thing. Like I always tell people if they’re like, if they’re really fresh getting started you don’t want to focus too much of your time on content in the beginning because you need to get the wheels moving.

But once things are moving, it’s. Putting fuel on the 

fire. Yeah, I would even argue that beginning phase, when you need to get the wheels moving is a great time to start building your content. It is also going to be the biggest time that you’re going to have a lot of ideas. And I know one thing we talked about in the green room is how you have.

Helped me or helped with Kento come up with some of those original ideas that then turned into content maybe speak to how merchants could use content to drive traffic to their products. 

Yeah. So at the beginning and content totally plays a role in the beginning with the product descriptions, right?

That’s like where you first need to really nail your web copy is if you’re talking about, selling. Hairbrushes or whatever you’re going to go and sell. Having really compelling content about the item outside of just like what its dimensions are like, how is it useful? What have people what are the experiences?

And that’s, before you’re getting tracked and you don’t have reviews, like the best thing you could do is try to talk about this, that whatever product it is at lake. So yeah, product descriptions, I think are probably your first content pathway to take as a numerous. For sure. 

What are you seeing then as a trend right now?

I know there’s some terms called compose, compose of composable commerce. There’s all kinds of now com commerce and headless. And w what are you seeing from adding content? Oh, on top of the regular content you’ve seen on a e-commerce store that content now has just become more important.

And I guess maybe speak to some of the things that you’re seeing in the industry around generation of content and the volume of that. You need to keep relevant. 

Yeah, to really establish a brand authority on top of having your product descriptions well, maintained, it’s also having a blog of some sort and having some talking points that really establish you as the authority of whatever it is that you’re going to sell.

So we see people like the people we see of our clients that are the most successful are very much like you were. We know what our niche is. We know who we’re talking to. We know what they’re interested in, and if you just continually listen to what it is that your audience is interested in, and you keep speaking to that, you’re going to be going down the pathway that you really want to be going.

So I’d say regardless of the trends, always go back to who your target profile audiences and make sure that you’re finding and meeting them with. 

Yeah. And I think to borrow a term from WordPress or some of the other content site, there’s always a pillar page that you’re trying to drive traffic to, or in the terms of a of a website that has a product or that product would be that pillar page.

And the goal is to generate content around that and then drive traffic to. 

Yes. Yeah. And there’s, there’s all sorts of different ways you can do that, whether it’s I’ve seen people do it from a case study pit standpoint, where it’s like this one product can be used in five different cases.

And then your landing page is like, How do I use so construction materials, a great example. So let’s say caulking, which is where I came from and Silicon sealants. You can use silicone sealants around windows. You can use them in the bathroom. You can use them on the sidewalk outside. And the people who are installing those different applications are very different people.

But having, a landing page from the audience saying writing out your content like this is how you use this product in this space, and then you can have another one about that space. So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that too. It’s not just like one category page or one pillar page for all the product types that person might be interested in, but it’s also creating different pages for one product that targets different audiences as well.

So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that content creation. 

So maybe talk a little bit about idiation as well. How you help or maybe talk about how merchants don’t have to have that full idea. You help them dig into it, come up with some more content and then follow on through even more content for.

Yeah, for sure. When you start working with any writer and a contact cucumber writer is a great example. If you have some rough ideas, share them with that writer, or even if you’re building a team make sure to share your ideas with your team. Cause like getting feedback on the ideas will help develop the idea.

And our, our service is a place where you can send us the roughest of sketches and we can help you hash that out, but always being on the lookout for bouncing your ideas off of other people I found is like infinitely helpful. Cause I see a lot of people they’ll be like, I have a thousand ideas, but then they just don’t.

Try to ask people like, is this a good idea? Cause they hold their ideas a little too close to the chest and ideas are free people aren’t going to steal them. And yeah, just 

let the flow, just talking about Combs. I was going to get a subscription to a comb. But my wife said it would be a waste of money, so I don’t know why, but so the I guess the, to go in on that, a lot of, content is so important, but content can be expensive in hiring a full-time staff writer.

Can be can be equally expensive. So how do you help? How do you see helping with your typical e-commerce agency by supplementing that content? Yeah, 

That’s pretty much the exact niche that I went to Phil because I, when I had silicone Depot trying to grow that business there wasn’t really a way to have a writer that was on my team.

But not like a freelancer, not like an intern, but someone who was a professional writer. And I could just borrow some of their time to dedicate to my project. And it was like Hey, let’s do that. And so that’s what contact cucumber is all about, is being able to access that professional writer for part of their time to basically help do that at a fraction of the 

cost.

And you don’t just do blog posts, you’re helping generate content for any type of media out there. 

Any type of written media and there’s some limitations to that. Like we can’t write your dissertation. We’re not going to write your homework. We actually, we actually did one of our first sample requests that we used to have a sample funnel where we’d let people make a free blog request.

Someone said, can you write a book report on where the Redfern group. And they’re like nice tribe, but no. So we’re not going to do your homework, but we definitely had some people, some pretty clever people that wasn’t the first one, because they came back the, I think the next day and put in another one, they’re like could you do a report on hurricanes and have it to me by midnight?

It’s oh, we’re not gonna do that. 

So it does give you an idea if you wanted to help get through school, though. You don’t just say, Hey, I’ve got to write this blog post on. The the geology of rocks. 

Yeah. Yeah, we can do a whole nother business specifically for homework, like homework.

don’t know. What’s a vegetable homework hummus, maybe homework, calmness. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, we just helped you. We help you figure out how to get your homework done 

on time. And watch out for the dog. So it’s not going to eat it. So w specifically written, so helping with social media posts, just Twitter tweets.

Of course what was I just thinking of? Oh, email newsletters is a great example of something that’s needs to be done every month and is often overlooked. And I think that email right now, people are thinking is email really important, but Hey, I still get email every day and I answer it and I look at it 

right.

And merchants, like that’s some serious like money on the table. If you’re not, if you’re not utilizing email, you ought to because yeah, that, that’s a really good place to engage with your audience and get people to come back and buy from you again. Or, email is an ex. Excellent source of doing that.

And we, we write tons of newsletters every month and those are really successful and also like on that. It’s not something we do, but something to think about for merchants, if they’re thinking about building. Their content points and how to reach their audience more. Definitely getting into SMS a bit.

I’ve seen a lot of e-commerce companies adopting more SMS marketing, and that seems to be going much better than email even. So something to consider. 

Okay. So just adding on to, on, on what SMS is going to be shorter messages, but yeah, I can see how that was. That is going to help a merchant to.

To increase traffic and help get education around their products that they’re selling. Maybe we can just dive into the ways that merchants should measure some of this. Like how, what is your definition of success or do people come to you and say, how do I judge my success on my content?

Yeah. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Of course, in e-commerce conversion rate is king, right? That’s the thing. It’s straw, Kate’s driving traffic, but what percentage are actually converting into customers or it’s I’m sending out this email, but what percentage are actually converting into clicks and going to the website?

And for e-commerce I think conversion rate is probably the area where we focus on and we definitely see some blogs that if they get posted on the first page of that relevant result, they can see anywhere from, a two to 4% conversion rate, which for a blog post is pretty darn. 

Yeah, that’s great.

So maybe talk a little bit about non the more, the broader idea of just developing content and then from an SEO standpoint, how do you measure success? 

Yeah, starting from the topic gets, it definitely gets more and more vague, like the higher up the idea, the more vague it is.

And then the closer to the actual metrics, the, the more it’s relevant, but I would say a good like litmus. To try when you’re first developing your content strategy is look at what everyone else in your industry is talking about in is what you’re talking about. At least as interesting and Mo more ideal, more interesting than what everyone else is talking about.

And if it is then you’re on the right path. But if what you’re talking about, Everyone already knows that, some of that content is good, like reiterating terms. So Google knows that, you know what you mean? But don’t do a 2000 word blog on like how to drink water or something is like everyone already know.

There was like the benefits of drinking the quantity of water. And that’s why you should get our one gallon water thing, because you need to drink a gallon of water. Cause it shows that you’ll like sleep better and like you’ll not have to eat as much and your exercises will be more effective. It’s tell the benefits, not just the features.

And I think that stuff like that is really important when coming up with your 

context, yeah. And I think the underlying idea to that is you want to differentiate yourself from other people. And especially if you’re differentiating yourself from say, Amazon, if you have a specialty product, or if your product that’s crosses over into that marketplace world, where Amazon might sell it, the more you can do to distinguish yourself as a leader in that the better your content is going to perform.

And the more traffic you’re gonna. I suppose the, one of the minimum things that somebody could look at is that their traffic is increasing over time. And also making sure that you’re you’re indexing those pages onto Google, your blog posts. If this that’s where you’re going to do, you’re going to expose this content to and measure.

What is more popular than that? Is this one more popular than this other one? One thing that we’ve done is on some posts put specific call to actions on those posts. And even in the past, we tried doing some kind of little internal ad thing where we’d have some ads rotate through the blogs to see.

Are we getting a lot of clicks and if we’re getting a lot of clicks, that’s a great place that you should be trying to capture some of those reads, right? Because I think was logged. So if you have a blog and you mentioned 2000 words, somebody is going to spend a, five or 10 minutes reading that’s a great time to get somebody to stick with it and then go somewhere else on your own.

Yeah. Always have a call to action of some kind, for sure. That’s a must do for every post should have some sort of call to action for sure. I definitely agree with that. And yeah, I of course. Like traffic is an important metric to keep in mind. But the reason why I don’t go there first is because it can be a little demoralizing because it takes so long.

If you don’t have traction to get the traction that you’re like this isn’t working. And it’s if you’re writing things that are as interesting or more interesting than everyone else writing about the same thing, you will get traction. It’s just going to take time. So that’s a big piece there because I don’t want people to give up early cause this.

Six to 12 months before you’re seeing the results that you 

expect. Yeah. And I think ideally you’d like to do one per business day. So an average of 20 a month, I don’t know I’m being right. Or 

that really depends on the industry that you’re in. Of course the that’s I was just laughing cause that’s our, our pitch, our first offering, was, you can get up to a blog a business day, but really, it depends on the industry you’re in.

And if you’re in a say you’re in the. I don’t know, medicinal space, that’s going to require more like say you’re selling supplements or selling some herbal teas or something. That’s really going to take probably longer form of content because your competition is higher. And because you’re wanting to attract the type of buyer who wants to read a lot about that thing.

Whereas if you’re buying, if you’re selling something a little more surface level, some people will want to do a ton of research on tires, but the majority of your consumers just want to know is it going to work in snow? Is it going to work in rain? Is it going to work in the summer? And that’s really all they care about and it’s not going to go flat very easily.

And it’ll fit my vehicle. It’s okay, great. So those can be shorter. So it depends on your industry. I’d say four. Good average, those at least try to get, somewhere around 15 hundreds, a week, 1500 words a week out at minimum, in some capacity, whether it’s, a combination of 400 word or 800 word blogs or.

One 1400 word blog, but just some kind of mix of content that adds up to that number is probably a good place to be. This 

is Google looking specifically at the length of a blog post, and that was going to be my next question is 400, the best size, or is 800 zero. Is there a sort of a rule of thumb that makes sense for the length of your blog post?

Now you’re really diving into an area where you can. For SEO agency, people masterminds and they will argue that to the, yeah. So that, that one’s a contentious one. I think right now the hot topic is long form content. Like everyone’s more beating the drum of 1400 to 2000 words.

But again, it really depends on what you’re selling, because if you’re selling something that the consumer doesn’t really want to know everything there is to know about it, they just want. To know that it’s going to work for what they needed to work for. I would always urge you to meet your consumer where they’re at figure out who your customer is and always write to them.

If you think that they really want to nerd out about the laptop, then write 2000 words about the laptop. But if you think it’s no, I’m selling to someone who they just want to make sure that they can open Chrome and. You use the internet, they don’t care about gaming or anything. So just know who you’re talking to.

And Google will always reward you for staying on top of your audience. And that’s going to be a, there’s going to be SEO. People who disagree with that. They’re like no, 1500 to 2000 words. Like it really works. It’s yeah. Okay. It does work. But there does come to a point where Google’s goal in life is to figure out exactly what you want when you start.

And so sure right now, the long form content is performing well, but in the end, the Google’s AI is going to figure out every search and what you’re actually looking for. And so just work that out. If you’re going to go write a piece of code. What does the person who’s going to read this one? Do they want to sit down and read a 10 minute log or do they want a, three-minute answer to a very basic question, meet the people where they are, and actually with that advice.

And this is where I pushed back on the SEO. People’s I we’ve seen featured snippets because of that, where people write a short form, 400 word blog, and they’re the featured snippet, which that’s 

huge. Wow. 

We need 

to put that on our website, honestly. Yeah. You need a featured snippet too, on your. So I, what I guess what I’m hearing is, there should be a mixture of sizes of content.

And just, let’s just say you, you work for one larger, long, long form a week and some smaller ones to fill in, or at least get that one blog post a week up there to help the keep things moving. 

Yeah, exactly. Momentum is huge. 

And then I, I know one thing that we learned in just in, in sort of the way you can help to generate more of this content is that out of that blog post it’s officially a long form blog post, you certainly can find tweets that are relevant to that blog post, and it’ll lead people back to it.

So quotes and things like that. And then one thing that I’ve noticed recently there’s WordPress plugins that will help you write a blog post. A podcast about your blog post. And if you were to do a weekly blog post, you could, I would say, read it back. I wouldn’t have, I don’t know how they do that generation, but it would be really annoying if it’s some kind of audio generated from a robot reader, but that, that content would make, usually make a great.

A great podcast or at least put it into some audio. And then what I’ve really seen, a lot of people doing now is turning it into a little bit of a vlog where you get on and you just either read the highlights or talk about the highlights from your post. Then let people go through and read that long post for 

sure.

Yeah. And I think. Again, to dive into some examples of what you’re talking about. Sometimes video content makes a good appearance with like makeup tutorials. We see people who are doing that kind of thing, but then where you’re talking about the more like higher level overview about certain products, I dunno.

What do you think? What are some products? Do you think that audio pairs really nicely with a blog? What kind of products do you imagine? 

Just audio or audio and. 

Let’s just take the audio example where you’re going to, we’re going to write a blog and then you turn it into a podcast. What do you think?

What kind of industries do you think that works really well 

for? Yeah. I think audio only would work, I think, excuse me, obviously, for audio devices, if you’re selling something, excuse me, selling something in the audio world that’s a great example, but yeah. Anything where you can describe it, anything where you don’t have to have a visual of what you’re doing.

So you mean you gave the makeup. That’s a great example, where you have to see somebody doing it, anything where you don’t have to see it, and you can capture somebody while they’re driving or they’re running or whatever they’re doing. And it’s a, it’s something that can be described. And I guess if we look at what’s out there from a blog or from a podcasting standpoint, everything in a podcast is normally.

Descriptive. If you’re talking about strategy of any sort or thought leadership and then if you can boil that thought leadership into what is it, what is Ted talk say 18 minutes or something? That is your, yeah. That’s your ideal things. Yeah. I don’t know how many, eight, how many words? 18 minutes is it must be 2,500 words or something like that.

But if you can concentrate on that and then I would even say you don’t have to do the whole thing. Like people like to hear shorter bits, like two or three minutes of it, and then it gives them a chance to read the whole post. 

Yeah, no, that’s interesting. And something I’ve seen a lot on.

Newscasters doing these days, like you see it on the Washington post and things of that nature where they’ll have an audio format that just literally reads the article out loud for you. And I find that kind of interesting too. It’s if you’re researching a pro like anything and it’s just listen to this in audio form, then you can just click play and.

Open your emails and listen to it in the background. And yeah, that’s a cool idea. I like that. I think that’ll probably start encouraging our clients to think more 

like that. Yeah. I think that’s where this idea that WordPress has that you could turn this this blog post into a, they’re saying a podcast, but I think the idea of just has a sort of a screen reader of some sorts that would read it to you would be a little bit better.

Then having a weekly. Podcasts based on a robot, reading your content. 

And anytime you can try to give your viewers or your users more ways to interact with your content usually you’re going to see performance upgrade, but the one thing I would caution everyone, if you try the, these ideas. Don’t stop iterating.

So it’s if you notice by adding audio, it re reduce the amount of times people click on your call to action, then try it without it, and then try it with it or try it with the call to action in the audio. Always iterate. I think something I see happening with Al with our clients sometimes is they’ll get stuck into their pattern and I’m doing the same thing every week and it’s not doing anything.

I’m like let’s try some new stuff and see what happens. So I think that coming up with new ideas, this is super 

important. Yeah. Testing and measuring is the most important thing anybody could do to ma to see how successful their content is. And I just had a conversation with an email person who said there is a Sending an email for a product is it’s great.

But at some point people get sick of getting your emails and you don’t, you’re not, you don’t have a success as you did before on that newsletter or that email list that you’re sending to because there’s a fatigue in getting way too much. I think from a content standpoint, though as long as it’s relevant content, you can’t, you.

You couldn’t have too much content unless you’re duplicating something across your own site or just plagiarizing somebody else’s 

right. I do agree. I think that what I was the point I was driving home. More that try to change how your blog posts look and feel and mess with your call to actions and that kind of just the scientific testing and try different things out.

Like definitely keep posting content, like you’re right. Like anytime you get deep into a topic, especially if you want to be the authority on that topic, you’ll never run out of stuff to talk about, but just try different stuff on the blog and just see what works. Yeah, 

we 

found that effective sometimes get lucky.

Like I think we got we are, we ranked pretty high on layout shifts, the new web, one of the scores and web vitals from Google. And it was only because we wrote an early article about it and posted it. And then we’ve been following up on eat more of those web viatical, web vital web, what vital web core vitals, sorry, core vitals that Google has.

I don’t get it. I’ll get this right today. Don’t worry. But if you can beat your early on some of those topics, there’s not a lot of penalty you’re going to get from writing about a topic when it first comes out, you have a lot of upside. The only penalty you have is the time it takes to write that article, right?

Yup. If it’s something new, like the core website, That Google has now that’s the score in your website. And there’s some specific things that are, that Google is keying in on. And if you’re early to those specific articles, you’re going to get some early wins and then making sure that you are writing relevant content moving forward, that still has something.

That still connects to that original article. Cause that’s going to continue to show Google that you have some thought leadership on that. 

Yeah, for sure. I think having those like anchor pieces that can eventually link to a bunch of other articles that go into depth as a really great or really great concept.

And we’ve seen that workout successfully for a lot of. 

Just diving a little bit into your into your career now, or your entrepreneur journey, entrepreneurial journey, you started content cucumber when you were still in college. Are you still in college now? No, 

No. I I dropped out of college and then starting to of take it over.

So yeah, I actually met my co-founder and my wife at university went one semester. Met both of them and then, thought Hey, I, I got a home run, so 

yeah, just I can, I had the, I had a similar journey. I, but I went to school for eight years before I dropped out. Okay. So you got your master’s degree?

No, I don’t have any degrees, but I did go to school full time for eight. Oh, okay. Yeah. Full-time student and then decided that I wanted to go into business and here I am, it’s been quite a fuel hit quite a few years later. So how do you, so what does it look like now to content you cover? How you keeping things fun and exciting?

Yeah. Fun and exciting. I think one of the things we’re doing right now, which is really fun is we have this competition going on called the real rumble. And it’s this competition where everyone submits a reel in our slack channel. And may the best real win and the best real winner will get like a custom made real winner of content, cucumber t-shirt.

And we just try to do little things like that to have fun. And me and the video guy who is hosting and judging the competition, did a a sketch to inspire everyone where I played a lawyer basically saying that this real needs to be thrown out. And he played the other lawyer, the defense attorney and the judge.

Like it was really funny, a little bit where we were just going back and forth on whether or not we, this a real. Allowed to be submitted or not. 

Nice. Cool. I know one of the things that I remember that you did at at one of those early IRC or retail X or whatever, the name they’ve changed to this year you had ice cream.

It seems like that. It seems like that doesn’t it, whatever it is this year, they’re 

like, we’re not getting enough 

traffic rebrand again, yearly rebrand again. Yes. Yeah, I still call. I like calling it IRCE, but reaching to that feels very oh, G right? Yeah. Retail X also seems okay now, but the, whatever the new one is I think it’s content retail, something like that, or 

I can’t believe they’ve rebranded again.

I don’t know why they think that’s going to be the solution, but sorry, if you’re listening to this and you organize that conference. I’m sorry. 

I think one of the things that you did earlier. So you had ice cream that you rolled around on a cart, which was, it was a great idea. You had a jazz concert this last 

time.

Yes. Yeah. We had a jazz trio. That was really fun. We always try to do something super creative and out there to show everyone that like we’re creative people. We try to live that spirit because we see a lot of content writing companies. You show. And look like all the other super corporate companies.

And I’m like, what are you doing? We’re literally creatives, get creative. So yeah, we try to have fun with it. Actually the ice cream, there was like blog flavored and newsletter flavored and Facebook posts flavor. And so we made them like all the flavors and then, oh yeah. And then black raspberry.

That was the one that we didn’t give it. One of those silly titles. So we could riff off all the titles and then say, and black raspberry and that all. Usually got a laugh cause they’re like why is black raspberry on its own? I don’t know. He just thought it was fine. 

In case you get a, in case you spam and get.

That’s king blacklist, 

blacklist, respirator. There you go. That would have been hilarious. I have an idea so at and I don’t want you to tell us what your booth is going to be like this year at whatever the new conference is going to be called in Chicago, IRCE slash retail X slash.

Content content retail. But if you were at a corner of your booth, that just says the, my iPad’s that said here’s the AI content creation, people go talk to them and then they have to just talk to an iPad. It’s in the little corner of your booth. And then you have your real people that are talking.

Nevermind. It looked better in my head than it did. It’s 

kind of funny. It’s like comparing the experience, like your here’s the robot. I was actually imagining, like we have like a. Like a little more dramatic. Like that idea makes me think you’d make a robot, how you do with like boxes and silver paint and then just put an iPad on its face.

And you’re like, yeah, try to interact with this and see if you can create something. And 

it’s frustrating. I did try one of those services. I’ve tried a couple of the AI services that write articles for you. And I have had such a horrible experience. I even went for 2.0 of some service. I’m not going to, I’m not going to give their name, but they came out with this 2.0 version and you pay a little bits for every part of the article and it generated this article.

It give you like five different points and it put it. I put a bunch of content in there and it was like, every single point was completely wrong. It was so wrong. And it’s okay, I want to get credit for this. This is like the most useless piece of information that anybody has ever written for me.

Oh no I think I tried it for talk commerce. I think I wanted to just, Hey, let’s break this down. The one of my episodes and write a show summary. And so I had, like I said, it, all this information and then it came back and it said, It gave me all this crap. And I’m like, oh man, this is like the worst.

I can’t use any of this. I can, I could maybe use the outline, which I think I eventually did. And I had to write my own little thing. But I think what that maybe just speak to having a real person write an article for you. So you actually get real content that, does that make sense to people? 

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. A real person, they understand. What people like, they understand that people want things to be accurate and they understand creative writing is very much a a discipline. And so all of, pretty much all of our writers have some sort of creative writing or journalism degree.

So they’ve gone through the pathway of figuring out what it is that people will actually read. Whereas I think the AI is trying to drum up the right thing. Not necessarily focused on what people want to read, but. That it is readable itself. And it’s it’s it actually what AI content generators are good for, I think is coming up with title ideas, honestly, you can, have I wanna make a new title or I want to make some like a paragraph of copy.

It can help you with that. But once you get into long form content, it gets so out there. Cause it’s pulling from every corner of the internet. So it’s it’s also gonna pull from the parts of the internet. I really don’t know what they’re talking about. 

Yeah. And then you need to go and do all the research on where did it find this?

Because I now I’m recalling that. I had a specific guest that I put in and it came back with a bunch of facts about this guest, which it happened to be nothing to do with the guest at all. It was something that was not even true, or I don’t know where it came up with the content, but it took me longer to figure out or to find where did it come from?

Then it did just the right again, just to write it myself. And 

went down that rabbit hole, 

trying to determine yeah, it was like, okay, you have a guest. And if I was, if I were to do something for you and I put it, I put Chris jets chestain and into Into the AI writer and it wants to write a short bio of everything that we’ve just talked about.

And all of a sudden it says, you were born in 1947 and you wrote three successful novels before you founded content cucumber in 2023, okay which part of this is real and what isn’t right now? Logically I know that. That you’re no older than 55, but that would also make you not born in 1947 and I’m now I’m joking.

Cause I can clearly see that you’re 18, but like at some point AI writers are going to make more work than it could be. Somebody just wrote it. 

Yeah. Brent Peterson, the esteemed dolphin trainer from Sweden. It’s what? Wait. Where did you get that? 

Yeah. Yeah, that was my job before.

Yeah. Swedish dolphins. They’re really common. Absolutely. Everybody knows about Swedish dolphins on. Now we have our headline of the show by the way. Sweet dolphins. Definitely. We’ve just gone through AI title generation 

and it will give you stuff like that. And you’re like, okay. That’s good.

Not because it’s good, but good, because it’s not good and I’m going to use it because it’s not good and people are going to click on it. Cause it’s 

funny. Yeah. Maybe we’ve got a few minutes left. Maybe tell us a little bit about what merchants should look at. Let’s just say I’m selling something to do with bathrooms.

What type of content would be the first step that they would take to get started? 

Yeah, so bathrooms and let’s just assume it’s products like showers and toilets and sinks and plumbing and accessories and tile and everything bathroom. You’re going to help build bathrooms. And actually, it’s funny that you say that because we have a company that does something very similar to that.

But yeah, so essentially where you would start is you’d say, okay, who is it? That’s redoing their bathroom. Okay. It’s probably a homeless. Or an investor, or it could even be a renter, that it’s either going to be someone who’s living there or someone who wants to get value out of that because, so you have these two different audiences, so you can talk about how investing in bathrooms can raise property value.

And then you could also talk about how bathrooms are. A really vital place to have looking really nice and also just a better quality of life to have a better bathroom. So I would say like finding out who your audience is. And then figuring out what things are important to them. Also there’s the whole, like my toilet broke crap.

What do I do now? And it’s even if you don’t solve that problem, talking about it and saying, Hey, don’t panic, turn your water off. Call plumber. You’ll be fine. This is what you searched for. If you couldn’t find a plumber. So just providing resources for the people who you think, cause they, maybe they come to you to buy the toilet.

But. Just providing useful resources to the people who you want to come to your site. So you just work out okay, who’s all the people that I want to come to my site. And that’s where that’s your content strategy. And it’s really figuring out who those people are, where they’re hanging out and then writing to that and making sure they can find you.

Yeah. And then also making that little warning bubble that says don’t take a crap in it. 

Yes. Yeah, of course. If it’s. If, yeah, if it’s not flushing, probably don’t try to put anything in it. 

Yeah. I can see that this is, this whole conversation is going down the toilet right now. As we close out the episode, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug it.

What would you like to plug today? 

Normally I’d plug contact cucumber, and. We’ve talked about contact cucumber so much. So I guess I’ll stick with that though, but yeah, consequent comer is a really easy way to get all the content that you need generation. It’s a month service.

You can get up to 2000 words a month. We have plans that you can tell us what to write. We write it. Or you could also do a hands-off plan where we do everything for you. We do the SEO strategy. We make the content calendar. We post it to your website, so you can have as much or as little involvement as you want.

And our whole thing is writing. And I guess lastly, to just steal one more shameless plug, check out Chris tasks. Dot com for updates on music stuff, which 

will come later this year. All right. Yeah. And so just now I have to ask what type of music are you doing 

so for this album, it’s going to very much be inspired by like seventies prog rock and eighties, piano 

rock.

Wow. 

So think Elton John Emerson, Lincoln Palmer stuff like that, but I’ll be posting updates and. Yeah. I also have a Instagram that I do all that stuff too. As Chris, Jesse musics. 

What instruments do you play or instruments? 

So piano is that I always say I’m a professional pianist because people have actually paid me to play piano.

But I also play guitar and drums and other instruments too, but people don’t pay me to play those. 

Just a short story to end it off. My, my daughter went and got a degree in or went for a degree in vocals. And so she ended up meeting a lot of music, people, and she had a person over at our house one day who was just getting ready to do his his recital.

He had a piece getting a piano degree. And so he just you want me to play a few things and we have a grand piano in our living room. Granted, it hasn’t been tuned in like 10 or 15 years. It’s been forever. And I, it’s, there’s an electric piano sitting next to it too. Anyways, he plays it and he does about 20 minutes just out of his head.

It’s amazing. And then I’m like, would you ever what if like they asked you to play this? When you, if you went in for recital, he said I would refuse. It was so it was, sounded so bad. It was his recital sounded great, but our piano is definitely out of tune desperately needs help. So if you do come over, there is a, an electric piano.

You can also play in our house. 

Cool. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Are you going to have someone come fix 

up your piano? I was thinking about it. I think the soundboard is cracked. I think that’s the only thing. It’s like a 1940s, a grand piano. That looks really cool. So right now it is, it’s a big, huge piece of furniture that needs to be tuned.

Yeah. A lot of times old pianos just turned into old pianos or Swedish dolphin. And our sweetest dolphins. That’s true. I’ve seen that. 

All right, Chris, Jess, Dane, we are going to see you in may. I’m excited. I hope you’re going to be retail X or whatever. They’re calling it this year. Maybe it later.

If I were to be really clever, I could come up. I’ll look up what it’s actually called and I’ll do a little boy silver and it’ll say.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You got to make it really robotic 

too. This is my AI driven content that I’m going to inject into that into the audio part. And then I could like, if it’s, if we do put the, I’ll put a little thing over the top of our mouse, so people can’t mistake it for some kind of a mouth over anyway.

Chris J chesting content cucumber is the company. You deliver content and you deliver it every day. It is such a great service. I’m happy to be I’m happy to be a customer of yours. I’m excited to see you in Chicago at and I’m excited to see what your booth is this year. 

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. W it’ll be good to see you. And I don’t know if you do live updates or anything, but it could be fun to do a live update. Yeah. 

I think last year I saw one person doing a little podcast and I was thinking about, maybe I would just do some little short interviews at the show this year 

and yeah, it is.

It’s a cool way to get to talk to your customers, to get some merchants in there and be like, so what’s been working for you 

lately, yeah, exactly. Last year was like a cricket fan. Hopefully there’s more people this year. 

Yeah. All right. Yep. I think so. All right. Thanks for having me.

Bye. All right.

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Ukraine and the Magento Community with Jisse Reitsma

Magento was born in Ukraine and the health and safety of our Ukrainian sisters and brothers are top of mind. Jisse Reitsma and Brent talk over a little history of where Magento came from and the strong Ukrainian community that has helped to make it a world-class e-commerce platform. We dive into Shopware and its advantages in today’s market and close out with a little Magento Association talk. PWA to come next time

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Long Term Support from Adobe will be called the Magento Open Source LTS version. This is a very common practice in Open Source software. The Short Term Support or STS version of Magento will be supported by the community. We also talk about the benefits of a cleaner more streamlined version of Magento Open Source LTS and how this will increase the ROI of merchants all over the world using any version of Magento.

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The Future of Magento with Vinai Kopp

What is the future of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source? Vinai Kopp and Brent talk about the recent Adobe Developers Live Commerce conference and discuss the keynote. We talk about Mage-OS and how the community has stepped up to help Magento Open Source move faster into the future. We debunk speculation in social media and talk about how long-term and short-term support will work around Magento. The excellent news: Magento Open Souce is alive and well and will be for a long time

TRANSCRIPT

Brent: Welcome to this episode. Thank you I have Vinai Kopp is here. I’m going to let you introduce yourself today. Vinai and I have known each other for quite a long time, but why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions.

Vinai: Right on. Thanks for having me, I’m the technical director at Hyva themes. So I worked very closely with Willem and all of our customers about more specifically developing the developers to do the implementations and try to make their lives as easy and fun as possible. And one of my passions, oh boy. I guess sleeping. Dog working out doing the stuff with a dog is fun. man trailing and all kinds of just fun stuff. It’s great. Traveling with a family is lovely. I really enjoy writing code. That’s passion still is. Okay, good. 

Brent: Yeah. I’ve had the opportunity to run with you and your dog and the mountains around Heidelberg, and it’s such a great experience.

Vinai: That was a very nice run 

Brent: So today I think let’s talk a little bit about the Hyva of theme and I think more, more, let’s talk about. Some of the things that are happening with Magento open source and Mage-OS. I think that would be some really interesting topics that resonate. Let’s start with let’s start with Mage-OS and, talk a little about open source.

Brent: I know there was an Adobe developer live conference on Friday last Friday, and that would have been February 11th. What, was your takeaways from that? 

Vinai: Yeah. Okay. For me, it was a very nice talk. I enjoyed it. Not just talks. I watched a couple of, and I didn’t watch everything. I just watched a couple of talks and presentations and this round table about Magento opensource and such.

Vinai: I liked it. The vibe within Adobe I’m enjoying is that it’s been a lot better than it used to be a couple of years ago, and they’re communicating a lot more which, helps me understand what’s happening. So that’s good. Even though you just asked me before we started recording, actually the keynote was a little misleading in part.

Vinai: A number of people reached out to me afterward and asked me about some of the statements that were made and at least from my understanding as part of the Magento open-source task force, where we talk extensively, not hours about these topics. Maybe the information given was a little incomplete, so I understand why people might’ve gotten the wrong impression there.

Vinai: One of the statements, for example, was that community open source handed over completely to the community. And that’s not true. What will happen at least according to the current plans as an expressed intent of Adobe is that Magento open-source as it is today will stay there as Magento open-source LTS.

Vinai: So long-term support, which has I have five years or whatever, support versions, very stable, absolute focus on security and stability because it’s the basis of their commercial offerings. And what they will be handing over to the community is a new distribution called STS Short Term Support. So this will not be officially supported on Adobe cloud.

Vinai: Probably it will be possible to install it and use. it Even though it just won’t be enough official distribution for, one. And that in fact will be owned by the community. It’s not quite clear who that will be. Will it be the Magento association or how that look like? But Adobe said they only will have a advisory role.

Vinai: No veto power or anything. So the community can in fact steer the way it should go, which is lovely. It’s pretty much exactly what we wanted to achieve with Mage-OS. And I’m very exciting. So I was very surprised when Adobe announced itself with a 180 turn. They’re so great. And a lot of things probably were being discussed internally before they announced this.

Vinai: So that’s one thing it’s not that open source is just handed over to the community and Adobe it’s okay, got rid of it. In fact, it’s going to be a whole new distribution. That’s in the hands of the community while the existing distributions will exist. And. Security features and new releases will flow back into STS and at the same time, any features that are developed and STS, and that are maybe then after a year or so are battle proven turn out to not cause big disruption and actually have tangible benefits for merchants.

Vinai: They can be cherry-picked back into LTS when there’s time for another release there. So there, these diversions are definitely not independent of each other, and there’s a vested interest on both sides to stay compatible to some degree I’d, even though I’m really looking forward to being able to innovate again, as part of the Magento Fork, and at least it’s hard not to speak about Magento STS.

Vinai: Because I’ve got pretty clear picture about Mage-OS, how that should be, you know what it’s for the value it will provide to merchants, to developers, to Adobe, to the ecosystem. It’s, maybe a bit premature. Trying to apply the same thoughts to the STS distribution, because that’s just not just Mage-OS. I’d But probably there’ll be some similarities.

Vinai: So I would be very excited to be able to help maybe steer some aspects of that into the direction that I personally find important, for example, make it more accessible for developers and the performance improvements, of course, et cetera. So many, things there to, do, to think about fun with. So that’s one part of it.

Vinai: The other part that you mentioned before we started recording again, was: Is Adobe going complete SaaS? Like Adobe Commerce going completely SaaS. I think what that was statement was intended to mean was that all new features that Adobe will be releasing for Adobe Commerce will be SaaS offerings, just like they have for the last couple of years.

Vinai: So everything around sensei. So Adobe analytics, product recommendation, search. I think those are the services they provide so far. They are SaaS offerings, but they only are usable with Adobe commerce because of the PHP stack, they built around it integrated into. Now in theory, they could be integrated into any commercial e-commerce offering, right?

Vinai: Not just Magento They’re SaaS offerings after all. But Adobe commerce will be built on the PHP stack. So it’s not like it’s completely SaaS now for the years to, for many years to come as the official statement. So nobody knows for how long pretty long as my expectation, right? It will speed pretty much what we’ve got right now.

Vinai: We have the stable PHP core and then SaaS offerings being built on top of this. And this is actually great because. Nobody likes breaking upgrades. It’s just doing work without getting any benefit out of it. So having a stable core is awesome for everybody developers have much more fun building new stuff, merchants don’t want to pay without getting something in return for development work and development hours.

Vinai: So this idea that we were proposing for Magento open source from the beginning for Mage-OS that is, and now also I think hopefully will be adopted for for the STS release, is that the same approach has followed. So any new features are developed as extensions, so to speak, right? It doesn’t have to be SaaS offerings, but they won’t be part of the core, so to speak.

Vinai: But that external extensions, which then can be added in, and the only difference is such a service or feature could be running inside of the same PHP process. So that would be the in-process customization. And as we develop as know and love. Or it could be a SaaS offering like Adobe offers it now, in case of Adobe, those could be customized through the thing called Adobe IO, formerly Firefly, et cetera, but there’s just for the SaaS offerings.

Vinai: So all the existing customizability of Magento still exists. And that’s great because we had the home module ecosystem and develop practice system around that. So maybe that clarifies things a bit. 

Brent: I want to just break this down a little bit now. Cause we, when we went through a lot of things and I, did not have an opportunity to see the live broadcast.

Brent: But the The LTS and STS, I think obviously has confused a lot of people when, I read a few notes from, somebody that sent me here’s what’s happening, they said Magento’s going open source. Magento is going, SaaS was the first statement. And the Magento Association is going to take over the Magento open source.

Brent: These are some big statements. And I was like, wow where did this all come from? And I started doing some searching and I couldn’t find anything about it. So I think your clarification has made it much easier to understand. And then Willem did go through the LTS and STS with me.

Brent: And that also makes perfect sense. I do feel like maybe they did dump a whole lot in a keynote on the community. And I’m a little bit perturbed that it’s going to take three weeks for this recording to come back out. I feel like maybe there was some misinterpretations of this news and it hasn’t spread widely.

Brent: I just want to go back to open source and let’s talk directly about STS LTS. And so it’s clear right now, Magento is going to control the open source core of Magento. Adobe is going to control the open source core of Magento. It’s going to be called long LTS long-term support. And another entity at some point is going to get control over the fork, which is going to be this short-term support, which is going to be more of the innovative space that’s going to happen.

Brent: Would that be a good 

Vinai: We’ll be able to adopt newer PHP versions much, much quicker. Include improvements that have a high priority for community better caching, better session handling. For Adobe, they didn’t have a high priority because of maybe focus on Adobe commerce, cloud or stability.

Vinai: There’s much more room to maneuver there for innovations. 

Brent: Think some of the things you’ve talked about and one of the things they did they announce earlier was they’re going to decouple all the core features, all the third party modules like PayPal and Dotdigital.

Brent: All those are going to get removed from the core. And we’re going to end up with just Magento, which I think is a great idea in that part. Alright. Again, just to explain to the listeners LTS is going to be a a version of Magento that is a core version. That’s going to reside as an open source version for everybody to use.

Brent: It’s not going away. It is still going to be the core of Adobe Commerce. And Adobe commerce. Theoretically, what they’re saying is they’re not going to bundle a lot of new functions into the core of Magento, but rather depend on third parties and more likely from Adobe anyways, SaaS services to attach to it.

Brent: That a good, a easy way to say it. Okay. Absolutely. If we then talk just briefly about the SaaS, Because I heard a lot of people say Magento is going SaaS, right? I don’t know how that could have been misinterpreted. I guess I do know how it could have gotten misinterpreted.

Brent: It sounds like all the new features are going to be SaaS, but the core of Magento. As we know it, there’s no plans at the moment to make it go SaaS. And it would really have to be a brand new refactoring of Magento or Adobe commerce before it could possibly go completely SaaS 

Vinai: so complete speculation here, but my guess is something like that will come at one point in time, maybe.

Vinai: But everybody within Adobe says many years to come, whatever that means, right until that we’ll be ready. So until then they will be reliant and dependent on the PHP version for many years to come. And also even after this new product finally has been realized this complete SaaS commerce offering. They have a lot of existing customers on Magento, as we currently know it and they will still need to be supported.

Vinai: So that will take another how it is, software never dies and we have still have Magento one and what’s called oh, it’s commerce hanging around. It’s still we’ll still have Magento two sides on PHP in 10 years. Officially supported by Adobe, 

Brent: yeah. And I think the, realization to have this SaaS offering, it will be something that competes in the enterprise space when it’s ready.

Brent: And I’m guessing five years from now, it’ll be ready. Ideally it would be cool if they had three versions, they had a SaaS, they had a on-prem and they had an open source. With the open source, always underlying core that’s pushing forward. All the core features that are made Magento. And there’s no reason why a SaaS version couldn’t be PHP.

Brent: I think Akeneo has a SaaS version. That’s PHP Shopware has a SaaS version that’s PHP. Let’s, not speculate too much, but I think just to help people understand what was put out there on Friday The peripherals of Magento as we see them, or as Adobe commerce, sorry.

Brent: As we see them are going to be SaaS. And I guess the good news for that is that anybody has open source would now have options to bring in some of the enterprise SaaS features that Adobe commerce is offering 

Vinai: theoretically will be decides to offer them to. Open source merchants running on source, sure.

Vinai: So there’s no technical reason not to only business reasons. Hey, we want to have it exclusive for commerce, which I don’t know, but they’re all, always other offerings too. Companies like Nasto offering product recommendations and other search streetwise, et cetera. So there are many options, competitors, so to speak of the Adobe offerings, which are of course, open to any open source merchant too.

Brent: And I think all of these, a lot of these extension companies Shipper HQ is a great example of who decided that they were going to go SaaS early on. They’ve had big success in doing that. And I don’t think because some of that the processing is done outside of Magento doesn’t necessarily mean

Brent: that it’s going to stop you from making some customizations that you want around that. If we think about how Magento works, there is an extension that usually talks to a SaaS provider.. And then the SaaS provider does its work and it comes back right. At a minimum, you can just connect with restful or you have some basic connections where it would do everything, but generally we’d have some extension.

Brent: You would install that extension would do the communications. If there’s any rules that we want to build, we could build into that extension. That’s outside of the SaaS. And I guess we would call that microservices, right? If we’re truly SaaS, you’d have to have all these different microservices that are residing outside and you’d have to manage all those things.

Vinai: I don’t know how micro to these servicesare, but services. And that’s exactly how the Adobe SaaS offerings integrate into Magento commerce to exactly. Just like you said. So no 

Brent: difference. Yeah. And I think too I guess there are going to be Adobe extensions that you would install.

Brent: And I’m thinking specifically of the new Adobe payments, which is an extension you install, but the bulk of the work is done outside of Adobe commerce. And it is open to, it is open to open source clients. Interesting that a lot of the extension updates, because they said the extension is partially written in react.

Brent: The extension updates can be pushed to the extension from Adobe. 

Vinai: Yeah. Then it has to be hosted somewhere like the JavaScript code needs to be pulled in from some server environment controlled by. Adobe in that case. So they just update the file server, which then gets loaded into the browser.

Vinai: That’s the only way to do that because they are unable to update the code running on a server, unless of course they own the server tooling with a cloud. So that would be another story. But Yeah, it’s everybody’s has the same tools at their disposal as a technological tool. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Adobe, whether it’s a third party SaaS provider, whether it’s an in-house team, Adobe obviously has a bit of.

Vinai: Power in terms of manpower, they can put behind some, things and unify a lot of offering. And there certainly is a benefit in that, but they still have to build stuff with the same technology everybody else see what’s 

Brent: so I think some of the things I’m hearing is that you’re, excited or let’s call it bullish about this LTS/STS Model.

Brent: And it’s going to be a good path forward for the years to come, at least in the short-term at least five years in the long-term 10 years, right? 

Vinai: Yeah, I am. Your guess about the timeframes as good as mine. That said I, my idea is probably something similar yet. I think probably not too far off, but again I, have no idea.

Vinai: I don’t know no additional information now because Adobe had big collaborations. They’ve got legal. They’ve got a ton of teams, a lot of different departments that have to be involved, product ownership, marketing, API’s, strategy, leadership, whatever that means. So, many people, so many aspects it’ll take some time.

Vinai: It won’t be here tomorrow. I have no clue how long it’ll take. It does seem like Adobe is interested in making that happen as quick as possible, as quickly as possible. So I can have no. Impression of anybody’s stalling, this and this is I’m talking here. Being part of this Magento open-source task force, right?

Vinai: So we meet every two weeks and get to talk with other members of the community who are interested in the future of open source and also five or six people from Adobe were there all the time. So we talk about different aspects of this and try to find the best path forward. And that’s what this is. So it’ll take some time.

Vinai: And in the meanwhile, we, from the Magento opensource community Alliance, we’ll continue to build out the Mage-OS distributions and everything that we’re doing there, I believe will seed and directly into the STS version. Because we’re learning. Building this and all that knowledge will serve being able to have a community run Magento version, even with the guidance from Adobe, it doesn’t hurt learning.

Vinai: Things are never going to so we are not dependent on Adobe. And that’s the one thing I keep, repeating. And it’s one of my main motivations there. I think it’s pretty important to be independent, to be able to make our own decisions without having to wait for others. And so far everything that.

Vinai: Has greatly just only good things have come from it. Look at what we’re getting. We’re getting STS version. We have a lot more communication with Adobe. The whole vibe is shifting around Magento. We have a lot more clarity about where Magento’s headed, et cetera. So I believe if we could continue to do this.

Vinai: Good things will come. 

Brent: All yeah. So I want to shift gears. Let’s I want to close out this Mage-OS thing. If you’re a listener and and you’re not technical, don’t worry Magento’s around. 

Brent: I, want to just dive when it just one small technical talk, but really quick.

Brent: So I did see, I think he’s a Magento master and I should know his name, but he talked about integrating the UCT, the upgrade compatibility tool into the build of. Of every build of Magento. I think that’s exciting and I think more people should use this upgrade compatibility tool as well as just the multi, the testing framework.

Brent: I can’t express more that developers need to be using some of the tools that are out there. Have you used the upgrade compared to the UCT tool at 

Vinai: all? Not an anger. I’ve just used it on. It’s a code base that I work on, but because I’m working with that product company, Hyva, it’s not like we have our own sites.

Vinai: Like I’m not a merchant in effect. I work for merchants, so it’s slightly different, but yeah, it’s good. This upgrade compatibility tool is helpful. I wouldn’t consider it a goal to be a hundred percent green because that severely limits what can be done, but it’s super useful. And that it shows where to pay extra attention during upgrades.

Vinai: Chances are depending on how the code is written, it will still work. But it’s, it just gives a indicational where, and get them started. 

Brent: Good. All right, so let’s move on to the Magento association. So the you’re part of the open source task force, right? Is that what it’s called now? The open source task force.

Brent: I’m on the membership committee. So I can share my news from our meeting yesterday. And you can share your news how’s that you share your news first. What’s the news on the open source taskforce 

Vinai: then use all the open source taskforce is that we’re trying to. Figure out how to make this STS version happen as good as possible.

Vinai: First Adobe has to figure some stuff out internally, but once it’s ripened a little bit we want everybody on this task force, once a joint efforts, they’re realizing that in fact, a lot of the work will be up to the community. And with as all things open source, the people who show up and do the work, they’re the one who counts.

Vinai: So it doesn’t matter about how’s things. How groups of people as are, should look, it’s just whoever’s there and does it. Yeah, I hope many more people will turn up, but the same with this open source task group at the beginning, we’re a lot more people. After sometimes some people just stopped going.

Vinai: Maybe they thought nothing would come out of it or don’t have time or last happened. I realize now we live in a world where things do happen that make Magento seem less important. So I understand, but we need the people who are willing to show up and do the work, and we want to encourage people to join.

Vinai: So that’s what we talked 

Brent: about. One thing I’ve seen from this task force is the lack of representation from people outside Europe. 

Vinai: Wait, so you’re talking about Mage-OS I think those are the task force is the committee of the Magento association. Yeah. Yes. So a Mage-OS. Yes, it absolutely you’re right.

Vinai: The U S was underrepresented and many other parts of the world. Okay. And the reason for that and you, guessed correctly. You’ve talked about that before. It’s just, we want it to move fast and moving faster, easier with a smaller group. Yeah. Now we’re at a point see we have, we almost have a release ready, and once that’s ready, we will open up the group and we’ll open up the GitHub repository and invite people to.

Vinai: It’s super important, what people have to participate, but then we have something, we’re not just people talking about stuff and we’ve got something. Yeah that’s super exciting and I’m looking forward to many people joining like us and other people, other parks, we need that. 

Brent: Just to clarify and I started to add some confusion. Magento open-source taskforce is five people from Adobe and five community members that are working on how are they going to make this all work? The open source version, and what’s going to happen. The Mage-OS, the Mosca is a group of people that are actually working on making it work.

Brent: Is that a good way to describe it? 

Vinai: Yeah. Started earlier. Thus whole STS version only happened because. Oh, what the open letter that this community lines, European centric group published and yeah, so that’s how it started, but it’s not going to stay that way. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It’s confusing from the outside.

Vinai: I wouldn’t have a clue. What’s going on a Magento association. We have. We have Magento open source. Now we have Magento opens on LTS and STS, and then we have major multiple distributions and we have too much who can understand all that stuff. But I did it the company in real time. Yeah. So hopefully everything will just merge together over time.

Brent: Yeah. All right. So from the membership side, then the Magento association is going to have a paid model. And at first, what you’ll get from paying is you’ll have the right to vote for the board and the board voting is out now. I think it’s starting. And I think I think that there has been quite a shift in the community and, people are looking for new board members.

Brent: I think they’re looking for March 1st to start, it’s going to be on Patrion that they’re looking to to March 1st to start the member drive to get people to join the Magento association. And it’ll be I won’t say I won’t have any, I won’t say any prices yet because nothing has been confirmed, but th there should be some affordability in there as well.

Brent: It’ll be very similar to what Drupal’s doing. And the pricing will be the pricing to join will be lower than what Drupal has. And the first benefit is that you’ll be able to vote for the board of the board for Magento association. That’s my big thing. Yeah, I, yeah. And I think one of the things is that people have, complained from that the Adobe side it’s not been transparent and communicative and they had Magento association side has been slow in communicating.

Brent: So I think what we’re seeing is each of these committees is happening and I’m taking some responsibility on telling the world what’s happening in our current. I, wrote a blog post about our meeting in January. That should be out pretty soon. Now I’m going to write a media blog post about our meeting for February.

Brent: And honestly, to just the time to get that blog, post approved is quite quite a long stretch. It’s not like you just record it and get it live right away. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of red tape and I’m learning that. Part of it is that the community has to be okay with some of this red tape.

Brent: And I think what you’ve said earlier about Mosca and how you wanted to make it happen faster, I think that’s a great decision to make that work, because if you do open it up to the whole community, now you have multiple, people who want to do different things and you, you can never get anything.

Vinai: Do you remember last September and meet Magento, Poland. The discussions that were happening there, the board paid membership and everything. So it was cool to see this come to fruition. Very nice. Also back then Matias from Typo3, he said, okay, if you start to open things up, what will happen is a lot of people will attend the first two meetings now be 

Vinai: back to

Vinai: fraction and those are the important ones.

Vinai: So don’t spend too much time making everything too transparent and easy. Because too much effort there isn’t worth it. And back then, I it would be nice if we just had hundreds of people working overtime, getting everything done, we just yeah, I think that’s just not how it’s going to work.

Vinai: He has a lot of experience in that 

Brent: areas. Yeah, I know I saw some of those. I saw some of his tweets or I think that there were tweets or LinkedIn, but I think there are tweets anyways. I just want to reassure people from the Magento association side and by the way, go to Magento association.org forward slash join and join today.

Brent: That things are happening there. Things are happening on the open source tasks. We’ll have some great news on the events committee. Things are happening on the events side. There’s going to be more meat Magento’s coming. There’s things happening from the membership side.

Brent: And I’m just going to continue to push that Magento association has a place on their website to tell us what each of these committees is doing. I do feel like it’s not like we’re working towards transparency, but it would be great to ha to even publish the meeting notes. As a transcript.

Brent: I don’t know why not right? This isn’t, there’s nothing happening in these meetings. That can’t be, we don’t sign an NDA and we don’t say, no, you can’t say this to anybody. So why can’t we talk at least talk about it. I think if we don’t do that, then we also end up with speculation. Like we did from last Friday’s conference where the keynote is saying Magento is going SaaS.

Brent: And everybody starts getting confused. 

Vinai: Yeah. Would it be helpful to know. To be able to refer back to, okay. What’s actually going on if needed. Probably most people won’t watch that because we all busy and. No more meetings oh yes. I want to watch more 

Brent: meetings. Yeah. I think he just said from a news standpoint, even from a transcript standpoint, if you Google, like I like right after I saw those notes, I’m like, I started Googling Magento, going open source and Adobe commerce open-source and Magento Adobe commerce, all SaaS and nothing’s out there.

Brent: There’s nothing, there’s no news about it. So then I’m like maybe there’s a misinterpretation of what the person said. Yeah. All right. We are going to have to do a second episode because we’re running out of time for your Hyva talk, but I think let’s, briefly dive into Hyva and I think that we should do a second episode specifically on the reason why people should, we should implore people to have faster websites.

Brent: I think that should be the topic. If you happen to be on Magento, Hyva is a great option. And we’ve just launched our first client on the Hyva theme it’s taken us a while, a live one. So we’re excited about it. And we’re seeing great things. And every, meeting I’m in this, shouldn’t be a Hyva commercial, but it’s going to be every meeting I’m in.

Brent: I pitch Hyva and say that there’s no better way to improve their ROI on a website than to increase the site. Speed. So tell us, maybe give us some updates. We have five, 10 minutes. Now give us some updates on Hyva and tell us what’s happening. 

Vinai: So much it’s happening, all the things, all the good stuff’s happening in particular things that I’ve been working on a lot.

Vinai: Extension compatibility. We now have a number of extension vendors. Join Hyva. We are committed to supporting all their extensions, making them compatible. So they work out of the box on Hyva installs. We have some early adopters like red chants and Tuma with great extensions. So they all have their extension are compatible.

Vinai: And now we can seeing more larger major extension vendors join like mate, we just renounced a tech partnership with Magewerks and WebKuul coming. They have a lot of compatible extensions. So that’s great seeing that these extension vendors see the benefit in making the extension compatible.

Vinai: So we have more than a hundred compatible extensions. Some are listed in the Hyva compatibility tracker. Some are compatible out of the box, so no need to install additional extensions just provided by the vendor directly. And that’s been great. So I’ve been recording videos on how to make this compatibility model.

Vinai: I’ve been writing a lot of documentations. We’ve made the documentations public, which has been requested a lot, so people can inform themselves before actually starting out purchasing a license. So that’s done now at docs hyva.io, and that’s. What I’m trying to do, basically making the life of extension developers more pleasant and making life easier for merchants because all the extensions they want to work with, they just work.

Vinai: So that’s good. A lot of extension vendors have been following. Lead off Magento, creating better extensions in a way that they weren’t built for Luma. So building a ton of small JavaScript files, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we work, how we work in Hyva. But there’s a reason for right there.

Vinai: Any Google page metric, just. It just doesn’t pay having, this required JS based front end. So having small inland JavaScript is great. People love it. Customers love it. It’s super fast. Yeah, we have to adjust the way we ride these modules. And that’s what I try to add in. Developers. 

Brent: That’s great.

Brent: Yeah. So I I’ve been again I’ve been pitching the fact that Hyva was going to improve your web vital scores. It would be great. And I’ll give you some idea that I had, it would be great. If on the Hyva site on your hyva.io site, you have some kind of. Check right.

Brent: With a with the theoretical. If you switched your theme, what your score could be. So like you punch in your URL. It does a quick calculation, which it’s an open, it’s an open API for the vitals. All you do is show that performance score. Like for example, I just did a test on on, yesterday on a client and it came back as a 17 on their performance score.

Brent: And I have a script on my computer that I run. So I just put in lighthouse URL, boom. It gives me a little report and I can share it right with the client. It would be cool to say, and that you would say here’s your score? 17. Theoretically, if you, it you’d know that it’s going to improve it just by removing all that JavaScript.

Brent: It’ll improve it by 50 or 70%, whatever it is. So it’d go to 65 or something and knowing that they still have still a lot more work to do, but you can give them some scores. I, can equate this to there’s some marathons that you can do that are downhill marathons, and they always say, if your marathon was a four hour marathon at Chicago, if you do this marathon, you’re going to do a 3:30.

Brent: Okay. You, can extrapolate the idea of performance gains from a benchmark that you would get in general. And of course you would say, this is not really going to happen. This is all theoretical, but you will see an improvement and improvement could be as much as this.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah, it’d be a good selling tool. 

Vinai: On average, if we take the customers where we have numbers, who went from Luma to Hyva, the medium amount they improved by is X. Then we could apply that there, maybe something like that. We, could, it would be tricky if people then would try to. Take that as a a promise, it didn’t work.

Vinai: You still are using this super expensive chat, live chat or whatever that ruins all the page metrics, no matter what page you set up with an excuse. It depends as always, but yeah, I like the idea of being able. Just immediately present some kind of 

Brent: assaults there. Yeah. And then I think some, big some benchmarks some, key benchmarks and, having some success stories on, your site, you already have some success stories, but actually rolling them out with big, huge numbers and graphics.

Brent: Like some marketing directors like to see and CEOs like. They like to see a 56% improvement in load time or 120% improvement in a thousand percent. You know what I mean? Like those are the things that people like to see. I didn’t want to make this a marketing session, but 

Vinai: thanks for this free consultation, I’m working on a new site and we were just missing a bit of the content.

Vinai: It looks great. I can’t wait till it’s finally live. So there’ll be more stuff. It’s coming. It’s almost there. I really would like to have somebody on board who focusing focuses on producing that kind of content it’s would be really helpful. Yeah. You got a job 

Brent: good. So let’s, close out today.

Brent: I think that that there is some effort to get more content from Mage-OS. I think we had a meeting earlier and getting the community to be involved in helping to develop some of that content. So why don’t you just talk briefly about what you’re working on? Sure 

Vinai: the background is Adobe removed the domain, Magento.com and redirect all traffic to their Adobe commerce, adobe.com landing page.

Vinai: And I was pretty disappointed about, and I think that’s a super bad idea. It’s bad for everybody who built their business around Magento and gender opensource named Magento. And it’s. Harsh. I dunno, it’s not good. So I think the decision was made, and that was also confirmed from speaking to people inside of Adobe, that people who don’t understand and to not have the full picture.

Vinai: And that just happens with a large company like Adobe. So hopefully, maybe something will change. I have no idea, but fact is at the moment, if somebody wants to get formed about Magento open source, If they don’t know that already, what do they do? There’s no magento.com. They just go to a page on Adobe side, selling them to Adobe commerce, which is it’s just explaining how that’s built on top of Open-Source.

Vinai: Is beyond what most people want to know. So we need something there because it’s possible to create wildly successful websites on Magento. Open-source so many people are making doing great. And that’s why we decided are the Mage-OS group to put up content around Magento, open source. Targeted at merchants former.

Vinai: So they’re able to inform themselves so description what it is comparisons to Adobe commerce, for example case studies maybe insights into a specific features that are offered here. I don’t know, for example, page builder because that’s it’s feature that got rolled over from commerce to open.

Vinai: So things like that, that interest merchants who might consider it. So that should come out as fast as possible. And hopefully somebody else like the Magento association or Adobe will also do something, but experience has shown they move slower. So trying to get something done. And as soon as something else is there.

Vinai: The, if that’s better. I think everybody would be happy to contribute the content there too. So it’s just important to get the content out there because so many people’s livelihood is built around Magento and not Adobe 

Brent: commerce. Yeah, I agree. So I just closing out today a couple of key points and I just want to key in, on Magento open source.

Brent: And I think that we have to continually talk to the leadership at Adobe and let them know how important those customers are and what a great funnel they. To getting to Adobe commerce. So everybody on Magento opensource is a great candidate for Adobe commerce, in opensource isn’t necessarily right for Adobe commerce.

Brent: Because it there’s certain things. Clients don’t need. But everybody could be right for Adobe or for Magento open source. And if leadership understands the more they invest in the open source side of it, the more potential clients they have that will move to Adobe commerce, the right type of clients Adobe wants.

Brent: And I know. That Adobe wants people that fit into their suite, right? They want people that would maybe get AEM that would get Adobe target to get Adobe analytics. They’d like to have people that fit into that Adobe, experience suite, which includes Adobe commerce. This is a great vehicle for Adobe to get clients upstream into where they would like to see them.

Brent: And I also would agree that decoupling some of these things that were. Some of the third party modules that were product core, we’ll make upgrades easier and make the experience that some Magento open-source users have had where upgrades have been a little bit more difficult and, they’re costly, right?

Brent: So slimming down the core and making it really, great and making the core. Easily upgradable is going to help the open source users to to have a larger ROI on their investment. Yeah, the key here though, is we just need to keep pounding in that Adobe can’t forget open source and it’s not a competition to Adobe commerce.

Brent: The way Adobe commerce is positioning themselves are for big business. There’s no, absolutely no focus on medium and small business. So why don’t they continue to focus on it by letting them use open source? 

Brent: There’s some great folks inside of Adobe. Eric Erway, Nicole Khan Nelson Mineola.

Brent: Come on Chris, John Pasha talk HockeyApp I think it is not quite sure how to pronounce their names. Apologies, but they are great. They’re really working hard on increasing awareness and aside of adult. And we can see that it’s happening through the relaunch that we’re seeing now. So they’re also on the source task force.

Brent: So it’s not just us having to talk to it over leadership. We have to do that. You need to do that, but there also are good fonts inside of Adobe. 

Brent: Yeah. Good. Vinai. We’re going to have to schedule another. Just performance interview and talk specifically about how you make your website faster and that will of course lead into

Brent: But thank you for today. It’s been a very enjoyable conversation. I’m going to get the transcript out on this one right away, so people can read it as well. And and let’s do another one where you can let’s do it. We should do an episode when we’re all ready to, display how easy it is to install Mage-OS I think that’s a fantastic idea.

Brent: Yeah. 

Vinai: Yeah, let’s do that 

Brent: one again. Alright. Thanks so 

Vinai: much. Okay. Thank you to Brent. Yeah, take care. Thanks for having me. Bye bye.

TalkCommerce with Henry Daas

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Henry Daas talks about his book FQ: Financial Intelligence as well as some of the highlights of the importance of having a business coach for entrepreneurs.

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Avi is the owner and chief wizard of Invisible PPC, a white label PPC company that is helping agencies break into new markets.

Four ways to add B2B business to your B2C on Shopify:

Keep it simple, offer special Discount codes on the current B2C site for small-scale B2B sales, and/or just testing waters. For more robust solutions consider Third-party wholesale applications. Simplicity and single store to serve B2c and B2B Use Shopify’s wholesale channel if already paying for Shopify Plus. This provides a simple ordering channel to receive B2Bo orders. Finally, a fully separate Shopify online store gives B2B customers the most leeway both during and after the project, enabling, among other things, different catalogs and promotions in different stores.

Trying to go online from the Distributer model, consider these points:

1. Is your distributor willing to buy the product/service online? First test with them.

2. Set a higher price on the website Vs what distributor end retailers can offer? Will keep your distributors/retailers happy and trust us clients are willing to pay higher prices on the Brand site.

3. Offer exclusive products online

4. Exclude distributor Geo from online and go to new areas.

5. Offer a percentage for online sales in their territory, this will buy their goodwill and support for online.

InvisblePPC White Label Google/Bing ads service focused local businesses, a great choice for small agencies working in the local markets. Highly cost-effective and ROI positive to run Google ads for local business niches.

Talk Commerce
Talk Commerce

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