magento Archives

7 Reasons Why the Hyvä Theme is a Game Changer for Magento

March 31, 2023March 28, 2023 by Brent W. Peterson

I’ll cover the fundamentals of the Hyvä theme, its innovative features, and the reasons behind its skyrocketing popularity. Get ready to learn how this game-changing theme is transforming the way we build and customize Magento stores, delivering unparalleled performance, streamlined development, and a cutting-edge technology stack. Stay tuned as we unravel the secrets behind the Hyvä revolution!

Life Goes on While Working in a War Zone with Roman Kuzub

May 8, 2023March 14, 2023 by Brent W. Peterson

What is your perception of life in a war zone? Most of us can’t imagine what it is like to work in conditions where air raid sirens are normal. We’ve interviewed Roman Kuzub with Default Value agency on his team, their work, and life in a warzone.

What you will learn

Roman Kuzub is the CEO of Default Value, located in Ukraine. He is passionate about making things work easier and saving people time for something.
Roman: I wanted to mention the team because I was surprised by their behavior. We have 80 people in our company. I considered moving the company somewhere safe, but only 5% of employees decided to do so.
Roman: The whole team decided to stay in Cherkasy and started working remotely when we didn’t have enough experience with this. They did a great job and saved the workload, so I wanted to mention it.

Roman says that his team has come together and that the war has become normal for them. However, he took several rides to Kyiv.
Roman: We stay here because we have relatives, we have families, and we want to be closer to them because each day can bring anything, actually. But we don’t feel it’s a huge problem with our physical situation. It’s more about our mental state. It’s a difficult thing. Because it’s been a year of war, and you always expect a rocket in your city. It drives you crazy a bit.

Roman: I’m proud of my clients because nobody ran from us or moved the project outside Ukraine. And actually, I got spammed with different proposals to help the army or move the company to Germany.
Brent: Europe and the US have been united in supporting Ukraine and helping you as a country and you as people. What was your sort of leadership journey? Did you have any struggles coping with anything in particular? And I think you’ll come out stronger at the end of this.
Roman: I almost don’t remember March of 2022, but I know I filmed 10 to 12 videos for my team and customers that month, ensuring they know what is happening, where we are, and what we are doing.
Roman: I struggled to gather the team because they were spread in different places, but that’s my job. For me personally, the challenge is always about being positive when you see that everything is not that bright.
Roman: It was extra hard at least the first half of the year, but hopefully, family helped, the team, my closest teammates helped me to do this, and we are still functioning. We currently work at our office, but most of the team works remotely.

Roman: It started before the invasion because we had the COVID-19 experience. But now we ask people if we should move to a fully remote company type. More than 90% of employees said they’re waiting for the end of the war to return to the office because they lack personal communication and struggle to work just from home.
Brent: I wanted to ask why Ukraine is so strong regarding Magento and e-commerce.
Roman: The roots of Magento are here in Ukraine and in Belarus, as far as I remember. We have guys who were working in a core team development, the Magento 1, for about 15 years, and they are still here. They know the DNA of the system.

Roman: The second part is more about the attitude to work and being honest with the clients. You should trust your partner to do your project. When you work with agencies from other countries, and they don’t deliver the project. And when you come to Ukraine to work with the agency that does while being bombed, you understand these guys are serious. And that’s about the commitments.
Roman: That’s about something how work should be done, and here we have those attitudes. We can work with businesses in Europe and USA because when we are talking about something, we are serious about it.
Brent: Tell us about Default Value.
Roman: We do end-to-end development and help businesses grow not only by delivering the projects.

Roman: Our company is built by two really cool developers. We are a family-type company, we communicate freely, and there’s no such huge hierarchy here or very tough processes or something like that.
Roman: What sold this company to me is a totally honest approach towards customers and employees. We communicate clearly. Even when we are fucked up, sorry, we come and say, “We’re fucked up and need to solve this.” That’s the DNA of the company. That’s something that really makes us stand out. And it makes it difficult for me to find managers who can maintain such an approach.
Brent: Roman, what are your plans when the war is over? Will you have a big celebration? Can you see that day?

Roman: I can see that day. I want to build an international company and visit different places.
Roman: I want to stay here, and I definitely want to help my country to succeed. I understand that most people watching this podcast are not from Ukraine, so please push your politicians to support Ukraine, and don’t get tired because the war is not over and is not even close to the end.

An Entrepreneurial Journey in Comic Books and Toilets with Alex Teller

April 14, 2023January 30, 2023 by Brent W. Peterson

Magento’s life as an ecommerce solution has been a roller coaster ride.

Alex Teller is more excited about the future of the platform than ever. Alex talks about the flexibility of Magento and how it powered his business for over a decade. He dives into marketing and social media topics and more.

Transcript

[00:03:00] Brent: Welcome to this magenta edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alex Teller. Alex is the CEO O of home. Perfect. Alex, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in

[00:03:13] Alex: life. Yep. My name is Alex Teller. I am the CEO O of Home. Perfect. We sell faucets and sinks brand name, luxury products.

[00:03:21] Alex: We’ve been in business for about 10. Business is on Magenta. I’ve been a magenta enthusiast for quite some time. And when I’m not in front of the computer breaking my head, trying to fix stuff, I like to collect old comic books.

[00:03:36] Brent: Yeah. And I, we both met at Meet Magenta, New York and that was fascinating cuz my first experience in mag.

[00:03:43] Brent: With a client was on a comic book site and I can’t even remember the name now, but it’s been like 12 years. , you don’t remember the name? I know it’s not terrible. Yeah, that’s terrible. Anyways. did. I will look for it after the show and if I can find it, I’ll even put a link on the episode notes.

[00:03:58] Brent: So before we get into this what we’re gonna talk about, I do have an important project called the Free Joke Project. It’s hashtag free joke project. And I was, I’m gonna tell a joke to Alex. All I would like is just a reaction. The idea is, should these jokes be open source or are they like paywall?

[00:04:17] Brent: Okay, so they’re very short. Here we go.

[00:04:20] Brent: Dude. I know. Geez. Yeah. Maybe we should open source.

[00:04:23] Alex: This should be open source and patched and fixed for a decade. Before it’s stable,

[00:04:27] Brent: we’re gonna have to do two.

[00:04:28] Brent: Now I’m gonna re, I’m gonna start, I’m gonna do my second joke. Ready. A ghost walks into a bar. The bartender says, sorry, we don’t serve spirits.

[00:04:40] Alex: That’s so

[00:04:40] Brent: stupid. Yes. Very stupid

[00:04:45] Brent: All right. All right,

[00:04:50] Brent: I appreciate that. You gotta pay for a joke. That good? Yes. All right. So redo on the first one. The adjective from metal is metallic, but not so for iron, which is ironic.

[00:05:02] Brent: Yeah, I don’t know about that one. Yeah. Good thing I screwed it up to start with, but I feel

[00:05:05] Alex: bad cuz it’s cuz the, I don’t know about that is like saying, oh, that should be open source. But I love

[00:05:10] Brent: open source. Yeah. All right, good. I apologize. I could get a

[00:05:13] Alex: tattoo. I would get the canoe public license across my back.

[00:05:17] Brent: There you go. Perfect. Yeah. Open source license 3.0. So yeah. Yeah. Alex, tell us a little bit about your journey. Commerce and how you started home. Perfect.

[00:05:29] Alex: Yeah. I was always buying and selling on eBay. I would say eBay is my favorite to this day, still my favorite website ever. Because I do enjoy a, I do always have a collectible sort of nature to me.

[00:05:40] Alex: So I was buying, selling on eBay, and back then it might have been, I think I was like selling package software or DVDs. It, it was a while ago. It I’ve been buying and selling on eBay for so long that I was getting checks in the mail and I wasn’t even old enough to get a bank account. My parents needed to go in and sign me up so I could go deposit the checks and then PayPal came out and it was a game changer for me as I, I started to, just get the money straight to.

[00:06:07] Alex: So I was buying and selling on eBay, and then I knew I wanted to get into more e-commerce. And my father’s an architect and he put me in touch with some people that had access to some faucets and some sinks, and we hit the ground running and we’ve been in business ever since. . That’s

[00:06:23] Brent: awesome.

[00:06:23] Brent: And so you got, you went from eBay to e-commerce? I know my wife had a business on eBay for a long time and a different type of business. So what, tell, just tell a little bit about what were you selling on eBay and how

[00:06:34] Alex: to I’m still on eBay. My eBay username is comic pu. , ah, so

[00:06:39] Brent: I understand what you’re selling.

[00:06:40] Brent: It’s not

[00:06:40] Alex: Home Furniture. 89.8% positive feedback. One guy gave me negative

[00:06:45] Brent: feedback. Oh, that’s frustrating. I’ll

[00:06:47] Alex: say that I, it was for a heat sink that I forgot to include. It was a heat sink and fan that I forgot to include the backplate for, and it got shipped internationally. So the dude within I don’t know why this guy bought it from me, but I ripped it out of an old computer.

[00:06:59] Alex: I upgraded and I got 15 bucks. And the 15 bucks was not worth that one negative feedback to this

[00:07:05] Brent: day. Yeah, no kidding. My, my experience, so I all, I had a, I used to have a retail computer store. I sold it. I ended up with a ton of inventory that everybody said was bad. I sold it all in eBay. It was amazing.

[00:07:17] Brent: And nothing came back. So anyways let’s keep moving. So e you sold it all on. I sold

[00:07:23] Alex: everything. This is, you guys made more money on it for some of it. Yeah. This is a, you never

[00:07:26] Brent: sold it for in the store. It was crazy. Yeah. This was in the nineties, but yeah, some of the

[00:07:30] Alex: stuff, if you held onto it, it’s probably worth 10 times the amount, if it was like boxed computer games that are, like boxed Sierra games or something.

[00:07:36] Brent: I wish I, I also had a retail store called CD Rom City, so I’m dating myself now.

[00:07:42] Alex: I update yourself. It’s all good, man. I was there, I was clipping the coupon for Comp U USA on Saturdays going on my gosh, Sundays getting the mail-in. I love that I paid 90 bucks for EDOs, 16 gigs of Ram, and I loved it,

[00:07:55] Brent: So we won’t go into let’s keep moving forward instead. thought it was the best deal. I was so excited. So tell us a little bit about your current Your current store and what you’re doing and is it a hundred percent commerce, e-commerce, I should

[00:08:07] Alex: say? Yep. It’s a hundred percent e-commerce.

[00:08:10] Alex: Home Perfect is b2c. We have a large database. We have about 250,000 s skews and we have so many different product attributes cuz we have so many different product types. If it’s something like a toilet has a one piece toilet and a two piece toilet, and they might have required accessories that are different.

[00:08:29] Alex: One might chip LTL freight, one might chip X ground. There’s so many different elongated toilets, round toilets. There’s so many different product attributes and attribute sets that cuz of just the breadth of product mix. I felt like I almost had no choice to, to be on Magento. I think Magento has been a good fit for me because of that.

[00:08:49] Brent: Yep. When you were evaluating platforms, did you look at other ones to try to do your store on?

[00:08:55] Alex: Yeah, so back in 2012, we were on something called the Venda platform. It was software as a service before it was cool, right? Back when it just sucked when it didn’t work. Now Venda was okay, but it got acquired by NetSuite, I think.

[00:09:11] Alex: And at the time we we knew we needed to move to Magenta, so we did. And Magenta one worked very well for us for many years. When it came time to migrating to two, I did debate on whether or not I should move to another option. I had a layout, right? I was like, maybe I’ll go to Shopify, or maybe WooCommerce were the two that I was bouncing around on.

[00:09:33] Alex: But I felt the number of SKUs and the attributes would’ve been an issue on Shopify for me and commerce. I just, as much as I like geeking out I was familiar enough with Magenta that, I have a business to run, at the end of the. I’m the ceo, right? Not cto, right? So as much as I love technology, I need to sell faucets on the internet and toilets, right?

[00:09:51] Alex: How can I just keep the business running while, upgrading the software? I took the plunge to two. It was a little bit rocky at first. I would say the performance for large databases wasn’t there until maybe for me personally, I saw the improvements at two 40 or maybe two 40.

[00:10:08] Alex: But now it is very stable for me. I’m very happy being on it and I’m really finally getting to enjoy all the new technology and new benefits I have of being on it. And I’m having fun with it. So I’m glad now that I made that switch

[00:10:20] Brent: and I think you’re in a particular market space that has a lot of, like you had mentioned attributes and those are just parts of a product that can ide be identified.

[00:10:30] Brent: And in Magento’s case, they worked also to make configurables and child products. So if you think about on Amazon that left. When you’re navigating, that’s your attributes. Just for our listeners who aren’t under don’t understand the concept the, your particular market is very attuned to having very complicated products that can balloon your skew count.

[00:10:55] Brent: Maybe talk about the challenges of having so many SKUs and. How you’ve worked as a merchant to make customers be able to find the right product when they need to. Yeah.

[00:11:06] Alex: In short Brent, it sucks. Let’s take for example, the lighting industry. The lighting industry will create, new products and they’ll already have a skew count of 2000 codes, and then they’ll just discontinue on a whim the next year.

[00:11:17] Alex: They might not have even produced some of these things. They just keep throwing stuff out there and put it on. And sometimes the information is so bare from the vendor, but at the same time, we have the information when we when we go on their website. So at the end of the day, I think our customers know what they want.

[00:11:36] Alex: We’re not really looking for the customer who is oh I wanna redo my bathroom or kitchen, but I don’t know what I want. We’re very much looking for people that come into us, the Brandon part. . And when they do, we wanna at least be able to have that brand at part number, that image and offer, ideally a compelling price for them.

[00:11:51] Alex: And we really want them to come to us, not just for one item, but for a whole list. Because we have salespeople that will walk them through a quote and make sure it’s compelling enough. Or we have a members only price club that uses the magenta cart rules to, if they log in a lot of the prices might be heavily discounted and make it compelling for them to use us.

[00:12:08] Alex: So that’s where. We want you to go to a maybe showroom first or maybe discover the product that you want somewhere else, but then come to us for the best deal. Yeah. You mentioned

[00:12:18] Brent: price rules. Do you have ways to get your average cart value up in, in terms of when they’re navigating through your site, you wanna recommend other products, things like

[00:12:27] Alex: that?

[00:12:28] Alex: I would say that’s 1000000% credit is given where credit is due to our recommendations, our AI-driven recomme. We analyzed years of sales history and we started with maybe maybe a more dumb AI, if you would call it, right? Just saying, which products were most often purchased with these products.

[00:12:44] Alex: But now that we’ve gotten more information and every sale makes trains that and gets that smarter, we’re now able to maybe use the category data to boost and optimize which related products we show. . It really helps, it, sometimes a customer might come in and say, oh, I, I didn’t know I needed this in-wall tank carrier for this toilet.

[00:13:02] Alex: I don’t know if we personally want that customer, but at least we show it or we show the seat that goes with the toilet or we show maybe a sink and faucet that other customer had purchased. So it’s definitely very detail oriented for us. It needs to be exact and. And we’re not selling a pair of sneakers.

[00:13:19] Alex: Somebody’s not just swapping out their faucet cuz they like a black one one day and a gold one tomorrow. They’re making that investment for a while.

[00:13:27] Brent: Yeah. And I think recommendations is something that really scales especially as you grow your traffic and as more people, as you start collecting that information for what other customers are doing, that’s where it really comes into play.

[00:13:40] Brent: Do you mind telling us which recommendation engineer you’re using for, you mentioned ai, so are you using a outbound Outbranded one.

[00:13:49] Alex: Oh, yeah. I’m. I really value the close relationship I have with my host and provider cloud machines.io. I think they specialize in large databases and and large catalogs.

[00:13:59] Alex: And I think in particular they developed the they developed a software called computer ai, which is like product information management and also AI recommendations. I think I was like an alpha partner and now they’re going to market pretty soon.

[00:14:14] Alex: And adding some new clients. So I’m really excited about what they’ve done with me and for them to be able to offer that to other customers.

[00:14:22] Brent: What would, if you, if somebody were to come to you and say, I’m so afraid of machine learning how would you get, how would you encourage another merchant to embrace the idea of machine learning?

[00:14:33] Alex: I can really say it comes down to cost for us merchants, some solutions are just too costly and I personally can’t sign a contract. I, I. Spend crazy amounts on budget. I have to allocate a certain amount towards ads and I have to stay profitable. I’m not a company that’s looking for I, I looked into you, Brent you said something about how, like you had loss of leaders at your software store, but we’re looking to make money on every order.

[00:15:01] Alex: And, I’m not saying we’re gouging our customers. We’re we’re delivering a competitive price, but we can’t give away these items. We need to we need to make. And if we start spending a lot on very expensive features, we could just kill our whole budget. If somebody is scared about the concept of ai, me personally, if I were to, as somebody who’s probably more computer geek than most business path sorts of people, I would just show them the price and tell them that they have nothing to lose if it’s priced well enough and if it if there’s really no.

[00:15:32] Brent: Yeah, I think I’ve talked to a number of different, say, fraud providers and they use AI to help help with the transactions to make sure, hey, is this a fraudulent transaction, non fraudulent? And always give the example of a client that we had in Mexico who had a call center that would call every single merchant to make sure that it’s the right merchant, right?

[00:15:52] Brent: And at some point that just doesn’t scale anymore. , like you want to fulfill that item. And I think anything that has to do where machine learning can help you as a merchant scale your business, that’s where it works. And Adobe has a sensei, which it’s, it sounds is very similar to what you had in, in your competitor.

[00:16:13] Brent: Do ai. There are so many computer AI or competing to win computers already. . Yes. Computer . Sorry about that computer. Yeah, there’s just so many different places where you can get wins and I think people need to embrace it more. And the other thing is that it has to learn, like it needs to be there.

[00:16:29] Brent: It has to start collecting data, and it has to learn from it, but it

[00:16:32] Alex: needs, but cost is so prohibitive. Just to use your example of fraud, there’s so many and I see the I see the potential and I see why there’s fraud, fraud companies out there. But me personally, just to, shed some light on what I use for fraud.

[00:16:44] Alex: I have max mine filters, right? And I pay them a very nominal fee per transaction to, allocate thresholds that I’ll then review. And I’ll am I self-insured? Yes. But if I, went with a company that insures me on those frauds too, the cost would just be completely not make sense.

[00:17:01] Alex: So that’s the solution that I did and I put a lot of faith in MaxMind to, to machine learning and catch the frauds for me. But I’ve been very fortunate and very observant and and I like the software and I think that it does work for me, so I was able to keep costs down by doing that.

[00:17:16] Brent: As a medium sized merchant how do you find competing against the big stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that? Do you find that because you’re so targeted in what you’re doing, that you’re getting, you’re offering a much better value for what the clients are getting, getting?

[00:17:30] Brent: think Home Depot,

[00:17:30] Alex: Maybe is better for a lot of things. If you came to me and you were like, Hey, I want a new toilet, Alex, and I’m in California. And I’m like, okay, Brent, what toilet do you want? And you’re like, oh, I saw this one at Home Depot. It’s 150 bucks. I would say, go to Home Depot, definitely go to Home Depot and while you’re there, pick off Faucet because that toilet for me to ship to you.

[00:17:50] Alex: If I wasn’t, shipping directly from a west coast fulfillment center, which I can do with Magenta with msi, it’s so expensive to ship something like. I almost don’t even want the sale. It might get damaged and it’s not really a luxury toilet. If you take, for example, the total nere, which is really cool, and it has a integrated heated Bday seat, and I tell everyone, you’re aple.

[00:18:09] Alex: If you don’t have a bday, you gotta have one. That $150 boy doesn’t have that. And it doesn’t have an autoclose lid promised air de odor. It doesn’t have a concealed connection, so you don’t even see the wires. But that total nearest toilet costs 3000 bucks, so it’s different customers and for us, we’re trying to give them the best possible product at a good price.

[00:18:31] Brent: So the niche part of it or the specific market segment that you’re serving serves you well because you’re working on being a targeted, you’re targeting certain types of clients and what you’re doing, and that’s been successful as that’s a good representation.

[00:18:46] Alex: Yeah. I, all the time and even my father will be like I gotta, I need a new light fixture for a rental place in Brooklyn, and I’ll be like, , let’s go to Home Depot,

[00:18:55] Alex: Let’s go do it, man, this is 150 bucks. They do a great job with lighting, so everyone and or let’s go on Amazon and let’s, let’s find something that, whatever it is, there’s just different customers, like different things, and there’s enough of a market that what we offer is really more granted, luxury.

[00:19:13] Brent: What do you think is the most exciting thing right now in the e-commerce space? What’s getting you

[00:19:18] Alex: excited about it? I would say personally the amount of ai in terms of recommendations and ways to retarget customers. But I think the costs have finally gotten to the point where it makes sense for someone like me a couple years ago, even something like email marketing platforms.

[00:19:34] Alex: They were so expensive for what you got. And then, value added services of recommendations. It just put me, it’s gonna rock in a hard place cause I value software and I truly understand why it costs that. But I personally, if I just started, buying the best I wouldn’t be able to stay in business how I do it.

[00:19:53] Alex: So I think we’re at like an exciting stage. . Certain things have gotten more complex to pull off, but certain things are also more possible to pull off for less money. So I’m excited to delve deep into that and make it work for me.

[00:20:04] Brent: So you’d mentioned you mentioned email marketing. I’m in a business group and our topic, one of the topics that came up on Tuesday was, people think that social media is gonna be your savior as a merchant. How do you determine how much I should do on Google ads, on, on social media, on, on just an email or a blog post or whatever?

[00:20:24] Brent: How do you break out

[00:20:25] Alex: different that like a good buddy of mine has silver age comics.com, a site that we helped make on. It’s still on Magenta one, but it works for. And he does a lot of sales on Instagram. We’re selling vintage comics on Instagram and we’ll go live and we’ll have a couple drinks and sell.

[00:20:39] Alex: We sold like a $25,000 low grade copy of the first appearance of the flash on Instagram, which is crazy, and we’ll sell a ton of a hundred dollars books and $50 books, but you get a $25,000 sale on Instagram is nuts. And for him something like social is more important for. , A lot of our customers aren’t really on it that much.

[00:20:58] Alex: They’ll be like, they don’t even really know how to use a computer that well sometimes, or they don’t care, like they just, they know what they want and they want a good price and they know they’re gonna get a tracking number in an email and, so while for this particular business, certain things aren’t embraced in terms of allocating marketing budgets, I would say yeah, there’s more budgeted on Google, right?

[00:21:18] Alex: Or. , but but on other businesses it could be everything.

[00:21:25] Brent: Yeah. Yeah you took the answer out of my mouth. It is specific to businesses and I think as you’re even getting into B2B more, the social aspect of it isn’t as important as. Some of the other channels you have to help market your business. I think that one thing I know Gary Vi always says is, if it’s there, try it.

[00:21:44] Brent: Don’t and test it. Don’t, please don’t. I,

[00:21:46] Alex: what do you do for testing some? I was talking to ca at the meet magenta after party right before I talked to you, and he was like, Hey man you know who you remind me of, dude? Like you remind me of. And I was like, bro, like I, I please, I’m not, like I’m my own person.

[00:22:01] Alex: And he’s nah, but you probably go to the flea markets and stuff. I’m like yeah. I go to the flea markets and you probably buy a bunch of things. I’m like yeah, I do that. But I just I don’t know. I’m not really the, I very much get a thrill from a from an actual sale, but I’m not gonna like say something more broad.

[00:22:15] Alex: I’m very specific and maybe that just comes. Having more of a technical background as well,

[00:22:19] Brent: yeah, no I, so what I was gonna say is that testing things and trying things out are always important and I guess going back to social media, how much do you test on those social platforms to see if it’s gonna. Cr if it’s going to bring you some business from those, are they gonna convert to a sale if you did

[00:22:38] Alex: videos on?

[00:22:39] Alex: Yeah. Probably not for the $4,000 toilet, but maybe for the $300 washlet seat. The thing is you never want to get too comfortable just doing one thing, and you always want to try everything. But sometimes that fear of missing out You get grounded when it’s a grounding feeling when before you know it, you have no more money left than your bank account.

[00:22:57] Alex: So it’s it’s a humbling feeling to be like I have no money to do this. Or and I’m not saying we don’t have the money to do it, I’m just saying, you always need to think from the perspective of maintaining, a profit line.

[00:23:09] Brent: Yeah. So fear of missing out is a great, it’s a great example.

[00:23:13] Brent: And then also the capacity and the bandwidth to do all those different things you’d like to try. That’s

[00:23:16] Alex: amazing too, Brent. It’s amazing to not get off the, just to say social media is incredible. The fact that we could go on Instagram at midnight from my friend’s com shop in Queens and get, 200 people in a stream, a hundred people in a stream and have people just buy is such an amazing sort.

[00:23:33] Alex: Feeling like it’s so empowering to be like we just made our own home shopping network, like feeling it with our own, we’re, we’re probably a little bit, we’re cracking jokes and we’re being a little bit Wayne’s worldy, but it’s but the customer likes it too, and that creates like a personal relationship, like I ran into a guy after we did that show, and he was like, yo, man, like you’re the guy.

[00:23:50] Alex: Drinking, like your cup was like it looked like you were drinking a cup of pee, bro. And I’m like, what are you talking about, dude? It was like I think it was like Gatorade , but it’s but the guy was watching, like you had a captive audience and he remembered and he came up to you and it’s and that didn’t cost anything, it was free and it was sincere and it was memorable.

[00:24:06] Alex: So it, depending on what you’re doing, it could be the most important thing.

[00:24:12] Brent: Do you think as we’re going into the future for content and conversational content the content that’s wrapped around each piece of your products like is if you have a skew that’s one of that $3,000 five toilet writing, $5,000 toilet, sorry.

[00:24:27] Brent: Are, is that content around that? Say you’re writing blog posts or social or whatever, or, yeah, maybe more blog posts that, that’s pointing to that content. Educating people on why that, what’s about that and the features and breaking that content into larger content. It’s totally important. Is that more important now,

[00:24:43] Alex: what’d you say?

[00:24:44] Alex: It’s totally important. Is that more? Yeah. Yeah. It’s also not our own brand, right? If I had my own private label Washlet, I would be doing even more, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I have thousands of codes and I get information from vendors and then I can use like a software like computer to get more information from vendors.

[00:25:05] Alex: But I can’t, like I, there’s only so many hours in a day and I can keep going and I can keep adding. And maybe some good reviews help, but I’m a B2C and I’m selling something that people can get in a lot of different places. I think what’s compelling about me is they’re getting a great deal.

[00:25:19] Brent: You mentioned you mentioned having you mentioned b2c. You and you mentioned having the email earlier. And we always hear email is dying or email is dead. Your email list, are they still bringing in good Yes. Returns and do you see email going into the future?

[00:25:36] Alex: Yes, they’re bringing traffic.

[00:25:38] Alex: I think, you get so many emails every day that they all board together to be like nothing. But you do see traffic and you see like an interesting, sometimes I’ll look at Google Analytics and I’ll be like, man, I sent this email like three months ago. This guy just bought this and it if the more you do, the more you get.

[00:25:54] Alex: Are our emails a little bit spammy? We’re throwing a lot of coupon codes, and are they targeted to an extent? Somebody renovates their house once every few years, ideally you’re trying to get some contractors maybe, or some architects or designers and give them, some sort of incentive to to work with you directly in bulk.

[00:26:09] Alex: But I don’t think it’s going away. . Do you think it’s going away,

[00:26:12] Brent: Brent? No. I think email’s gonna remain strong. I saw a tweet the other day that we need a spam folder for texting though. And I would say that texting can get super annoying. And I’ve signed up for a couple of different brands for, they say, we’ll text you every once in a while to send you a coupon and then all of a sudden I’m getting a text twice a week.

[00:26:30] Alex: Yeah, I get a text from a gun range. Me and my wife she’s from Texas. We go to near her house’s, like a, there’s an archery range on the second floor and a gun range on the first floor. And we just did archery there like once, and they send me texts. They’re like come to Valentine’s Day at Saddle River Range.

[00:26:46] Alex: Like extra ammo is half price. And I’m like, I like it, but it’s, it’s lost on me. I’m in Brooklyn. Yeah. I’m not going to Saddle River Ranch for

[00:26:53] Brent: Valentine’s Day. . Maybe that’d be something that you should try this year.

[00:26:58] Alex: I would definitely do it if I was there. Just shout out to Saddle River Rage guys.

[00:27:02] Alex: The texting’s working guys

[00:27:03] Brent: keep texting me. Yeah, I read it. I guess the point on the points I’m trying to make is that there is a tipping point email. We don’t want texting to turn, like people say, my texting inbox is something that I, everybody reads the text at some point.

[00:27:16] Alex: Yeah. Unless it’s five or eight prints from high school.

[00:27:19] Alex: Yeah. .

[00:27:19] Brent: There you go. The text group that goes around and around. Yeah. I hear ya. Yeah. If you had some kind of nugget to tell a merchant that in it that they should be doing, maybe what they could still do for Black Friday, but then what’s, what they should be doing as they’re planning into quarter one of next year, what would that be?

[00:27:38] Alex: Yeah, so I never do any code upgrades. Right around now I just because, especially with Magento, I’m just like, oh God, I might not realize something else went wrong, for another month. And then it’s a trickle down effect. And then I’m breaking my head on, who knows where, Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving dinner, right?

[00:27:54] Alex: Like just fixing something, which has happened. But like I, I think. , for Black Friday, you just want to get organized and say, what are you doing? What am I gonna do? What are my sales gonna be? Am I offering coupon codes? Make sure the, for us Google promotions are really important.

[00:28:07] Alex: Google ads are really important. Submitting, leaking the coupons and just making sure you know you’re ready because there’s so many things to switch. Weeding up to Black Friday only to then switch it all. , right? Like you’re like, man, I have coupon codes and I’m lowering prices and then I’m activating this and it’s only for this day and then this day and then like once Black Friday’s over, oh my god, cyber Monday.

[00:28:28] Alex: And then, everyone should know Cyber Monday is gonna be extended to Cyber Tuesday, but come that Wednesday, you’re stuck reverting a lot of stuff back. And if you don’t, all your marketing efforts might get mixed up and might cause a trickle down effect of a headache. Just be organized.

[00:28:41] Alex: Yeah. It’s

[00:28:42] Brent: a plan. Organized, make sure I like that. I I think a lot of people don’t think about the fact that maybe they didn’t turn off their coupon codes after a certain time. And certainly magenta, it’s easy to just make the coupon codes stop working on the day after Cyber Monday or whatever, whenever you want to stop it.

[00:28:56] Brent: Yeah, it

[00:28:57] Alex: is. But if you don’t do it right it’s like somebody’s adding that extra 5% on something where you only had or it’s just like, oh no and then it’s like, what do you do, as the years go on, it becomes more difficult to like, reach out to the customer and explain to them what you

[00:29:07] Brent: did.

[00:29:07] Brent: Right. Alex, as I close out, as we finish out the podcast, to give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. It could be your business or any, anything, your school or something a anything you’d like to plug. What would you like to plug today?

[00:29:22] Alex: Sure. If you happened to acquired any comic books that’s say 10 cent or 12 cents on the cover price.

[00:29:28] Alex: Maybe some 15. None of that new stuff. Don’t, hit me up and be like, oh, I got these, nineties books. I don’t want ’em one or two of them, but not all of them hit me up. You could even email Alex home perfect.com, Instagram Web seven nyc. I’m born and raised in Manhattan or on eBay at comment palooza.

[00:29:46] Alex: I’m always buying, I’m paying cash for your collectibles. And in particular 1960s Marvel books. I can give you a good deal and I’d love to buy bulk and I buy collections. I buy inheritances. I’ll go anywhere and I’ll come to you. And let’s just, let’s buy these books. I like to keep some of them for myself.

[00:30:02] Alex: I am a collector too, but I do also sell.

[00:30:05] Brent: Awesome. It sounds like you should also have a online comic. .

[00:30:11] Alex: Maybe I do. .

[00:30:13] Brent: That’s awesome. . Alex, thanks so much for being here today. It’s been an enjoyable conversation and I wish you all the best on your your B F C M as they like to say nowadays.

[00:30:22] Alex: Yeah, but it’s B F C M ct.

[00:30:25] Alex: What is the ct? Black Friday? Cyber Monday. Cyber Tuesday. Extended.

[00:30:30] Brent: Extended. There you go. And then we’ll call it Christmas in July soon. Yeah.

[00:30:36] Alex: God. I don’t, I think it’ll just be year round. Honestly, with us it’s always year round. If you join our perfect Members only Price Club and you sign into your account, all the prices are cut in half.

[00:30:44] Alex: So every day is Black Friday at home. Perfect. We’re just trying to get you the best possible deal on your full renovation.

[00:30:50] Brent: Awesome. I will put all these links into the show notes and I appreciate you being here today. Thank you, Alex.

[00:30:56] Alex: Thank you, Brent.

The Human Connection in Commerce with Maier Bianchi

April 14, 2023January 10, 2023 by Brent W. Peterson

Welcome to 2023 and the start of a new Talk Commerce year. What’s new? You will see new and updated show notes, I have a new library of music from AppSumo and I plan on exploring OPEN A I this year. Lots of great things to come in 2023. Today we interview Maier Bianchi, whose primary goal is to help businesses join the modern digital economy. The world is constantly evolving around us like an ever-flowing river of time. To adapt and survive in this increasingly difficult landscape requires us as people to work together, with the mission of succeeding mutually, not exclusively. Maier enlightens us with his business wisdom and tenacity to overcome complex problems and circumstances.

Some takeaways from this episode

Maier has been involved with technology and computers since childhood
He began working in the IT side of a Halloween store in 2002
He began teaching himself coding in 2009
He got recruited to work for a luxury kitchen bath lighting retailer in 2010
He has since gone on to form his own company and become involved in the Magento community, forming relationships and networking with other members to stay informed and provide better client services.
Maier entered the e-commerce world without any formal development background.
He took a job in 2015 that exposed him to advanced technology and software development culture.
His company was renamed Bemair, meaning “one who enlightens”.
He is currently focusing on Magento, Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and headless platforms.
He sees e-commerce continuing to form the fabric of our shopping society, but with the human connection remaining an integral part.
He is a partner for Shopware and is looking to make headways into the Americas.
He is urging people to support 4hcm.org, an organization dedicated to helping those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
He believes luck and hard work are essential for success in e-commerce.
He sees the venture capital ecosystem drying up and encourages businesses to focus on brand voices and engaging with customers.
He encourages people to think of others during the holidays.

RIFF Happens – Read more of what Maier has to say on Linkedin

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this fantastic episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Maier Bianchi, and I have for the first time, I’ve known Maier for about 10 years now. I’ve said his name correctly. Maier, why don’t you go ahead, do an introduction, tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Brent: You are the founder of Bemeir, and again, I’ve been saying be Meyer wrong this whole time as well. And have you attended. . I think I just, I would always just say, I don’t know. Bier, bier. I would just say it wrong, but I say everybody’s name wrong but why don’t you go ahead.

Brent: You’re gonna do a better job than me, and I like the way that you spelled it out. I was super confused when I saw Bianchi or Bianchi because I would’ve said that correctly and I, nevermind. You just go ahead.

Maier: Yeah. My name’s Maier Bianchi. Thanks for the intro. I’m from Brooklyn, New York, currently by way of New Jersey, and I’m founder of Bemeir.

Maier: We’re an e-commerce solutions agency outta Brooklyn and web development and web applications and other things just like technology and helping people. That’s what we’re about.

Brent: Cool. And your passion in life is just having kids. Yeah. Crazy because you have 17 kids now, right? Or something

Maier: like crazy amount.

Maier: Crazy. Yeah, procreation is my passion. No, I have five. I’m definitely probably gonna keep it five, but you never know the fact still. Yeah. One more. Yeah. But yeah, so that, that yeah, that, that is part of my origin story. It’s probably why I’m motivated cuz it started having kids like age 22. That’s, yeah.

Maier: That, that defines me.

Brent: I am going to you have a, you have so nicely agreed to participate in the free joke project, and now I should have, I realize I should have had a joke about having tons of kids, but I don’t, I have a, I think it’s a good joke, but you’re all you have to do is tell me if you feel like this joke should remain free.

Brent: Or if we could charge for it. And today’s joke is a quick joke, but I may stumble through it. So if we have to do editing and people see jumps in the videos because I’ve said it wrong and Maier and myself have done this, take four times, . All right. You ready?

Brent: Yeah. , a man walks into a bar with a small salamander on his shoulder. The bartender says, what an interesting pet, what’s his name? Tiny. The man Repli. The bartender says, that’s an odd name. Why did you call him tiny? The man replies because he’s my newt.

Maier: That’s a good one. I’m not laughing, but I’m laughing internally. I’m definitely gonna go tell my friend that one. But I, you could charge for it as part of a scholastic book athon. Joke book, it could be part of a compendium, maybe not a standalone joke.

Brent: That’s fair. I think to be fair, a lot of my jokes are thinking jokes and like you think about it and then maybe a week later you’re like, okay, that I get it now. It wasn’t even funny, but now I get it. So that might be like something where maybe next week somebody and maybe what I should do is have, as part of the free joke project, I could have the following week, I do joke explained.

Brent: A newt is just as a small lizard. Okay, good.

Maier: The joke revealed, no, I wanna tell that one to my dad. I don’t think I can get the intro. But I like the actual payoff.

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll, I will admit too that I did not practice that. Like I found I was like I was getting ready for our at, just to get everybody in the green room.

Brent: Our green room conversation consisted of me waiting for you to come back from the bathroom. That’s true. I had some time and I’m like, oh wait, we gotta do the joke. So I looked one up really quick. And by the way, there is a dad joke API that you can access. And one of my, when I have some downtime, I do like to do a little bit of coding, right?

Brent: So my downtime consists of me doing bash scripts. If you go on, I do have a bunch of old Magento bash scripts on Amazon, on on GitHub, but I’m very interested in how can I make, how can I get to this api? So I haven’t gotten that far. All I’ve got, it’s still in my head and I’d love to just, Hey, how can I want to just send off a request and come back with a dad joke of the day.

Brent: I think filter ’em because some of them aren’t are. I’d get in trouble from Susan for saying ’em, but anyways. . Let’s would you like to talk about e-commerce today? Or what what would you like to talk about?

Maier: Yeah I’m open to anything that’s my problem’s. Not always prepared, but so no.

Maier: Yeah, you can lead the witness. You could go ahead and talk about anything, bring up any topic.

Brent: Sure. I wanna start off with if, when you get outside, like you said you came via New Jersey today or something, or did, were you moved, did you move from New Jersey to Brooklyn?

Maier: No, I moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey a couple years ago.

Maier: Oh, so you’re not in Brooklyn anymore? My company’s based in Brooklyn. I still have Brooklyn in my blood. I can’t, you can’t, you can take the kid outta Brooklyn, but you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the kid, but, got it. I. Currently reside in New Jersey and intend to keep it that way for a while.

Brent: Is that because whenever you drove outside of New Jersey and you came back, I mean outside of Brooklyn came back, you couldn’t get any sleep until you actually got there?

Maier: No. , no. I would just say it’s because Brooklyn is not the most affordable place to live versus the quality of life ratio and space for your family.

Maier: So New Jersey held those answers a couple years ago, back when prices were lower and yeah, things worked out in that regard.

Brent: I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately and I binge watch, I’ve been binge watching The Sopranos on HBO O Max on my iPad, so that’s a good, again, now just learning everything there is to know about New Jersey and about the people, the wonderful people of New Jersey.

Maier: keep wondering, yeah, that’s like a little north of here, but it’s real. There’s real places. But I did watch it sometime in the last year. Yeah, last year. Yeah. You’re gonna

Brent: Have to revisit it. And there is some, I think there, there was some tours, some Sopranos tours in the past just to watch that.

Brent: . Let’s talk a little bit about what motivated you to get into e-commerce and again, you’re relatively young, so you started in this Magento community when you were super young, like 12, right?

Maier: Yeah, . What motivated me to get into e-commerce is I always was into technology since I was a little kid.

Maier: Loved anything with computers and video games and Nintendo and just anything computers, since I was really. And then got my first computer when I was like, whatever. Let’s just say se pick a number seven, apple, two McIntosh. Lc, think like 16 megabytes of Ram 40 megabyte hard drive. My dad was into like Adobe Illustrator.

Maier: I play in like civilization, HyperCard, so you know, always was like into multimedia and art and like computers. And then flash forward to high school. Majored in media and communications, which was once again interactive stuff like photography, video making websites. And like my aunt got me like an HTML book when I was a teenager.

Maier: Never opened it. Had opportunities to learn like visual basic programming for robotics. Never followed through. So there was something about the book way, which didn’t appeal to me. And then flash forward, my parents had a Halloween. I was working at Halloween store in the back office, so doing more office and data entry stuff.

Maier: And then somewhere along the way I got into the IT side where they had started an e-commerce store, let’s just say in 2002. They were early adopters. I wasn’t so much involved in that. But then let’s just say more around oh 6, 0 7, got more involved in that. Cause I was working in the IT of the store.

Maier: And and eventually working in it like, POS infrastructure and MA making sure the registers were ringing during the busy times and like that type of high demand environment and customer satisfaction environment. Probably formulated how I think or think from the business owner perspective.

Maier: And then around 2009 I was working. And was managing the website or dealing with the website. And I started like teaching myself to code like html, css started doing some side projects like WordPress or static HTML stuff and I really wasn’t going anywhere there. And then in 2010 got recruited to work for like a luxury kitchen bath lighting retailer.

Maier: Shout out to Alex Teller, give credit where credit is due. And he got me into that company and they were on a SaaS platform called Venda. Back in 2010, SAS was not where you wanted to be cuz usually it was very closed source. Just adding a pixel to your checkout could cost thousand, cost thousands of dollars.

Maier: So they wanted to move to a more DIY model cause they were successful, but wanted to be able to iterate faster. So what was really great about that experience was I got with AdWords, front end development, you name it, all the aspects of the business. And then in the end of that year, they decided to look at a platform called Magen.

Maier: They were big, so they were going for Magento enterprise. This was the 1.9 version of enterprise, which was equivalent to 1.4 or one point, like right after the major architecture shift, thank God. But this was back then, so I was lucky enough to be put in charge of that project. , helping implement it, bring it to life, working with all the extension providers, working with a Magento at the time.

Maier: I was about to say Adobe, I’ve been training myself, but Adobe was not a concern back then for the Magento community except for making graphics and and so that’s really how I got into this, was working there and getting my feet. We Magento, went to the first Imagine met people like Karen Baker. Met people like yourself somewhere in there, asked, hitting you on Skype for help.

Maier: I don’t know how it hap how, and. and people, all kinds of, like back then. That’s what, how this started. And then flash forward to four years, said, Hey, I really e-commerce, I like making websites. And decided to go on my own and formed my company freelancing. And then for four years, or not in four years, like three years, two years, then I got burnt out on that.

Maier: I was like, Hey, I never wanna work for anyone ever again. No more jobs. Let’s go agency mode. And that was my. So that’s my superhero or super villain origin story in how we got here.

Brent: That’s awesome. And Alex has been on the show and and did, how did you stay away from comic books? .

Maier: So I’m not as good with him as the comics, but I’ve always had some comics, but I would say other.

Maier: Have been my hobby, like making babies or video games, , so yeah. That’s awesome. That’s an expensive hobby too.

Brent: Yeah, that’s a great story. Just so our listeners give some context The Magento community has been around for about 13, 14 years. The very first imagine happened back in, was it 2011 at the Yes, at the lax at Los Angeles L Ax.

Brent: And and then that’s solidified our the actual community of people. And it is really a community driver to make this happen. So it’s a, I think a unique time in space that we’ve had this and we were, we just saw each other at at Meet Magento, New York. It continues going, and not only do we get professionally, get ourselves Make ourselves better professionally, but we also get making great relationships.

Brent: And I had the pleasure of meeting you quite a long time ago and and just doing so many things across our space.

Maier: Yeah. And no, and I would just second that by saying there’s relationships I’ve made back then that still carry forward to this day. I was fortunate enough to meet like the founder of Uner.

Maier: Or people that like, like people who worked for Magento and Sapora and then introduced them to other people and they became formative members of their company. And it’s just been like this great, like a family reunion every time you get together with people from the community. Like when I saw you in Boston at a not Magento event at El East, and then just happened to sit down next to you at the table, it’s oh, there’s a friendly face.

Maier: So it’s just really comforting because as things change, it’s been a great constant factor out. And like that I think a lot of people don’t know about or they don’t have in their space. Yeah.

Brent: I think that’s for me, and I started to attend non-agent events in 2019 with the, for starting with the Adobe Summit.

Brent: It was a Magento event, but yeah, I mean it was 99% Adobe and 1% Adobe commerce. Did you find it a little bit different that maybe you don’t know so many people? Shop Talk or eTail event where , it was mm-hmm. ,, it was a way to, you, you kinda had to reintroduce yourself to the crowd.

Brent: And then the other thing that I find at those events is there’s people that absolutely don’t know about it. And believe it or not, they don’t care about Magento.

Maier: No, exactly. And so I would say I was there for multiple purposes mainly business development and meeting people. Like I went with my colleague.

Maier: who’s on strategic partnerships and business development. And so it’s different when you’re with a friend and you’re with someone, you have a different, like move and stride to you versus when you’re alone. I’m like pretty outgoing but also more timid when I’m like by myself. I feel like more in my own head, but when you have a certain wingman factor you are able to just get into different conversations or work the room as a team.

Maier: And then also that was a conference focus on e-commerce and I had a great time at eTail East. Back when it was in Philly some years ago. And so I had fond memories of that conference, like from 2014 or whatever that was. And and so it was like, just going there to be about it.

Maier: Meet with Shopify, meet with big commerce, meet with Adobe representatives, meet with partners like Air Call and Webs and so on. So it’s once again, it shows kind of the growth because there were so many familiar faces yet meeting new people at these events. And I would just. It’s cool to see the spirit in general of commerce catch up, cuz it wasn’t always like this, right?

Maier: It was a very different type of crowd. It was definitely a different type of vibe and I think it just has to do with the soup of the day flavor and how this became the big industry and more, more different folks who weren’t in industry flocked to it. So now it’s like one of the it places to be.

Maier: So it’s attracted more diversity in certain ways or more investment, which has led to more involve. . And so I would just say what’s the dark side of it right now is that we’re hearing about so many layoffs and so many people who are like at these companies who are, there’s a lot of things changing hands.

Maier: And so once again, it’s, there’s ups and downs and it’s a whole ecosystem. And so for me, the community is really like a, there’s just so many different facets to it.

Brent: Do you find that being part of the community makes you a better agency owner? And maybe just from a, maybe from an educational and networking standpoint that

Maier: Yes, 180

Brent: client percent client.

Brent: Yeah. A client’s gonna ask you a question and my ear is oh yeah, I’m gonna go ask Philip Jackson that, or something like that.

Maier: Yeah, no. I’m gonna put a plug. Like for example, in Magento World, there’s this thing called Mage talk that ca you know, not the podcast.

Maier: Sorry. Not Mage talk. Mage chat. Forget about Mage Talk mage. Is, it’s like this slack paid Slack membership where there’s a lot of really smart people all in one place, sharing ideas helping each other out. So it’s like not just these, there’s there’s a lot of free communities, like the Magento, open source Slack with thousands of people in it where you could post a question to get an answer, but imagine a more curated place where you can go learn things and people are happy to share their playbook or say, Hey I really rely upon this integration or this extension, or Here’s how we do it.

Maier: And yes, I would. Two things. Like I’ve struggled a lot in the last two years as an entrepreneur focusing too much on what other people are doing and from a social media and watching, you and getting all that in your head and oh man, I’m not doing good. And hey, the truth hurts. But then at the same time, there’s such a benefit to being connected to people because you learn so much and so yes, a hundred percent as an agency.

Maier: And I’m always on the hunt for information for my clients. That’s why we have so many partnerships. That’s why we do the networking, is because these relationships really help provide a a great way to just get support for people or answer questions. And I would say that’s definitely a big part of my the way I operate a secret sauce as.

Brent: and I will also put a plug in for Mage Chat. Kalen often asks me and I realize now that Kalen asked me in advance for ideas that he’s already gonna do, and he’s already proved successful. Soundboarding . Yeah. And I said I don’t know. I don’t know if I would do that. And then, within a day he’s Boom.

Brent: He I’m get all these text messages. I already got 50 people. I guess it really did work. . I wish I can move fast. He’s good at pointing out the fact that I often give him poor advice. So that’s how, yeah. He also

Maier: probably didn’t have that answer the day before. Cause that’s how fast Caitlyn moves.

Maier: Yeah, he’s saying one thing this week and then the next week he’s doing something different. And that’s part of his genius is the way he iterates and can just say, Hey, because like I compare that to the way I sometimes do things is where I’ll procrastinate on something or I’ll think about how I’m gonna say something or do something for so long, not put anything on paper, but then when the time comes, that visual or how I envisioned it, Goes to plan.

Maier: So there’s some thought to it, but no, he’s on another level with that. , I can’t disagree there. You can tell him one thing and he’s probably already figured it out.

Brent: Yeah, he’s a he’s probably a really good chess player. I don’t think I want to play him in chess cuz I’m a terrible chess player.

Maier: Yeah, I used to play chess when I was a kid, but those days are

Brent: long over. Tell us a little bit about some of your journey as an entrepreneur. You, you worked for Alex Teller. Then you went off and started your own, you did contracting and that’s where I started as well.

Brent: In the Magento space. Yes. I did contract and then I did a agency. Yeah, what was some of the frustrations around the contracting part?

Maier: Contracting wasn’t so bad. It was the trying to do both, like contracting and having clients or whatever. Contracting for multiple, cuz remember like my whole, I guess I’ll put it to you like this, right?

Maier: So I left and I didn’t have any formal background in development. I had some certifications, I kept leveling up, but I had no computer science background, no PHP background, no JavaScript background. So I don’t think I was the best equipped to get recruited for development. , but I was really specialized with the product.

Maier: I really have a good work ethic. Good focus on e-commerce. And so that’s useful, but that’s not a job, right? That’s not necessarily a ba that’s not necessarily an architect. That’s not necessarily this. So where I fit in well was in certain situations. So for example when I left the, that company working for Alex and then went to, it’s called Home Perfect.

Maier: I went to. , I just was like working with some other people on the side, setting up sites, trying to get involved in certain businesses. But then I got hooked into a company called Weedmaps. And Weedmaps is now a billion dollar, publicly traded company at the time. They were more of a startup going to Enterprise.

Maier: They’re based in Irvine California. And I had the pleasure to work for a brilliant cto. His name was Bill Antreosi and he was leading this project that involved Magento. It was like a marketplace. And it was some really forward looking architecture and headless and elastic search and all this stuff back in like 2015.

Maier: So I really had my eyes open to some advanced technology and also real like software development culture and that sort of stuff. So that was really, I would say one of the most formative experiences I had was I went from a DIY uploaded via FTP culture to. GIT and doing things the right way.

Maier: Culture and learning about, like the software developer handbook. And I worked with some pretty hardcore people who were really sticklers about certain things and that didn’t necessarily mesh well with my style. And so at that time, I grew as a backend developer. I actually learned object oriented programming eventually got my Magento developer certification, which to me, I never could have imagined when I started out.

Maier: The. back end one. So I was like, man, you’re doing something right. But at the time, Magento two was coming, this was like 2015. Everyone was like, okay, the writing’s on the wall. It’s gonna get a lot more hardcore from here. If you could program Magento one, it doesn’t mean you’re good at Magento two.

Maier: So I started to get squirrely. There was some, cultural issues in the company in terms. How the Magento team was functioning. And I was a little bit frustrated and so I was like, Hey, I wanna move over to the business side. I feel hey, if I know the guy that created Magento and I know these people and I work well with all the top software people and I can help speak these languages, hey, let me be a part of this side of things.

Maier: And then that was okay. And eventually, like there was this other company that was trying to recruit me to be a job and I was, I had just had my fourth kid at the time, or like once. I converted to be an employee for healthcare reasons and allowed me to get married and all this good stuff.

Maier: And we had our fourth kid. And so it was more just like I went as the situation developed and I was less focused on building like an agency. I didn’t think like that. I might have had different situations like, hey, I had the job but also had a couple other clients or, projects on the side.

Maier: But then really what happened was I was recruited by this company. . And you know how once you’re a Magento developer, you’re getting hit up by recruiters like, oh, we need a senior Magento developer. And you could be like, Hey, I just know this. And they’re like, no, we want you to solve all our problems.

Maier: And you’re the guy. And they think automatically you’re like a PHP lord. And that wasn’t me. And so I took this job that had been recruiting me for a while. I took a pay cut, I bought a car, was commuting 80 miles a day. That was already the red flags. Took a job where I was working from home and quit because I felt like I was gonna get, cut eventually.

Maier: Anyway, got hired and fired in 60 days. I was working at this company called Nobel Biocare. It’s part of the Danaher Group. Publicly traded. They’re a multi-billion dollar corporation, no lie. Logged into the Magento dashboard and had a billion in transactions, and I was like, you’ve made it when you went and you’ve worked on small Magento’s, then you see one that was a billion and you’re like, okay, this is big.

Maier: But the point is, I wasn’t a good fit for the role they hired me for. It didn’t work out. But I went from having an income to having no income overnight and I was shattered as a person. I was very upset. You can imagine when you’re a sole provider for a household, what that does to a person in your mindset.

Maier: I didn’t take it very. . And so 2017 was definitely a rebuilding year and I’m not gonna act like there wasn’t some kind of help or I like, I wrote an article about this actually recently on LinkedIn called Riff Happens just in solidarity with people who have been laid off. I wasn’t laid off, but I just meant my experiences of, like it definitely has caused me to grow as a person or different aspects of this.

Maier: And just to wrap that up, I guess that is how I went from that employee mindset and the security of that to, Hey, I don’t want to work for any anymore. The social contract is broken. Nobody actually has your back. We’re all a commodity out here. Every man for himself, not so severe. But that’s what changed my mindset.

Maier: And then I basically also, my company was called MageNYC, right? So that was, this is how forward thinking I was. I was like, Magento, New York City. I want to be the guy. Guess what? eBay had a problem. That was a trademark violation. Cause I tried to make a logo, which had the diamond in it, thanks to the glory of Ben Marks was able to work that out.

Maier: And I was gonna get a licensing agreement, but the licensing agreement was terrible. So I said, you know what, I’m gonna change the name. This was late 2016, right as that other stuff was happening with the job and like that whole transitionary period. And so that’s how the name Bemair was. Bemair, because Eric Heman from MageMojo at the time was like, oh, hey, why don’t you just name it after self?

Maier: Why don’t you do this. And I was like, okay. Like my name means giving light, or one who enlightens. It’s a hebrew name, my first name. And so I was like, cool, let the company be one who enlightens. Hey, we like helping business owners. Let’s enlighten people. Let’s empower people. So that went from a Magento focused ideology to a global ideology.

Maier: And that was like a blessing in disguise. The industry changes and being so narrow focused doesn’t always benefit you. And so it was a really just big time of transition. So that’s how I went to being agency focused. I know that was a long-winded tale, but that’s how it happened.

Brent: No, I think the stories of how we get there are much more interesting as than when you get there.

Brent: The, it’s the journey that, that is the interesting part of it. So you talked a little bit about being super focused on Magento. What does it look like today? You’re branching out, right?

Maier: Yeah. And I just want to add one parable to what you said.

Maier: A person is as big as the problems they have.

Maier: And so if you look at your life and you feel like you’ve grown. You don’t think you’ve grown well look at what your concerns were five years ago and look at what your concerns are now and you’ll be shocked to see how much that’s changed. And so that’s how I’ve known, I’ve grown even since then.

Maier: And the problems. So anyway, back to your question is right now we’re focused on Magento, still also wrote an article. Why? I’m still focused on Magento, cuz I believe in it and businesses are still using it and need. We became an Adobe commerce partner this year, so that’s a big milestone because no one’s gonna have an event in Brooklyn in our hometown.

Maier: And we’re the most legit Magento agency from Brooklyn, and you can’t invite us. So I had to step up and become a bronze partner so I could get invited to the Adobe Reconnections, so that was great. We’re also a Shopify partner. We work with plus brands and nonplus brands on Shopify. We’ve been working with Shopify, I’ve been working with it since 2014.

Maier: I wish. Had the foresight to make that my bread and butter could probably be rich by now and acting like I invented e-commerce. Like a lot of these people, like everything you touched turns gold because you had it on easy mode. But but no, so we really got focused on Shopify, let’s just say more 2019 is when we’ve picked up some advanced Shopify knowledge and just been really accelerating.

Maier: And now I consider us up one of the best. I look up to big companies like Half Felix and we make websites and some of the bigger. More boutique or deluxe Shopify agencies, and I don’t consider us like that, but that plus we’re a big commerce partner. I found it hard to grow in big commerce.

Maier: Shout out to the people that do like yourself with that sign in the background, your big commerce elite status, because that’s a really cool industry as well. And . We’re focused on these kind of platforms and I have interest in your Salesforce commerce Clouds. Shopware is one that I’m trying to grow with and having the foresight.

Maier: Again, shout outs to Shopware. We’re a Shopware partner at the moment trying to help them make Headways into the Americas. And also shout out to Ben Marks since everyone jumped on the board when you were on. But I was trying before that, but he really was the catalyst for everyone. And then . And so really like my focus is to utilize our skillset in ways that make sense.

Maier: Cuz now I’m currently trying to focus. And headless is another thing where we do, but unless you’re exclusively doing that or you have your own headless framework that you work on and constantly are using on projects, it’s hard to, it’s like any muscle, it’s hard to develop your muscles if you’re not stretching ’em every day.

Maier: And so I would say the areas I specifically want to grow are Magento, adobe commerce, Shopify, and headless. That’s. Would be my sweet spot right now, but always interested in evolution and going further.

Brent: That’s awesome. Like we’re recording this right before Black Friday. Oh, yes. This is gonna, it’s gonna be a couple of weeks before this gets out.

Brent: It’ll be past Cyber Monday and all those fun

Maier: things

Maier: in the aftermath. See you all in the, a aftermath.

Brent: This will be an aftermath. In fact, I have I have a whole bevy of episodes that are being released over the Black Friday weekend. Nice. Now you’re listening to this. Now go back to November 24th and listen to listen to the people that I have on and Megan Bliss from Signified.

Maier: I got you. Just read my mind. That was the one. Yeah. Keep going.

Brent: She’s on Friday, she’s on our Black Friday cuz they have a holiday guide and we’ve talked about it. I’m like, there’s no way I’m gonna get this done be so we could have this before, but hey, I could do it on Black Friday. So they

Maier: definitely should have included us in that guide.

Maier: I’m shocked we weren’t included, but it’s okay. I have a big chip on my shoulder in case you don’t know that

Brent: tomorrow I have Gina Ter from site and that’s another fantastic vision. Oh, we had to call with

Maier: her today or yesterday. We had

Brent: to call her. All right, Paul. There you go. It’s a small world

Maier: Yeah. We’re all playing in the same sand.

Brent: Yeah, absolutely.

Maier: And by the way, shout out to Megan, greatest partner upline ever. She’s like in the partner pyramid scheme. She’s at the top of all partners.

Brent: Yeah. There was only other one, other partner manager that I could remember that was, I thought was better than Megan, but she went and left WATO and went to another agency anyways, anymore . Yeah. She’s still a very good partner manager but just not in our exact space. So what do you think what, how do you see now let’s look at, let’s look at the end of quarter four in the beginning, quarter one for e-commerce. Do you think it’s still we still driving towards a good next year in 2023?

Maier: I’m looking for my crystal ball. Hold on. I gotta find it. Let me see what it says. I think there’s one thing you can bend on. E-commerce is going to continue, right? That’s a safe pick is that people are going to use ecommerce people are gonna need e-commerce. It’s still going to form the fabric of our shopping society.

Maier: I think brick and mortar is here to stay too. I think the pandemic tried to put a dent on that. You can bleep out that word in case it just messes up the algorithm. But I think things that happened in the last two years tried to put a dent on brick and mortar, but people really want the human connection.

Maier: And so I think if we bridge the human connection with e-commerce, and that’s in the form of. And strengthening brands and brand voices and how you talk to your customer and how you engage with your customer really shows that e-commerce can be the vehicle or the vessel for, this neoclassical shopping, right?

Maier: It’s not a binary thing. It, that’s what I always enjoyed about when I worked back in the Halloween store was, Hey, I was the guy who was answering the phone. If you call, if you had placed an order, Hey, I saw your order in the digital space, but then we called you if there was an issue or you needed to do a store, in-store pickup, we were prepared for you.

Maier: So it wasn’t like it was this amorphic, faceless animal. There’s real people, there’s real stories. There’s real people impacted by e-commerce. And so I think if we keep the human connection in mind, it’s not going anywhere. I just think the problem is the commoditize. The ads, the ad driven feed the beast venture, capital fed ecosystem might be drying up and that’s okay.

Maier: It wasn’t really healthy to begin with, but I think if we separate the two, and we don’t just look at it as a chart or a line graph, but we look at actual, hey, a guy from X County, Louisiana started X business and it was either a lifelong family business or it’s a new business.

Maier: Someone who’s really small time getting into it themselves on Shopify and starting their own drop shipping business. Whatever it is it’s how people connect to those businesses and the actual utility of what you’re selling that is gonna determine your fate, in my opinion, and also luck and also hard work.

Maier: But yeah. . Yeah, that’s, was that an evasive answer?

Brent: No, that’s a fantastic answer. And yeah, I know. It was a long it was a very open-ended question. My ear, we’re running out of time. We targeted 20 minutes and now we’re pushing up against 35, but darn. As we close out Yeah.

Brent: There’s so much more to talk about. We, I wanna ask you about your your camera, but anyways we’ll have we’ll do a follow up episode, maybe a special. Technology episode.

Maier: Yeah. We’ll do a po Let’s do a 2023 technology episode. I’m down. There you go.

Brent: As we close out the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug and you can plug anything you’d like today.

Brent: What would you like to plug?

Maier: Okay. I’m going to plug 4hcm.org. It’s the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association. One in every 250 Americans has hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy . It’s a real heart disease. It’s genetic. You may have it, not even know it. If you get an echocardiogram, you can get your heart measured, and if your septal wall is more than 12 centimeters, you probably have it, or you’re on the verge of having it, you should get it checked.

Maier: Everyone should support this charity, the 4hcm.org, any kind of donation. I think that would be a big help to saving a lot of lives in this country and helping people get treatment for their conditions. So because it’s Thanksgiving, And we need to think about other people than ourselves. That’s my shameless plug of the day because this whole episode was a shameless plug anyway, where I talked about myself and my business a lot.

Maier: But we need to focus on 4hcm.org and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. heart condition. That’s what I want to shamelessly plug today. That’s awesome.

Brent: Thank you so much. I very much enjoy when people do a shameless plug not about their business. So I really appreciate that. And I agree there’s so many, there’s so many causes 4hcm.org I’ll make sure I get all these links

Maier: in.

Maier: Yeah. Lemme make sure I notes. Imagine I gave you the wrong spelling. Let me just, yeah, no, it is 4hcm.org. I’m bugging.

Brent: Yeah, we’ll, and I’ll make sure these get into the show notes as well as thank you. Anything else that you want, any of your articles that you’ve rec recently written and your past articles, we’ll make sure we get those onto Yeah.

Brent: Onto the show notes

Maier: about the layoffs.

Brent: Yeah. And We will we will regroup in 2023 and have another conversation of what we’ll do with the technology conversation. Or maybe we’ll do it in person. I would love that. We’ve got a bunch of events coming up for next year. Will you

Maier: break down this virtual wall separating us right now?

Maier: Absolutely. Find a way to link up in the physical space and can you give me a closing joke? Give me an outro joke. All

Brent: So I was thinking about this. The, and this is coming outta. Okay.

Brent: The first time Yoda saw himself on 4K tv, what did he say?

HD am I.

Maier: Oh my God. Is that do, if you not, there is no try.

Brent: Yeah. I guess I could have phrased it better. Hd. Am I? Yeah, that would’ve, you kinda have to go right through it, you gotta think about it for a little bit. You

Maier: got a known That’s a good one though. It is a delivery though, isn’t it? It’s how you, I think you gotta make it something more about the connections.

Maier: There is, something or something hd I, you got, I don’t know. Anyway, thanks for the, thanks for bringing that up, .

Brent: All right, we’ll do one more, right? Alright. You last,

Brent: every morning after I get out of the house, a bike comes outta nowhere and ru and runs over. . It’s a vicious cycle.

Maier: Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. The vicious cycle. I like that one. You’re welcome. Cheers, man. All right.

Brent: Happy Thanksgiving. Have a great Thanksgiving and I look forward to I look forward to seeing you in person next

Brent: year.

Maier: Same. See you at some events and be well. Take care.

Four Ways to Increase your Website ROI with Thien-Lan Weber

April 14, 2023October 31, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

Tune in today to learn about the four easy steps you can take BEFORE Black Friday to make your site faster. (You can even tune in after Black Friday). Thien-Lan Weber talks about the four easy steps you can take today to ensure your ROI is maximized on your website ROI.

OneStepCheckout is not a traditional Magento module provider with a lot of extensions. Our checkout module is our core business. We work exclusively with checkout and conversions to always bring you the best possible checkout product. We are all about reducing customer abandonment and increasing customer conversions.

Show notes

Page speed deck by John Hughes: tiny.cc/irx-page-speed
Forbes Finance Council Article: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/10/ecommerce-tips-holiday-recession-economic-downturn/
Optty (Buy Now Pay Later Aggregator): https://www.optty.com/
Hyva: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/category/hyva/
Wyomind Shipping Extension: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/08/insights-why-click-collect-further-boosts-checkout-conversion-bopis-in-store-pickup/
OneStepCheckout Seamless Registration Feature: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2021/10/onestepcheckout-for-magento-2-registration-account-creation-modes/

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this Spoony holiday edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Thien-Lan Weber from One Step Checkout and she has done a much better job of her costume and background than I have Thien-Lan. Why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.

Thien-Lan: Hello, I’m Thien-Lan Weber. I work for OneStepCheckOut. So I guess most people know me otherwise. One step checkout is the main Magento extension to reduce for Magento one and Magen two. My passion in life, it’s eCommerce and drumming. I also like dress. And appearing on podcasts.

Brent: Excellent, thank you.

Brent: And so today before we get into our regular content, I’m gonna tell you a joke and then you are going to tell me if that joke should be free or if we could charge for it. Ready? You ready, ? Okay. I found out my girlfriend is really a ghost. I had my suspicions the moment she walked through the door.

Thien-Lan: It’ll be free.

Brent: Good. All right, Telan. I know today is Halloween, so I dressed up in my doctor who Christmas sweater, which I have my holidays completely mixed. And you are very well appointed in a a scary outfit with a span stuck in your head and you even have a great background. I appreciate that.

Brent: But we, let’s talk about the scary state of the economy and things coming. And then I think, let’s put it into context of what merchants can be doing to make sure that they’re getting everything they can out of their website. . Exactly.

Thien-Lan: Yeah. So yeah, not very funny. The current state of the economy is pretty gloomy.

Thien-Lan: We actually, I noticed that in New York when I went for McLin to New York, it was not as vibrant as 2018 and 2019 when I went and even the locals like Eric, and. Laura was telling, wa was saying that, A bit more dangerous. Lots of homeless people in the street. And I guess here in Europe we hear all the news about inflation war in Ukraine and yeah.

Thien-Lan: Worldwide inflation is around 8.2%. For the last 12 months in the US it’s yeah, around 8%. In Europe it’s around 10%, but with big discrepancies between countries like France, where I live, which is like 6%, and countries where Anton I imagine to expert lives in Estonia where it’s like 25%.

Thien-Lan: So yeah pretty.

Brent: Yeah. And so I know that there are ways in which merchants can help. And one step checkout is at the end of the funnel, let’s say at the checkout process. And I, you mentioned that you had done a article with Forbes about some points in which merchants can look or work through the checkout process.

Brent: Why don’t you explain a little bit about what that was?

Thien-Lan: Yep. We partner up with nata, who is a for finance council member to talk about this context and what eCommerce merchants can do as quick wins to get more sales this holidays. So it’s all about getting. Market share because consumers will have less spending power.

Thien-Lan: So the competition will be really fierce among all the brands. And you need to offer an experience that really appeals from the moment that people like even before people learn on your website up to the end of your online sales funnel. So today, I’m happy to share with you those four. and and they should be a lot, most of them should be implementable before this holiday season.

Thien-Lan: So that’s the good news.

Brent: All right, so let’s just tell let’s tell us the four points and then let’s go into detail on each one of them. Yep.

Thien-Lan: So the first point is to have a fast. Sorry. A fast website good performing websites. Consumers who go to your website, if they, it’s loading in more than two seconds, they’re going to leave and go to another website.

Thien-Lan: So performance is key here and throughout the whole browsing experience, you need to make sure that it loads fast enough so that people don’t leave and find items that they want, gift ideas, and put them into. So that would be by using themes like Hova, for example, on two, that makes the whole experience much faster and even helps you score rank higher in the search results so as to capture more traffic.

Thien-Lan: So that’s number one.

Brent: Number two, Okay, so I, Yep, go ahead. No, go for it. Number two

Thien-Lan: is around shipping. So with C we saw that by online pickup, in store, or click and collect is very popular. And sales going through those channels are going faster than eCommerce itself. So given that most of most of the time those shipping methods are more cost efficient, it costs nothing for the retailer to just have people come and pick it up.

Thien-Lan: It’s going to be very useful for consumers who can’t afford those extra five, $10 for shipping. So that was number two offer. More flexible shipping methods, including cost effective ones. Third one is offering flexible payment methods. And for the last couple of years, by now, pay later has been very popular as well because they allow consumers to pay, let’s say, in sport installments every fortnight, but without paying any.

Thien-Lan: So that helps when the budget is very strained to break it down into a longer period so you get your paycheck and you don’t pay anything on top of that. So offering payment methods that consumers like need for the holiday seasons is a big factor for to drive. And last but not least, having a good checkout that removes all friction from the checkout experience and allows consumers to place their order without forcing them to create an account or look for two coupon code that you might not have, or filling a lot of fields that will allow you to convert all that traffic.

Thien-Lan: And your efforts along the online sales funnel into an actual order.

Brent: So three out of the four are at the end of the funnel, which is probably pretty common that once they get through, number one, if it’s fast enough, they’re gonna, they’re gonna wanna buy something. What if you start at the top of the funnel with.

Brent: The Google has changed its its algorithms to now put more weight on the speed of your site. And if, let’s just say so one step checkout supports more than just Magento, right? There, there are other platforms that you’re supporting.

Thien-Lan: So for Dar, we are looking at supporting Que, but the priority is to support Magento two and Which makes Magento two much faster.

Thien-Lan: And is adding the sexy back into Magento,

Brent: adding the sexy back in, is that what you said? Yep. That’s good. . Okay. So having that sub two second load time, which in the past first Magento especially, has been unheard of. So some of the tools I guess people could use to help with that would just be Google Lighthouse and Google Page speed insights.

Thien-Lan: Exactly. Another resource that I found very useful and entertaining was a deck of slides by John Hughes from ue it was a hundred slides, but very funny ones about page speed, why, what you can do, and all the tips. We can add the links to the notes of this podcast. But this is a fantastic

Brent: Perfect. Yeah, and I will add the, I will add that to all the show notes. Alright, so let’s move on to shipping. So I think in the US anyways, shipping free shipping is the thing and Amazon is really driving that. Do you recommend that merchants do free shipping?

Thien-Lan: So that’s a strategic decision based on your cost goods sold, your pricing, your competitors.

Thien-Lan: So I can’t. You have to offer free shipping or you have to include shipping in your item price. I think depending on categories and consumers there might be different strategies that was better for you. But yeah, consumers one of the key reasons for carbon environment is when consumers see extra cost at the end of checkouts, so that often happens.

Thien-Lan: when checkout is on two pages with the first page with the item price, and then the second page with tax shipping all additional costs. So that’s a big driver. Either you state up upfront how much your shipping is going to be, or you put a threshold of. When shipping becomes free, and that works quite well to get consumers to pile up their cart and reach that threshold.

Thien-Lan: That makes sense for you financially. But yeah the most important is to be very up upfront and not have any surprises. When shoppers go to the end of checkout and see the final cost they have to pay.

Brent: Yeah, and I can say from experience that I have dropped out of the cart many times when I get to the end and suddenly shipping is a quarter of the cost of the entire order.

Brent: And I automatically go to Amazon then because A, I know that the ship, there’s no shipping. And then b, I also know that it’s gonna come in two days. The other, I think the other good strategy in terms of shipping, and I do agree that showing shipping up front is such an important thing to do. If you were to have a threshold of, say if you spend 50 euros or $50 and then you get free shipping, I think that’s something that I, that appeals to me and it also gets me to spend a little bit more money.

Brent: So if you’re at $49, you search like crazy on what does that $2 item I could get to get my free shipping maybe talk

Thien-Lan: a little bit about, Does that I do the thing I haven’t looked for. The product that is the same as shipping. If shipping is $10, I’d be like, Oh, I get that $10 items. I can have it for free.

Brent: Yeah, absolutely. And if merchants are very clever, they would also do maybe a little scale that says Here’s how close you are to get to free shipping. And if you just add this one more thing. And if they’re very clever, they would add some extremely high high profit items. As incentives to get over that shipping amount.

Brent: So say you’re at $9 and they have something that they charge $9 for, but they pay a dollar for it. Hey, buy this item and you’ll get over your free shipping. There’s so many tactics that merchants could use if they start thinking about the behavior of consumers. And as a merchant too, I think you should be looking at what your competitors are doing and trying to make sure that you’re not missing out on something like that.

Brent: So for example, if your competitor is just offering free shipping, but their every item is a little bit more expensive there’s a reason for it. I think we’ve seen that on Amazon. Sometimes those really cheap things are more expensive cuz there’s free shipping and I you mentioned that earlier.

Brent: About the free shipping part of it. The other one the second one or the third one you mentioned was flexible payments, and you mentioned buy now, pay later. Talk a little bit about that.

Thien-Lan: Yes I’ve been following the Buy now pay later trend for two, three years now. And it all started in Australia and today there are more probably a dozen brands who offer Buy Now pay.

Thien-Lan: the most popular in the US would be a firm and in Europe might be clown. And the whole objective what I find very interesting is that it’s a win-win for consumers and for merchants. The merchants pay a little bit more with our in terms of fees, but consumers get to pay. To slice their payments over six weeks and sometimes more without pay, paying in any interest.

Thien-Lan: So it’s, great for them especially when they are they don’t have much budget and and it. Showed to drive a lot more conversion. And also a lot of those brands, they have their own app. They have their own consumer database, so they give exposure to their own merchants through their apps.

Thien-Lan: So let’s say on the Klan apps, you will say you will have or buy from ex brands, and then consumers will go directly from the cla up to that. Instead of going through Instagram ads or, Google search.

Brent: Yeah. And I think the other thing would be to make sure that they’re at least saving the token for the credit card to check out.

Brent: So second time around, you don’t have to enter all that information. Talk a little bit about that friction that happens in shipping and payment in your check.

Thien-Lan: Yeah so yeah, as I said, the number one reason for car abandonment is high shipping costs. So that’s why it makes sense to offer various options and buy, install to buy online pickup in store.

Thien-Lan: Is a interesting one. And yeah, we’ve partnered with French Magento extension provider called Why Your Mind That does very good quality extensions to allow that and add all these options. So the, this is The more payment and shipping options you offer, the less friction you get because consumers want certain options and if you don’t have them, they will go elsewhere.

Thien-Lan: So for shipping, that’s a great one. And for payments, either, they, one of the reason why they leave a website is also when they don’t trust the website. They have never heard of that band before, that the item is interesting and they don’t want to leave their credit card. So in that case, they would rather, for example, use paper.

Thien-Lan: And so it’s a good one to offer as well.

Brent: Just going back to the shipping I spoke with somebody earlier who said that they clicked on an Instagram ad and they were they needed something for a holiday. I don’t remember the holiday, but they needed it by a specific date and they said the shipping would be three to five days.

Brent: Their date was two weeks out, so there was plenty of time the two weeks came and went and there that nothing was ever shipped. Talk about the importance of maybe some reviews and having that knowledge that, hey, that item is actually gonna get there on time. Because I think sometimes people also wanna know that I’m gonna buy this and I need this, and if I don’t get it in this amount of time, I’m gonna go somewhere else.

Thien-Lan: Yep. So I guess there are two things here. One is setting expectations. So having the right information, the accurate information about when the item is going to arrive at your place is important. The other day I went to a local merchant and they have their own calculation and algorithm saying, Oh, for shipping it might be three, four.

Thien-Lan: But then they don’t re, it’s not accurate. It doesn’t really talk to the carrier. So it’s not, that trustworthy. So if you can, have the right timing and specify information about. When the order is going to be processed, when is going to be packed, when is it’s going to be shipped, and based on how far the consumer is, how long it’s going to take to be shipped, that would be the best.

Thien-Lan: But yeah, otherwise it is better to, overestimate the shipping time, then underestimate and then disappoint.

Brent: All right. So let’s get then to the, Oh we’ve talked a lot about frictions. Tell us about how, maybe, how one a checkout can help reduce that friction with the client at checkout.

Thien-Lan: Yep. After shipping cost being the number one reason for car and the number, the second one is forcing consumers to create an account. So how many times have you been to a website where, Click on cards I want to pay. And then you have that page that says, Log in, I’ll create an account. And you can’t do anything.

Thien-Lan: You can’t, pay, you can’t get your item. And 25% of consumers leave at that point. So we, OneStepCheckOut we’ve been addressing that. Thanks to feedback from a lot of our merchants and clients, and what we do is we allow to create an account by simply using all the information that anyone would answer when they fill out their shipping details.

Thien-Lan: So email, first name, last name, address, and the only thing you need to add it is a small tick box where consumers can enter their passwords twice and that creates an account. So we call it seamless account registration, and it replaces that, account creation wall that is making, 25% of people leave.

Brent: Do you find at that stage some people forget that they have an account and they fill out all that information. How do you get around the idea? , they go through that, they forgot that they created an account and then they click and then it comes back and says, You already have an account.

Brent: Please enter your password. And then they’ve forgotten their password and by the time they get around to finding it, they’ve left because they forgot they were even what they were ordering. Yeah,

Thien-Lan: that happens quite a lot. So yeah. I think we also allow people to check out as. And then have the account reconciliation later after.

Thien-Lan: I have to get back to you on that. But I think that would be the sensible thing to do because you absolutely don’t want people to be stopped at that point when they’re ready. To give you money and to pay for that item.

Brent: Talk a little bit about the idea of one step checkout. What, like the reason why it’s called One Step?

Brent: I think that’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t think through all the different steps that they have to go at checkout.

Thien-Lan: So it all started with Magento one, and back then checkout was six steps. So it made a massive difference to have all those steps into just one. Above the fold with one single button that says Order now.

Thien-Lan: So you can fill out all your fields and not click any next button, just one big button order now.

Brent: So it’s making sure that there’s almost nothing you have to do make sure you complete checkout. How about making sure that users The right address and things like that. I’m assuming, integrates with other plat or other services that help find the right address.

Brent: Yeah, go ahead.

Thien-Lan: The key advantage of our product is that we integrate with. 90% of the third party extensions that are out there. So address validation, that works really well. Tax calculation shipping estimates, any shipping extension hundreds of payment extensions. So whatever you need, you can integrate it with one step checkout.

Brent: All right. I wanna switch directions just slightly. Okay. Are you seeing the same amount of people on Magento two using your services, or do you feel like it’s declining right now?

Thien-Lan: So with Magento two, we could see that it’s on the other side of the product maturity curve. The number of install.

Thien-Lan: And the number of orders for Agen two has been slowing down. But as I said, with Hova, it’s been picking back up, so that’s why I’m saying it’s bringing sexy back. And so a lot of, I would say, yeah, big proportion of new orders from west of checkout, from gen two are driven by hiva things. .

Brent: So you would, you could say that HAFA is changing.

Brent: HOA is ch is saving Magento from the dorans, from the tomb.

Thien-Lan: Let’s say that .

Brent: Absolutely. So if you have something that we started off with spooky and scary. What would be the biggest thing you could tell a merchant that they should think about for. website and for their checkout process,

Thien-Lan: I would say yeah, performance is key.

Thien-Lan: So today people don’t want to wait. Most people would buy their holidays, gifts on mobile, so it has to be mobile friendly. Loading really fast, allowing them to browse and or even, guiding them into what would be the most interesting, the best selling products because people are also looking for inspiration and then removing friction all the way through to check out and let them place their order without asking them for too many questions or asking them to do too many things.

Thien-Lan: So a lot of a lot of that friction is also in the order. Subscribe to our newsletter, get $5 off. Remember this, do this, do that. And you’re like, Go away. Go away. I want my product. And then someone calls you, you do something else, and then you go to another website

Brent: to shop. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great point.

Brent: I do, I’ve had quite a few guests that say, Love you learn to love the popup, but make sure you don’t have the popup in checkout. Because it I agree. It’s so annoying when you’re typing in. All of a sudden you get the popup and says, that, says, Enter your email address and subscribe to our newsletter when you could have a checkbox in your checkout that says, I’m, I’d like to subscribe your newsletter , because you’re putting your email address anyways.

Brent: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a really great point. Popups popups, especially on mobile. I think the other thing is that merchants still are thinking desktop first, and we’ve talked about performance and we’ve talked about friction in the checkout. Friction in the checkout is even more when you’re on mobile because it’s so much smaller.

Brent: So having that easy to use navigation is so important. Do you have any words of advice for people to. Enter as little as possible for the checkout. For mobile, You mean for consumers? No. For a merchant. Is there anything that they can do to reduce the amount of things like you, You said that having options for shipping, but I think.

Brent: At some point, if you have so many options, that’s too many options to show on your mobile phone. Is it recommended that you have as little options or making sure that they don’t have a lot of opt or even that’s where the free shipping would come in, where they don’t even have to choose shipping because it’s free.

Brent: Anything that, and that helps merchants check out on mobile quicker.

Thien-Lan: Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting point and I’ve seen it with. A lamp company. So they are the biggest in Europe. They have lamp.de eliminations.co, uk, lamp.fr, and 13 lamp sites across Europe. And for all their websites they have, they almost removed the shipping method.

Thien-Lan: Section because they have one carrier, one shipping cost, and you don’t have to choose. So that makes the whole checkout form much shorter and it’s quicker. People don’t have to wonder, Oh, what do I want? It just tells you what you’re going to have and that’s it.

Brent: So you’d say they’re helping us shed new light on the checkout process?

Thien-Lan: Yep. They help. Yep. They help simplify the whole thing and I guess they’ve seen that consumers are happy with that. So why give the choice when you know it’s the best options for you as a merchant and consumers are happy?

Brent: Excellent. Telan we are running outta time. And as a bonus on the episode I do want to do another free.

Brent: Because it’s Halloween and I have a Halloween joke for you. And then we’re gonna go into our shameless plug. But before we get there, I do have a special Halloween segment joke for you today. So again, this one is free or paid. Are you ready? Ready. Why did the policeman ticket the ghost on Halloween?

Brent: It didn’t have a haunting license.

Thien-Lan: paid with

subscription .

Brent: Excellent. Good. All right. Yeah. Tn Lan, Thank you so much. As I close out every episode, I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today?

Thien-Lan: The only thing I didn’t mention was that Natasha Sonoma from the Forbes.

Thien-Lan: Council is the CEO of Optt, O P W T Y, and that’s innovative platform that allows you to acquire and manage all your, by now, pay later brands all in one space. So that’s really cool because depending on your. Not all the favorite brands are the same. And if you operate in lots of different countries, you can acquire them all at once, and then in the panel you can see who is performing better and you can dial up that down based on your storefronts.

Thien-Lan: So that really helps consumers have the preferred payment methods. And in terms of integration, that helps all the hustle. talking to each of the brands, integrating them into your two checkout, and then seeing which one works for you. Yeah, excellent. For one, it’s not a plug for one step checkout, but for Opti, and that is compatible with one Step out as well.

Thien-Lan: So it’s like a Lego blog. You have one to click out, you plug Opti and from Opti you can have access to 60 by no pay later. .

Brent: Very cool. Thank you so much. And I will put all these in the show notes and I will try to get this episode live as soon as possible so we are not so far away. Ka TA’s Halloween and it won’t go live today, I’m afraid, but we should have done a live stream.

Brent: That would’ve been a good idea. Yeah. Anyways thank you so much for being here today. 10. Who also helps on the Magento Association. I appreciate all your work and she’s now showing us a nice sticker for one step checkout. I would encourage everybody to go there for their Magento two sites, and I would encourage everybody to use hfa.

Brent: Our newest HofA is our newest sponsor for Talk Calm. So you’re excited about

Thien-Lan: that as well. There you go. I wasn’t even paid to talk about them. ,

Brent: thank you so much. Have a great. .

Thien-Lan: Thank you. Bye.

The Big Blue Wave with Robert Rand

April 14, 2023October 3, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

What is a healthy ecosystem? Is it with a platform that only focuses on large enterprise clients like the fortune 500? Or is a healthy ecosystem around a broad base of commerce users that can mature and grow into a large company?

Robert Rand and Brent talk about the future of Magento Open source and what Adobe could do to help the community. We debate on the sliming of the core to add more features.

What do you think? We finish the episode talking about Shopware and the blue wave coming to the USA.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to build an ecosystem. We discuss what Shopware is doing to build its ecosystem and the resources they are putting into making this happen.

Making a Breeze out of Magento with Dimitry Diejew

April 14, 2023September 8, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

Welcome to the new Breeze theme. Consider it the new base instead of Luma to build your next theme. SwissUpLabs created their new open-source template to improve customer engagement and make your site the search engine’s top priority.

With the Breeze theme, it becomes easier to provide an excellent user experience and higher sales conversion. The Breeze Blank theme is designed for all devices and by multilingual clients. The minimalist design is great for any type of website, and the Blank options maximize your customization opportunities. The theme maximizes Your Google Light House Score.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce today I have Dimitry Diejew. Go ahead and introduce yourself pronounce your name much better than I did. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.

Dimitry: Brent. Thank you very much for your invitation to your podcast. My name is Dimitry and I’m from SwissUpLabs company.

Dimitry: I’m a co-founder and product manager. Recently our company is focused on Breeze Front End. And I think we can talk about this a bit later on. And if you are interested in my interest, I think that the most beautiful part of our life is simply traveling with people. You love hiking cooking taste food, and eating it together.

Dimitry: Something like.

Brent: Thank you for that. So today we’re gonna talk about speed and why speed is important. And specifically around Magento two maybe talk a little bit about your experience around Magento two and some of the issues that we’ve seen after it’s been seven, eight years.

Brent: We’ve seen the Magento Luma theme. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to start this initiative and what you’re doing?

Dimitry: Yes. Frankly speaking. Yes. Magento two with us from 2015 and it’s now for seven years and Luma theme frankly speaking, I think there were no updates to it for this seven years and world really changes for last seven years.

Dimitry: We a lot of bad chance simply face it new requirements from Google. It’s like it happened three or four, four years ago that Google announces that it’ll rank search results, according to page speed of each page. So slow pages, slow sites will be shown as a bottom part of the page and the faster sites we’ll have some positive results, and for the last two years, people are starting to ask how I can my make my Magento site faster and get better run in Google. And I think everyone in Magento two ecosystem faces the same problem that making Luma fast is not easy. And here we, that is why we decided to create breeze.

Dimitry: And share

Brent: it with

Dimitry: the community.

Brent: Yeah. I think that if we look at the broad scope of how many Magento websites are out there, it has to be 90 some percent that are incredibly slow. So was it the speed issue that prompted you to create breeze or was there other underlying things that made you want to start it and then maybe speak a little bit about the fact that it’s it’s open source.

Dimitry: Ah it’s better toward the extent why we created Breeze you will look at the history, how we created it. First of all, at SwissUpLabs we’re offering extension and templates and our customers, usually when they install our products, they’re checking. Okay. What will be page speed of our sites after using that product.

Dimitry: And they constantly were asking why it’s slow, how we can make it faster. So first we came with page speed extension, and I think that every extension vendor on the market ha have extension like this that is. Offering like image optimization, Java script bundling like critical CSS and many other like small tricks to make

Dimitry: lumas seem faster. But after several years we simply stack into the wall and said, okay, we can’t make it faster because there is a lot of CSS and default luma theme and you can’t remove it or throw away. There is a lot of Java script. Knockout JS is like simply killing the page score. Even without any extension, it was critical as flow.

Dimitry: So more than one year ago we decided to play and like experiment and we created extension that was killed was named bridges. So we simply thrown away all, almost all Javascript tag that came with Luma. And we code it and used several libraries that allow it to make JavaScript part of Luma much smaller.

Dimitry: But in the end, we had the same Luma styles, the same templates, but Java script was controlled by. And initially it was not free. It was like provided only for our customers and. Later we saw that it’ll bring a lot of profit for community if we will make it free. So we decided to make it free.

Dimitry: And people started using it was still slow because it was not complete solution. It was just replacement of Java script. And then we said, okay, we need to make it in the right way. So we decided to create the. That will show the full power and remove and all other issues from Luma frontend.

Dimitry: And that is how we created Breeze frontend. And now we are also offering Breeze evolution Theme that is also free and our main idea because of that stands behind of Breeze is that Magento is open source. And we think that frontend that used by many people also should be open source that anyone can contribute it, that you can fork it, you can offer your features.

Dimitry: And that is how open source community simply works.

Brent: I just want to be clear, is it is a re it’s a replacement of Luma, or are you basing this off the Luma?

Dimitry: It’s complete replacement right now. We are only using Luma out because it’s like, it’s a really complex part of front end and we are still not sure what to do with it because like every payment extension shipping extension, it’s based on KnockoutJS and it’ll be like, Which this will be very careful with checkout, but as far as we know, Google simply doesn’t measure the speed of checkout page.

Dimitry: So for now we replace all pages and it’s not based on Luma zero inheritance from Luma.

Brent: So later on then is there gonna be a lot of work for developers to get extensions working with Breeze or is it essentially a breeze to get it working together. That was a small

Dimitry: joke. Okay. Is okay. Yeah. We really wanted to make it breathe, but anyway, you still have JavaScript code that is based on the KnockoutJS and all other libraries that came came with Luma.

Dimitry: You need to rewrite your JavaScript code and that is most time consuming part of migration. Then you have to update your less style a bit, and that it after that your extension will work frankly speaking key, you will simply install an extension at the Breeze evolution team or Breeze blank scene.

Dimitry: You will see all main blocks, simply functionality, Java script will not work. So that is how it.

Brent: Can you talk a little bit about the difference on this theme and what Adobe is pushing under PWA and why would somebody still want to use breeze over going with PWA?

Dimitry: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it’s a good question. PWA is really great technology. And I think that a lot of big companies will benefit from it, but it’s as far as, remember, it’s already two years on the market, like with PWA studio and we don’t see like a huge List of stores that are using it.

Dimitry: If you will check the number of store that are using Magento two, it is like it’s hundred of thousand, something like that. Probably less, a little bit more. But with when you are looking for a list of stories that are using PWA studio it’s not as big as number of Magento two stores.

Dimitry: So it’s really looks that a lot of Magento two store owners simply afraid or simply don’t have enough money to migrate to headless solution that is why I think that it’s like, it was quite a clear with message from community that was sent one year ago. His open letters that We still need monoliths front end.

Dimitry: And that is why we came into this direction. And we think that from, for small store owners and even medium size businesses, it’s still okay to use monolith front end because it’s easier to develop. It’s easier to maintain

Brent: You’ve made a really good point about the ease of use.

Brent: And that PWA requires you to have two different separate stacks and maintain both of those. And also having a separate place or could be the same place. But hosting would also be a little bit more complicated with PWA. Do you think that Adobe is missing something here by only pushing PWA?

Dimitry: I can say for sure, but I think that Adobe has its own role. It’s serve its own clients’ interest. And for people that are using Adobe commerce it’s much easier to use PWA and it’s within a reach of their budget, but I think it’s if you will see at the numbers, like 90% of all Magento users is open source and not everyone will be able to use PWA.

Dimitry: So there is really need for good and fast and easy to use monilith front end, frankly, speaking, working with Magento from day one when it was variant studio as far remember. And when it’s just it was published, it like, it was a lot of people and everybody was happy. Cause it was to edit everything because he was able to like story owner with low technical skill was able to create store around it and modify it according to their needs with Magento two.

Dimitry: And Luma frontend, it became a bit more complex. And our old clients that us, for 10 years, they say, okay, we are missing times from Magento one when we were able to simply edit template files. And it was easy for us. We were able to do that without expensive developers, I don’t understand Adobe positions that they are pushing the PWA technology, but I think that the risk space and the risk requirements for different types of front ends,

Brent: I’m gonna ask a question about the Magento association or the Magento community in general.

Brent: Do you feel as though. Either Mage-OS or the Magento association should take over the responsibility of the open source product. So things like breeze will continue to grow and and go out into the marketplace. Or do you think that what we’re doing already and how open source is positioned with Adobe that there’s enough behind it for them?

Dimitry: I think that mag association should simply create a place where different companies developers can offer their solution for real needs of store owners. So there be diversity, if you want to choose this solution, you can go visit probably you will like breathe or probably you’re still okay with Luma.

Dimitry: Because it’s like cheaper because every extension or themes that you can buy because I was reading a lot about current state of Magento to community. And I see that there is a lot of talks about how things should be from position of agencies and like quite big companies that are using Magento two.

Dimitry: But I still see that almost no one is speaking in the behalf of small story owners, there is still a lot of I think it’s thousands and thousands of store owners that creates their stores by them own like it all day. So Magento one and they are doing updates. They installing extension Magento two I think it’s simply one of the best eCommerce platforms on the market, simply because of that, it simply gives you a lot of power right out of the box.

Dimitry: No other platform will give you that for free. And that is why I think it’s simply a great chance for any small merchant that has right set of skills to create and run successful store with a low budget. If you know what you’re doing, you can do that. It’s just I think so.

Brent: Yeah. So as you grow or as breeze grows what are the things that are coming out? What are the features and what are the new things you’re gonna be releasing under the breeze logo or breeze brand?

Dimitry: Okay. As I said right now we are still not covering issue with checkout because. Check out at Magento two is also, it’s not fast.

Dimitry: If you will check discussion at Reddit or Linkedin, and many people complains that there is a lot of request the page can load for several seconds and you need to optimize it. So we think that we will take care of that issue. But my issue here is that we made Breeze. Mostly because we need a really good feedback from community because developers.

Dimitry: And store owners really understand what’s their problems. And as soon as they will start implementing Breeze start using it they will come to us and

Dimitry: then they will tell, here is the problem let, cause is Luma, because it was published at seven years ago, and for that time there was no update of front end, and for this time, there were a lot of changes on the market.

Dimitry: For now, we have a front end that simply outdated. And with brief, I think we want to go with the way of evolutions that we will have requests from community. We will add it. Probably somebody will push some ideas, push some commits, and we’ll also include it in terms of Breeze.

Dimitry: So community will decide what to do with Breeze in one or another.

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. From a I want to just go back a little bit about the the Adobe PWA. I think Adobe is arguing or would say that it’s easier to integrate experience manager with a PWA. What would be your reaction when somebody says something like that and how hard is it to integrate a, another CMS platform into Magento as a monolith?

Dimitry: I think that I’m wrong person to answer that question, but I think every technology or stack has its strong and weak sides. As I said, we working with small store owners and they simply don’t have such need cause if you want to implement other platform, okay.

Dimitry: I have a good example. We really like implementation of integration of WordPress with Magento two that was done by Fishpig company. I think we are using it in almost every second project. So if it’s can be done with WordPress. So I think it can be done with any other type of CSM, but as. Our goal is to serve small small business and medium sized business.

Dimitry: And percent Magento open source.

Brent: Yeah. And I think that you’ve identified a really, a large portion of users of Magento two that I think Adobe has forgotten about and that is the small business user who’s simply using Magento two for their store, and they don’t want to invest all the money in all the other Adobe products that maybe Adobe’s trying to do.

Dimitry: Tell us Adobe will be really surprised to see how many offsite stores in

Brent: the world. Yeah, it is a incredibly popular platform still. So tell us how do they find you? How do they find the, your company and get in touch with you?.

Dimitry: Simply word of the mouth. They found us in the Google. It’s find sync, if you will check Magento or Adobe marketplace. I think there are just five or seven template on the marketplace and just like six of this seven template are from our company. So they’re simply going to marketplace.

Dimitry: There the main vendors that sell in here templates, then they go into our site, checking our products, reading our reviews, and now I really hope that more and more people will start using Breeze frankly, speaking via publish it evolution and Breeze blank on marketplace and receive that popularity.

Dimitry: It’s keeping growing. And we see like quite many installation every

Brent: day. Yeah. That’s great. And just your the website for the theme is breeze front.com, right? Breeze B R E Z E front.com.

Dimitry: Yeah. We, yeah. And yeah, that is correct. We created,

Brent: Separate side. Great. And the, your company is Swiss up labs.com.

Brent: Yeah. Great. So Dimitri, as we close out on every podcast, I give a guest an opportunity to give a shameless plug about anything. What would you like to plug today?

Dimitry: Okay. I don’t want to talk about our company or Breeze because discuss that. I just probably want to ask everyone if we will listen to simply help Ukraine our companies through from Ukraine, developers, from Ukraine, and now really like in very difficult situation. And we really appreciate any help business support from countries all around the world.

Dimitry: And. We will appreciate any

Brent: kind of help. Yes. And are you in Ukraine right now?

Dimitry: No. No, I’m not in Ukraine. I’m in Poland for the last seven years, but many our developers are still living in Ukraine. Good.

Brent: And how are they doing now? Are they, are you still be able to function and get most of their work done?

Dimitry: Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite strange, but that people are still going to work. They’re still having their life here and It’s difficult. It’s tough, but people are standing.

Brent: That’s great. And I know that there’s lots of places that you can help out and contribute to the Ukrainian cause.

Brent: Dimitri, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate your time. And again, I encourage people to go to breeze front.com and see it. I’ve seen some of the lighthouse scores. Your theme is scoring. Fantastic. And I’m so excited that there’s more and more people that are building and growing their Magento two practices and that you’ve offered this fantastic front end as a replacement for that very slow back end.

Brent: And I just wanna add it’s probably more than seven years. The ver very first version of Magento two was supposed to be out in 2012. I don’t know if anybody remembers, but. It has been 10 years since the launch date was announced. Yeah. So the theme is probably older than seven years, but it is very, what you’re doing is very well needed.

Brent: Thank you so

Dimitry: much community about our product. I think that it’ll really help a lot of people out there.

Meet Magento Singapore with Sushma Vyas

April 14, 2023August 4, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

We interview Sushma Vaya (@sushmavyas) with Ranosys from Singapore. #mm22sg Sushma has been organizing Meet Magento Singapore since its inception. We learn about Singapore’s vibrant and friendly city-state and the great event the team organizes. Listen to the entire episode and give me your feedback on the MA Pledge commercial I created at the end!

Meet Magento Singapore happens live on August 25th, 2022. Don’t miss it. https://meetmagento.sg

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this special

Brent: Magento Association edition of

Brent: Talk Commerce

Brent: today. I have Sushma Vyas. She is in Singapore and she is with Meet Magento Singapore. We are going to talk about the event and how fun it was and how fun it’s going to be into the future. Sushma, go ahead,

Brent: introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.

Sushma: Thank you, Brent. Very happy, feeling really related to be part of this. My name is Sushma as you already shared with everyone in summary. If I would say one liner, my day to day job is to make sure people associated with us are happy.

Sushma: I act as the COO chief operating officer with Ranosys, I’m the organizer also for Meet Magento Singapore. I take care of end to end operations for the company, making sure all the departments meet their KPIs, people attached with us. I really mean it. Whether they are partners, our customers of all important people, team members, employees are happy.

Sushma: That’s the goal. And that’s what I do being in Singapore for past 18 plus years now. And yeah, I think that summarizes that’s.

Brent: So your real role as a chief happiness. I wish . I went to Meet Magento Singapore in 2019, and it’s such a great city, such a great community. And the event was so well put on, tell us a little bit about the history of Meet Magento Singapore, why you guys started it and a little bit about the event.

Sushma: Thanks. One of my favorite points to talk about we’ve been associated with Magento per se from I’d say it’s childhood days, because we used to do those little Magento meetups when we were very young as a company, Magento also was running community editions and all, and we did see. Real good potential traction people attached around 2016,17,18.

Sushma: We did attend a lot of Magento events globally and that got us excited that let’s have one Meet Magento Singapore itself. And the thought was really well taken by Adobe commerce aka/Magento. And we got this to own and organize Meet Magento Singapore. It was really, it has been an exciting journey.

Sushma: It was when the very first event, what I’d say was the most exciting for us was that Singapore hosts and is easy for people. It attracts people, businesses, retail, commerce, especially a lot more. Easier. Sorry. If I sound biased than a lot of other countries, it has that reputation and comfort as well.

Sushma: The venue has been amazing, I’d say. And we’ve enjoyed. And of course we all know since past three years, the journey we have seen how pretty and commerce has transformed. Likewise has the event itself opening it up for online presence mix of both. So in all, I’d say it’s been insightful.

Sushma: This is something that we ourselves learn from people around the globe when they come here and everyone builds that bond, that community. So exciting journey.

Brent: If you were to say to someone to attend the event what would be the some of the big draws to attend meet Magento Singapore.

Sushma: I’ll talk about Singapore, right. First is really the place, because as much as it is a little red dot, a small place, it brings, it offers everything. It attracts businesses. It adopts technology really fast and well. The place itself is an attraction

Sushma: we, I would say people to come and visit and see how this is so well organized, disciplined, yet open for innovation. And it implements that. Of course, because of all these things, there are huge brands companies who have their foundation here who have their offices here. So they can see and communicate, I mean, that community bonding and they can see how these big brands are facing the challenges, implementing it via technologies, solving it.

Sushma: For Meet Magento Singapore, I’ll say, come for our after parties as well. I know after parties are fun everywhere, but I, I really Bo that some of the best after parties we’ve had the venue is great Marina Basin and it’s real fun here. Meeting people from close to a hundred plus countries and connecting, talking.

Sushma: it’s a different mode that you see them in after parties and different insights that you get during the event and talks.

Brent: I think that we forgot about the importance of meeting people in person and everybody thought, oh, now that everybody’s doing zoom meetings and online that the live event is dead.

Brent: But I think what we’ve found is that, people desire to see people in person. And not only do you get to go to a great event, but you get to see a great city and then you get to see different cultures and all kinds of things that are wrapped around traveling to a different type of place. And I agree that Singapore is very easy to get to for us in the US.

Brent: It’s a long way. It’s halfway around the world, but yes, you know, it’s very easy. It’s very accessible. And I can say that even the customs. Everybody was so nice and it’s so easy to get through the cultures. There’s multiple cultures. We in 2019, we brought eight people from our office in Ahmedabad to Singapore.

Brent: And what did we do as soon as we landed, everybody wanted to find their Gujurati restaurant to eat at. So we all found the section of town that had a Gujurati restaurant and we ate there. So it, there, there is food for everybody. Something for everybody to offer. What would you say to a sponsor who would like to sponsor Meet Magento

Sushma: for sponsor?

Sushma: See, I think there’s a wonderful mix of audience because there’s a very good balance in terms of merchants, in terms of technology, partners, partners, and end users customers. So with this balance, they get to have their message reach the right people. It’s not lopsided.

Sushma: So there is one real advantageand we take of it. Otherwise, even the ecosystem is such that it attracts all these different pool of people. So that’s one of the biggest advantages for sponsors plus I shared, there’s this very easy ethos reputation of delivery that its Singapore has gained.

Sushma: Its its rapport in terms of making sure businesses are smoother run. The government would say, we’ll take care of the hassle for you. We’ll make sure things are things are not full of bumps for you, and you make sure that the business is flourishing. So that kind of something is a healthy sign for someone to sponsor in an ecosystem like this.

Sushma: So usually this is also something that we hear from our sponsors and, Yes, digital marketing and all there’s a good outreach. There’s a good reach that they get from. So, yeah, that’s what we would tell them,

Brent: From the event organizer side. So I know renos has been organizing, Meet Magentol Singapore.

Brent: If other organizers would like to organize an event in a different region, a different city, do you have some advice for them that to get started and some reasons why they would want to get started organizing a meat Magento in a different city?.

Sushma: Why they should or why they good for sure.

Sushma: Organizers do gain a lot of publicity for sure. And learning on top of that, because something that we, even our own customers, our partners, something that we see them when they are there on the stage speaking or discussing, it’s a very different learning and insight that we get, which otherwise in day to day

Sushma: communication or interactions we don’t get each other on that level of thinking or discussion. This is something we must do because meeting and meeting them in a different mindset is together new learning. And we build a bond, a community which is memorable to us, plus helping the overall ecosystem.

Sushma: if there are any tips or anything, that we follow, or we would prefer people to follow is maintain that local touch, what that place is known for, because people would come from far away from different places to also know more about that place as it there’s nothing beautiful or ugly.

Sushma: It’s the combination that makes that place really different and unique. So I’d say maintain that, make sure people also know more about the place, know the local touch, local flavor. So that event automatically becomes very special and unique. There are many things, but this is what I feel we must consider.

Brent: I like what you said about having a different mindset to learn. And I think that oftentimes as we are pushing our whole team to do work that we forget that our team has to also learn about what’s new. If we continue to work on what’s old, then all we’re gonna do is create old things, creating new things requires new knowledge.

Brent: And I agree that you get put into a different mindset and you’re not in front of a bunch of screens. You may be in front of your laptop while you’re watching the speaker speak, but you’re not in front of 10 screens with a dog barking and somebody asking you it’s time for dinner. It puts you in a place where you are in a learning mode.

Brent: Maybe speak to that learning mode a little bit.

Sushma: If I take myself as an example, I don’t come from a technical background. But when I’m there, I listen to those even technical talks or innovations, it makes me more excited to know more Magento as a platform. I would’ve never known otherwise. Except for that. Okay. Customers need this.

Sushma: We fulfill this, the depth of it. I would’ve never known or never have been inquisitive to know that. Okay. Alright. There is this feature. So because when during panel discussions or somebody shares, you can do this, just talking about that specific feature, which to me appears like magic. And then I feel, oh, okay.

Sushma: Then what else does it do? What else does it do? Where else can it be implemented? And it gives ideas. Okay. Not necessarily here. It can be used somewhere else. So I’m a student there. Actually, when I participate or I hear the talks, the speakers talking about it. Likewise, someone whose technical may find interesting business cases, which he, or she, would’ve not thought of while working on that piece of code or that piece of integration.

Brent: I know that there has always been a developer track or a technical track, and there has been a business track. And that just means that there’s something for both audiences. There’s something for merchants to learn about what are the new things that I can do on Magento or Adobe commerce.

Brent: And I know, especially for the developers, they can learn about the newest technology things that may put a merchant to sleep. Having that ability to see those different pieces of the puzzle and spark some interest. And I’m just gonna say that those new things create innovation because a merchant may say, oh, I saw this at this event.

Brent: I’d like to do it on my site, but I’d like to do it in this way. The pushing the boundaries. I sit on the membership committee and Meet Magento Association is trying to get more members as part of the Magento Association. What would you say to people who not are not sure or don’t know why they should join.

Brent: Do you have any good advice for them?

Sushma: I’d say definitely join because. I’ll make it a little more philosophical if you hope you don’t mind, because at the end of the day, all of us want to contribute. All of us want to give back. In that effort, what we gain is enormous. When we join our intention was really not, oh, we give back, we do this.

Sushma: You know, okay, it’s a community we want to learn. I’m very attached to this by the way association, because we’ve gained a lot, whatever we’ve gained, I’d say from our years still now it’s because of that and because of the community it creates. So the fulfillment part is huge. In addition to what we gain in terms of repeat learning resources to knowing problems before you face it and solutions, how these get resolved.

Sushma: All this is. I always are like, I’d say golden assets of having being part of a community in which Magento association gives you so readily easily. I would not ask anyone to think twice about it because this is one of the strongest, one of the biggest, and I wish all the best because that shouldn’t die.

Brent: And even at the lowest level, it’s $1 a month, so $12 a year. And I think that allows anybody, the facility to join and they’re coming. We are coming out with some other models where companies can sponsor their employees to join as well. So there’s gonna be continued innovations from the Magento Association to help membership grow.

Brent: Sushma as we close out our podcast every week, I give the guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything promotion about anything you’d like to promote. What would you like to promote today?

Sushma: Hadn’t really thought about it so much what I’d like to promote, but, since I’m part of Ranosys, I’m part of this whole company that’s one, one thing that I can promote is that explore, recommend, refer, explore services.

Sushma: I think that’s about it. I wasn’t really that prepared about it. What, in my mind. So that’s what I can think is the first thing that’s. That’s

Brent: Thank you, Sushma. So thanks for staying up so late for me. I really appreciate it. Oh,

Sushma: it’s a

Brent: pleasure. Pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the, yeah, go ahead.

Sushma: I was saying you have some really interesting questions there.

Brent: Good. Yeah. And I, I wish you all the best in your event coming up. I wish I could be

Sushma: there this year thank you. Thank you so much.

Brent: I will miss you 2023. Yeah, hopefully,

Sushma: definitely. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thanks Brent. Have a lovely day. Bye-bye.

Magento Association – Meet Magento New York

April 14, 2023August 1, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

We interview Vijay Golani about the upcoming New York event and the Magento Association Events committee.

Here are some topics that were discussed at the event.

Magento machine learning – How Adobe and Magento are dealing with AI and Machine learning.
Magento university – It is now called Adobe Digital Learning Management.
Artificial intelligence – As from above – Machine learning and AI are a big part of what is happening in commerce.
Magento commerce merchants now enjoy fantastic Adobe commerce support.
Dedicated cloud service – Adobe Commerce Cloud is being integrated into other Adobe services.
Magento commerce is now called Adobe Commerce.
AI-powered inventory management and AI search are the new trend for 2023
Adobe Sensi is driving relevant products across the Adobe Commerce Platform.

Meet Magento Indonesia 2022

April 14, 2023July 26, 2022 by Brent W. Peterson

We interview Muliadi Jeo who organizes Meet Magento Indonesia. This is the seventh year for Meet Magento Indonesia.

This is a broader series of interviews to focus on the Magento Association. The goal of these interviews is to increase awareness and increase membership for the Magento Association.

The event happens on August 3rd, 2022 in Jakarta Indonesia

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Magento association or something. We don’t know what to call it yet, but this is promoting the Magento association today. I have Muliadi Jio from Indonesia, and he’s the organizer of Meet Magento. Indonesia

Muliadi: hey, Brent. Hey everybody. Good to see you all. And talk to you again, Brent

Brent: let’s dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your event, and how long you’ve had it running for.

Muliadi: This is if I count it this is supposed to be the, instead the six or the seven-year we run in Indonesia. So it’s always been offline, of course. And then the last two years, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we have to switch to online for a couple of years and this year.

Muliadi: So we are so excited. Finally, we were able to do it again as an in person meeting. And so far the respond, at least from the advertising for the sponsor side. They’re so excited. It’s been a while there’s no event and everybody just jump in and join. So we’re very excited.

Brent: And traditionally, you get a lot of people at this event.

Brent: Tell us about your attendance

Muliadi: and things like that. I remember when we started seven years ago I think that’s close to about a hundred people which is where we see, oh, that’s a good audience to start at that time. And then as we go year after year, I think the last. In person event on what’s that right before pandemic 2019 that one is actually around 600 people show up on the event.

Muliadi: And we can always unique us. So we have Three different track traditionally, so one track really for business and one track really for a solution. So where the sum of the sponsor can talk in the solution because they’re bringing their solution to it. And then the last track’s really more technical discussion.

Muliadi: And yeah, we have about 50/50 about like merchant versus a engineering dev flow burst kind of audience. .

Brent: And how about your venue and the location? Tell us a little bit about Indonesia. Why would, why should we all come to Indonesia?

Muliadi: Why would we want to come? I think most you have to, if you’ve never been to Indonesia, I think a lot of people very funny when we talk to a lot of people, especially from American or from the Europe, obviously a lot of people know Bali more than the Indonesia itself.

Muliadi: So when we talk about, do you know Bali. Indonesia, maybe not but obviously Bali sits in Indonesia and where we are is in Jakarta, which is the kind of the central the biggest city in Indonesia. We are close to two hours away from Bali. By flight.

Muliadi: Yeah. And then we’ve been doing this in Jakarta because like it’s all the business and all the enterprises all have the headquarter in Jakarta. It’s fun. You can fly to Jakarta and then you can, obviously once you’re in Indonesia, you should just explore to any, like to Bali and all the rest of the, a exotic islands on the east part of Indonesia.

Brent: And of course there’s so many exciting and beautiful places to visit in Indonesia. Obviously going to a Meet Magento event is such a great opportunity to travel and meet people. And from the sponsor standpoint maybe tell us a little bit about some of the merchants you have there and why somebody would want a sponsor.

Brent: A Meet Magento event.

Muliadi: Yeah, we traditionally very very localized as far as like our event. A lot of the sponsor, we get a lot of local sponsor, but obvious some we open up for a lot of international. Businesses that want to get their business exposed to Indonesia market, which is well known for the big population and the opportunity here.

Muliadi: So that’s always the kind of the attractive point to be able to get your business exposure to here in Southeast Asia especially in Indonesia itself. Yeah at our event is always free. That’s the unique part. Compared to any other event around crossroad on the other meet change event I think we are the only one that is free and fully funded by the sponsors.

Muliadi: Luckily and then, yeah it’s exciting.

Brent: And you have, you said you have three tracks that you’re running in conjunction with the event?

Muliadi: And they yes, there’s a three tracks. It’s a whole day event.

Brent: So you have a business track, a developer track. And what was the other.

Muliadi: It’s what we call it.

Muliadi: The solution track it’s really for people can present their product and basic more like showing kind of solutions. And typically we use that for the sponsor to be able more engaged and able to demo the product and stuff like that. But digital this year seems like we are going to

Muliadi: blend it together. We have a lot of different kind of speakers this year. Not only just a group sponsor, but as well, like a lot of the business practitioner. So we mix around all inside the three track that we have. We still have gonna have three tracks, but not like really divided that way anymore.

Muliadi: For this year.

Brent: So part of this is the Magento association now helps to promote these events. And Magento association has paid memberships now. So I’m on the membership committee. And our goal is to increase membership.

Brent: What would you say to people

Brent: who that, what would you say to people who encourage them to join the Magento Association?

Muliadi: I think let’s go back with the heart of this Magento is the community and this Magento has been really successful because all those community support. So I think the Magento association is becoming the form of that. And naturally we want to be part and this association and participate as much as we want

Muliadi: and that’s and in the form of the paying membership, I think that’s at least a little bit that you can do as far as participation, and that’s a lot more to participate. I believe you are also involved with much more than just a paying member. You are also involved in the comittee and a lot of the different stuff.

Muliadi: And I, I think that’s what we are looking forward with the Magento association. So we can recreate this vibrant community back where everybody can participate and basically yeah, I think in our maybe like blessing each other, something like that.

Brent: Go back to the beginning. And why you decided to put on a Meet Magento event, had you attended events in Europe?

Muliadi: So it’s by accident actually, I went back to Indonesia way back on 2010. So it’s almost 12 years now. Initially I just going back here because family reason and I was already have a good relationship with Magento. I was in the states for 16 years and right before I went back to Indonesia, I worked with a company called Guidance, which is.

Muliadi: Partner of Magento. We are among one of the first partner working with Magento directly, still in the Culver City office. Naturally when I went back to Indonesia at that time I’m building the first set of developers for Guidance and really focusing on Magento and it started with only a couple of us.

Muliadi: And then the team grew to five. And 10 and all of a sudden become a full team of I think at that time we still have about 15 people concentrating, really delivering the gentle project for our US clients, a lot of, but then Indonesia eCommerce picking up around 2012 to early 2013.

Muliadi: So then we get a lot more exposure with a big comp, a big company that interested to know more about Magento. And obviously at that time I still go back and forth, always attending the Imagine. We miss the Magento Imagine events. That’s been really great. And I met a lot of people there.

Muliadi: Some of them were was the founder of the Meet Magento association at that time still . And so we have a talk and then we would think, okay, maybe we can build a community in Indonesia. Why don’t we try? And then I talked to a couple folks on the Magento and they also interested to

Muliadi: build exposure in Indonesia. So we just launched our first event out of the blue working with Magento, working with several I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long and yeah, but that’s, it’s turned out really good. The event we get a lot of support from the local company, as well as audience that coming in and show really interest on the platform and interest in the building the community.

Muliadi: So just that’s becoming now every year after that, we just continue to have the events until now, basically. Guido is one of the first person actually flying to Indonesia on our yeah. Guido. Yeah. Guido Jensen. Yeah, he put

Brent: on the, I think they put the very first event in the Netherlands and I think Meet Magento, Netherlands by far is one of the best ones that’s out there still.

Brent: It’s such a fun event. Yeah.

Muliadi: Yep. And then the following year or year after two years after that, Thomas also fly to Indonesia. So yeah, it’s been really a good run. All right. Followed them, saying that I need to

Brent: come one of these years. I’ll come

Muliadi: next year. You need to, I’m gonna keep saying until you come here, please do so

Brent: tell us, how do they find an event?

Brent: is it

Muliadi: your address? It’s re really from information? Yes. So the official website is called very easy to remember is the M A G E dot ID. So it’s a mage.id as. So you can go to the website, you can see the agenda, you can see the speakers that are already set for this event. It’s gonna be on August 3rd.

Muliadi: So not too far, it’s less than two weeks. Their venue will be the venue address will be on the website and you can register there right away too. And like I said, it’s free.

Brent: So just outta curiosity when you do a free event, do you find a lot of people don’t show up?

Muliadi: Obviously with the free event typically the, from the registration and the show up is probably it’s a industry stranded around 60% show up or so 40% most likely not show up.

Muliadi: Yeah. But it’s still it’s still good number. We we’ve like we, with all the registration that we have it’s a good turnout

Brent: for us. Yeah. That’s a really good number. I know that so we organize meet Megento India. and did, have you been to meet Magento India yet?

Muliadi: Did you come?

Muliadi: No. No, you have to come we’re planning. I only went one time to Bangalore. Oh, that was

Brent: Magento live. Yeah. Anyways we get we pay, we have people pay, but we do get an incredible attendance. It’s in the 90%, the people that buy tickets come to the event. Yeah. I think all the meet Magento events and I’ve been to meet Magento Singapore as.

Brent: So that whole south Asia , meet Megento events you do such a great job putting those on I tended last year, virtually which was a very good event. , I stayed up late to to be a speaker in my evening. Thank you, morning. It, it was very good. I actually spoke the night and followed watched a lot of the speakers.

Brent: Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. I will put mage.id on the show notes and I wish you all the best in your event.

Muliadi: Thank you. Thank you, Brent. Really great talking to you as always. Thank you. And good night.