Marco Steinhäuser

A few days ago, I was attracted by a billboard advertisment at a tram station near my home. The poster is apparently part of a mobile marketing campaign by Christ Jewelers (German), one of the leading jewellery and watchmaker chains with stores in all of Germany’s big cities. Taking a closer look at the poster I found a QR code on it without any description and, as a curious person, I checked it out.

QR codes are a fantastic instrument in mobile product marketing… when they’re used wisely. What I found here, is a good example of an ill-conceived mobile campaign and a squandering of marketing euros.

First, you’ll be led to this URI: http://qr.christ.de/link/80ef6382f46050a15734b17f943cf4d. The trailing code eventually analyses which poster you have scanned… fair enough. After that, on your mobile device, you’ll be redirected to a landing page: http://landingpages-christ.de/jette_pure_passion/. This redirection didn’t work on a regular browser on my PC, it seems it’s only intended for mobile marketing

Although I doubt that landing pages, from an SEO point of view, are still of real value, this particular landing page is even less useful than others, because it doesn’t provide any meta or text information for search engines except of the URI. As a result, you won’t find it in any top-level position in a search engine even if you search for “jette pure passion”.

A boring embedded movie awaits you here, showing pieces of jewellery lying and hanging in a wood. The background music fits any 1970s film, and the movie itself cannot be skipped.

After a long wait (over 1:40 on 3G maximum speed – and remember, you are still at the tram station or in the tram already), you are allowed to enter Christ’s online store via the button “ZUM ONLINE SHOP” (even the font doesn’t fit well here and the letters are consequently cut off). Going further, you will realize that the storefront is not optimized for mobile devices. You will see the same user interface that you would access with your regular PC browser at http://www.christ.de… although with your mobile device, you sadly cannot even navigate through the flyout categories.

To be honest, I cannot even imagine how this epic marketing failure could have happened to a big player like Christ with an ocean of employees (of which at least some must be using mobile devices) and a large marketing budget. Christ should be able to afford a professional mobile marketing campaign without any of the problems I described above.

What do you think? Why do you think this mobile marketing campaign could have ended up so miserably? I’m interested in your opinion, so write in and let me know!

In the recent months, I attended all of the main trade fairs of the e-commerce industry in Germany and France:

• dmexco (Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference) in Cologne
• Salon E-Commerce in Paris
• MOW (Mail Order World) in Wiesbaden

I joined the OXID eSales crew at our booths and I would like to share my very personal take aways of the events with you.

Don’t just ask me what the software can do for you – also ask what you can do for the software

A main part of my job as the Community Guide at OXID eSales is to help spreading the word about OXID eShop and to ultimately help grow the open-source community. Thus, I am very happy to talk to booth visitors and agencies interested in our product range and the community. In particular, I enjoyed a lot of very interesting conversations to folks who knew what open source software is about; people who came up with really good ideas, being excited about new challenges to enhance OXID eShop and committed to sharing some very interesting extensions.

Yet, there have been visitors at the booth who made me feel cheap because they were just interested in free as in free beer. I could smell their greed and selfishness. In such cases, I will kindly ask you to download, install and check for yourself. Also, I will not walk you through all the implemented features and I will not help you find modules available for no or very low cost.

If you want e-commerce software at no cost and don’t want to get involved in an open-source community at all, that’s perfectly legit, but don’t waste my time. If, on the other hand, you ask questions on our forums, I and other community members would be happy to help, because the answer to your question will help others.

To make a long story short: Free riders are welcome as long as they don’t waste the time of those in our community who want to build something together.

There are many ways how to contribute: Your translation to another language is as welcome as bug reports, module and core contributions. Even with the purchase of a commercial license you foster the development of our open-source edition.

What does open source development mean for a product also sold under a commercial license?

At the booths, I often got asked about how the OXID eShop open-source community influences development of the Professional and Enterprise Edition.

The short answer is: The community would kick our ass if we developed and communicated badly – and it did so in the past.

By going open source in 2008, we deliberately self-imposed community pressure upon OXID eSales. Since then, the community influences our product development.

For example: Instead of hiding security issues, we are forced to fix those issues in a short time, in fact until another developer will come up with the problem. On the communications side, we inform solution partners and support contract owners beforehand by distributing a private security bulletin to them, given that they still need some time to implement the fix we provide, before we make the bulletin publicly available.

Dear potential partners, get to grips with your channel concept

I have also been approached by potential partner companies at the three events. Most of them would like to join for just one reason: to have us forward leads to them. Of course, this is totally fine from a business perspective and OXID eSales is happy to negotiate such agreements. Yet, such a one-sided approach neglects the benefits of the open-source community for our partners.

So, at the booths, I always advised potential partners to consider how they can tap into the OXID eShop community or related open-source communities to promote their products or services. For example, the payment providers we partner with have developed interfaces or modules for connecting OXID eShop with their infrastructure. That way, they provide something useful to the OXID eShop or related communities and get word-of-mouth marketing going.

There are many different aspects to consider when distributing a newsletter to clients of your online store: categorization, definition, content, legal conditions and technical facts. In this post, I’ll concentrate only on the technical aspects.

Newsletters are emails containing information or promotions that you, as a shop owner, wish to send to your registered customers. In some countries, the newsletter recipient has to explicitly agree to receive such information through a checkbox or the so-called “double opt-in” method.

Email Format: HTML or Text
As you may know from your email client, you can choose whether (newsletter) emails should be sent in HTML or in plain text format. Usually, you will use HTML to mark up your text content as bold, italic or underlined, to use tables or to display images. This is not possible in plain text emails at all and it also depends on whether the recipient’s email client is configured to receive text or HTML emails. Thus, the MIME format was created, which sends along both text and HTML formats in the same message. Plain text will be displayed for recipients who only allow text emails, and HTML will be displayed for everybody else.

Transmission Agent: SMTP or Sendmail
Sendmail is a standard email transfer agent (client) for Unix-based systems that can be triggered by other clients on the same system to send email messages. You can install it on any arbitrary Linux machine of your choice and send messages from this server. However, it’s important to note that these days, all messages sent via this method will typically end up in the Spam folder of your recipient’s email client or may not even be forwarded by the server in between.

SMTP as a server protocol, is supposed to be a more secure solution. In most cases, the SMTP server accepts email forwarding requests coming only from localhost (the server where your online shop is hosted). Using an SMTP server on another system is nearly impossible as this SMTP could be misused as an email relay.

Filter Lists: Don’t Think Only Black and White
To avoid email spam, many different mechanisms have been developed during the last few years. One of them is the black-, white- or grey-listing method. A blacklisted server or IP range on the recipient’s machine, for example, is barred from delivering emails to the recipient at all. In the past, providers for black, white and grey lists developed and these lists are used by regular ISPs and hosting service providers.

If the server of your hosting provider has been blacklisted, you can assume that none of your emails will reach their intended recipients. Most professional email marketing providers by the way, have contracts with these list providers to ensure they are whitelisted and can transmit large amounts of email .

Grey lists cover everything in between. If you are not on a blacklist or on a whitelist, a filter on the recipient’s Website will put your email into a queue and check for other spam indicators (like content). If this queue gets too many requests at a certain time, your email might take a few hours or even days to be passed through to the recipient.

Email Transmission Tools
Newsletter emails, even to a large number of recipients, can be send via various email client applications and servers. You have wide choice depending on your given circumstances in respect of the above technical facts. Let me introduce you to some of the options.

Standalone Client Programs
It is possible to send multiple-recipient emails via an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. For data privacy, you must ensure that none of your clients can see other email addresses in the message: add yourself to the TO field while putting a list of your newsletter subscribers in the BCC field. Avoid using CC (from my own experience ).

As far as I know, an Exchange server will accept 200 recipients with one dispatch. Also, under this method, it is not possible to enrich the content of your email with dynamically generated data.  For example, it won’t be possible to inform your clients about cross-selling products on the basis of their previous purchases.

Integrated Shopping Cart Solutions
This is differently handled in shopping cart solutions, as they usually provide the ability to send email newsletters to opted-in customers and also to enter product data with the newsletter. Using this option, you can define personalized content using the order history of each costumer. For example (independent of any legal requirement), you could ask Mrs. Meyers for a review of the suit case “Canoono I Pak Classic” she bought on August 16th 2011, promising to raffle off a voucher of 100 EUR for the most inventive review. It’s great technology, but you must be careful that you don’t end up on a blacklist somewhere…

The OXID eShop newsletter feature can help a little bit here as it sends out newsletters in batches (number adjustable from the admin panel).  But at the end of the day, every newsletter transmission could be misunderstood by your hosting service provider, by list providers as well as by the recipient’s servers. In short, if you have too many recipients with too much similar content, it is time to begin thinking about using a professional, whitelisted email marketing provider.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the “magic number” of newsletters that will work properly from your shop server as I think it depends on your hosting provider, your monthly newsletter frequency and the number of newsletter recipients.

Open Source Scripts
There are a number of  scripts (some open source) that can apply to the same needs. However, they too will break down when faced with black- and grey- lists.

Summary

As your customers grow in number, you certainly will have to think about a professional (white listed) solution for your newsletter emails. This solution should ideally provide an interface to your shopping cart to compute the opted-in addressees as well as product items and order details. There are already a number of solutions available but there should definitely be more… right?

Please write to the email marketing provider of your choice and ask if they provide an interface to OXID eShop. Also, please feel free to contact me personally – I would be happy to support you from this end with contacting the channel marketeers of those services.

As earlier announced in my blog post on oxid-esales.com, Friday, March 11th, was our first local developer meet-up in Leipzig, Germany.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Christian Zacharias explains

Joscha Krug proudly shows off his OXID Commons shirt

These guys found something really interesting

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about the incompatibility of Zend Guard Loader (formerly known as Zend Optimizer) with PHP 5.3.x. Although PHP 5.3.0 was published over a year ago (November 1, 2009), there is no solution for Zend Optimizer or Zend Guard yet, and Zend Server doesn’t properly decrypt files encoded by Zend Guard.

This has been a problem for OXID eShop PE and EE customers, who have been unable to update their installations to PHP 5.3.0 or better due to this incompatibility. So at OXID Partner Day, OXID announced that it would abandon Zend Guard encryption for these editions of OXID eShop. Both products will however continue to be available under a commercial license.

A few days ago, on October 26th, we celebrated the annual OXID Partner Day. More than 150 people working at our partner agencies attended the interesting presentations and workshops held on that day. One of the most interesting and popular ones was called “The Power of the Community” (link leads to a German PDF with the handout), and was held by my friend Sandro Groganz.

Over the last few years, it has become a tradition to honor the best implementation of an OXID-based shopping cart with the “Best Solution Award” at the evening ceremony (more in this blog post). The winners this year were:

• lieblingstasche.de in the Community Edition category (dixeno GmbH)
• Der gepflegte Mann in the Professional Edition category (egate media GmbH)
• BABY-MARKT in the Enterprise Edition category (anzido GmbH)
• Strenesse in the Enterprise Edition category (Werbewelt AG)

BABY MARKT: Winner of the OXID Best Solution Award in the Enterprise Edition category.

OXID Best Solution Award: The Happy Winners

Corpus Delicti: The Cart

Besides the honor, winners also get a physical award: a shopping cart. Yes, a real shopping cart, just like the one in the supermarket around the corner, which is stuffed with local Schwarzwald delicacies (Schwarzwald is the region in which Freiburg is situated). And of course, every winner has to take it home…which would be a problem if you had come by train like Andreas Ziethen of anzido GmbH had.

The next morning, towing his shopping cart through the ICE train floors, he was stopped by four policemen asking him, “Is that yours, sir?” and pointing at the cart.

“Of course,” he said. “This is my Best Solution Award!”

Daily, there are more and more new online stores using OXID eShop. Some of these shops are supposed to be available in just one language (e.g. German), nevertheless they tend to forget to disable English, which is enabled as an additional language in OXID eShop by default.

This issue rears its ugly head if for example a browser’s standard language has been configured in English and the shop is supposed to be available in German only and the administrator forgot to disable English. Then, visitors will see a English version of the shop that looks rather strange. All looks good in a browser with German as the language identifier. Then OXID eShop will show the nicely crafted German content as intended.

Above screenshot shows the English version of a supposedly unilingual German eCommerce site. Looks creepy, doesn’t it?

Hence, if you don’t need a language, please

• deactivate it (see below screenshot) and
• clear the cache (/tmp/ folder)

Hope this helps to avoid creepy zombie multi-language sites

Tomorrow morning I will officially and proudly announce our collaboration and development platform available at http://dev.oxidforge.org. The software basis is FusionForge, a GForge fork. This platform seems to be ideal for team-work on committing code, language extensions, localizations, themes and much more.

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.

musicgate, another forum mate, had an awesome idea collecting all OXID shops running opening up an appropriate group at the social bookmark platform http://www.mister-wong.de. This idea went on like giving discounts and / or coupons to all of you brothers in arms. For a first, just let’s collect. Feel free to register yourself and to present your OXID shop in this group!

Unfortunately, Mister Wong doesn’t speak “Globish”, everything you will find on the .de site would be in German. If you are not a German native speaker you might don’t understand the handling there. In this case you are welcome to open up another – your – OXID eShop – group at the .com site of Mister Wong.

Very good news if you want to run a modern, free and open source e-commerce plattform from Portugal:
Thanks our Portuguese community member, monteiro, Portuguese translation is now available for OXID eShop. In a first step, I put the complete file to the language section of OXIDforge. This file for displaying the front end in the correct translation, is available under GNU GPL.

Of course, you may use Portuguese lang.php as an additional language if you run your shop somewhere else then Portugal. Just make sure you translated your products and categories as well.

Also, an Italian fellow, tassoman, found his way back to the forums and promised an Italian translation to come up soon. His request for implementing gettext is interesting enough: AFAIK the PHP library “gettext” has got a lot of clients that would make both, front and back end translations pretty easy. I handed that proposal over to OXID’s shop product management.

For future, maybe we could use the new collaboration plattform on OXIDforge that we are working on for translation stuff as well as for new themes, templates or modules. It will open up the next few days.