Writing about ecommerce, AI, leadership, and building at the intersection of commerce and technology.
OpenClaw Engram is a memory plugin I built to solve the biggest problem with AI agents: they forget everything between conversations. Here's why I built it and how it works.
After years on Ghost, I moved joshuawarren.com to Astro on Cloudflare Pages. Here's what I learned, what I'd do differently, and why static might be the answer for your content site too.
After 25 years in ecommerce, I started customizing OpenClaw because every "AI solution" on the market was just a chatbot with a new logo. Here's why I did it and what I learned.
A practical guide to getting an AI operator running for your Magento, Shopify, or Adobe Commerce store. What to expect, what you need, and how long it takes.
The shift from AI as a tool to AI as a team member is happening. Here's why waiting is costing you money.
Forget chatbots. An AI operator is something different—an AI that actually does work in your ecommerce systems. Here's what that means and why it matters.
AI search is rewriting the rules of how customers find products. Here's what ecommerce merchants need to know about Answer Engine Optimization and how to prepare for the shift.
Welcome to Leadership in Commerce! I will be focusing on three areas in this space: 1. Ecommerce Optimization for Scalability and Stability: Strategies to strengthen your ecommerce infrastructure, ensuring your platform remains robust during high-demand periods and integrates smoothly with evolving tech. 2. Leadership in Ecommerce: The intersection of leadership skills and ecommerce success. Insights that help current and aspiring leaders enhance their impact within their organizations. 3. T
This morning I woke to the sad, heartbreaking news that another American police officer had been shot and killed. When I heard it was a Richardson police officer, it hit closer to home - I work in Richardson. Then, I dug into the story a bit further and learned it was even closer to home than I thought - the shooting occurred at an apartment complex that Jenna and I lived in just a few years ago. It’s just a few miles away from where we live now, and neighbors confirmed that the noise we heard
In my post "Magento 2 in 2017 - How's Things?", I brought up the point that the Magento 2 GitHub repo has averaged 11+ new issues per day in the past 30 days (and that includes a relatively slow period, between Christmas and New Year's). A large number of these issues are irrelevant, blank or otherwise adding noise that makes it hard for Magento to identify what the high priority/high impact issues are. If those issues can't be identified quickly, then the quick resolutions we're all hoping for
This is a quick, personal post inspired by Karen's recent post, "What Magento Should spend some of that 250M on". Karen's post inspired me to break my entirely-too-long hiatus from blog posting to provide my personal viewpoint on Magento 2 and Magento Inc as we go into 2017. I don't have the time I'd like to dive into every aspect of M2 and Magento Inc or to blog as much as I'd like, but I want to put a few points out there for discussion and debate in the community. First, a disclaimer. I am n
Building and growing an eCommerce agency has taught me more than I ever imagined it would've. I'm going to be writing more about these lessons and other interesting things I've learned over the years. First up - reviews, testimonials and references. Vetting a potential vendor, partner or supplier is hard in the digital age. You'd think that the web would make this problem easier, but it's just introduced new challenges as well as new opportunities for dishonest actors. I'm not going to pile on
So, in the past few months, Magento has moved out of the eBay family and has returned to being a private company. There's been some shakeups internally with some key new hires and the org chart has been shuffled around some. Some people seem to be a bit nervous about all of the changes, but I've remained positive all along. Magento's strong community and foundation in open source software has kept it growing strong throughout a number of major changes in ownership over the years. I'll dive deep
I'm often asked - Josh or Joshua, which do I prefer to be called? And, well, the answer is more complicated than you would think. In casual, in-person conversation - say, we run into each other at a conference - feel free to call me Josh or Joshua, I'll answer to either and have no real preference. However, if you see me present, read an article I write or ask me how I prefer to be addressed in a professional setting, you'll always see me listed as Joshua Warren, never Josh Warren. Why? You mi
Are you headed to the Magento Imagine conference in April? If so, you might want to check out what ended up being my most popular article of 2014 - What I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Trip to Magento Imagine. A majority of that article is still relevant for #ImagineCommerce 2015, with a few tweaks and new hints: 1. Imagine 2015 is back to its usual spot on the calendar in April instead of May. That means it won't be quite as hot, but Vegas still averages a high of 80 F and a low of abo
I wanted to take a moment out from my usual banter to call attention to a really amazing member of the Magento community and a charity event they're involved in right now. Brent Peterson is running the Boston Marathon this year as part of Run for Research, an American Liver Foundation fundraiser. Before I dive into the details, please, take a moment to visit his fundraising page and contribute $25. I'm supporting Brent's run and encouraging you to do so for two reasons - first, because of how B
I'm excited to announce that my article, Choose Your Own Adventure: Freelancer or Founder, appears in the January 2015 issue of php[architect] magazine, which is available online and in print now. I drew on my experiences as a freelancer who found himself rather unexpectedly growing into the founder of an eCommerce development agency to write what I hope is a very applicable, hands-on guide for all of the developers out there considering striking out on their own either as a freelancer or as the
I just wanted to take a second to say thanks to everyone out there on Twitter, on MageHero.com and to the Magento community as a whole. I've grown Creatuity very slowly over the years - we don't really have a marketing budget, or marketing department for that matter - it's all been on word of mouth and referrals and developing a reputation for solving some of the most challenging problems with Magento and taking really good care of our clients while doing it. Because of this, every single refer
With all the discussion around the technology behind Magento 2, the release schedule and the excitement of how Magento 2 will help transform eCommerce, I have to admit, I hadn't thought at all about certifications for Magento 2 until someone at Magento asked my opinion about it. So here's the challenge - when Magento 2 launches, how will an employer or merchant know a developer knows Magento 2? Magento (both as a community and as a company) has always made it clear that they understand that a bi
Making Magento go fast by Thijs Feryn @ThijsFeryn at #phpworld Magento can be a little slow, but it's tremendously flexible. Presenting today from the perspective of a hosting company employee who knows a lot about PHP but not a lot about Magento and approached it from a hosting/operational standpoint. Remember the basics - activate caching, flat catalogs and JS & CSS minifcation. The Magento compiler is a lie - it's invented for people who have no bytecode caching, but everyone should have t
What is new in Magento 2 with Tobias Zander @airbone42 at #phpworld Ever since October 4th of 2013, the Magento 2 team has been pushing weekly updates to GitHub. Magento2 is built on HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, LESS, requirejs. This means that Magento 2 won't support IE8. Layout configuration is changing in Magento 2. Breaking the XML files into multiple files to make it easier to find what you need to change. Unlimited theme fallbacks are coming in Magento 2. Magento 2 currently has support of PHP
Turning Your Code into a Company: The Parts They Don't Tell You by Luke Stokes - @lukestokes. Founder, CTO of Foxycart. Founded in 2007. Goal was to provide income for his growing family. Starting a company is hard - it took 4 years of working full-time and then building Foxycart in the evenings and on the weekends, working as much as 10 hours on Saturdays. Don't believe the hype on TV - Shark Tank isn't real life. It's hard to build a company. But it's worth it! A human being should benefit f
Eli is opening up php[world] with the opening remarks. Welcome to the first PHP[WORLD]! The goal is to bring the entire PHP community together. Get out there and talk to people from other platforms/communities that are here today. Twitter hashtag is #phpworld WiFi is Sheraton_Conference, user: php14, password: sheraton14 Game night tonight, open source hackathon tomorrow night. Open spaces - sign up for a slot. You don't have to be an expert on the topic, just talk about something you're i
This Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk is "Seeking the Magento Community's Center of Gravity" with Kurt Theobald. Community events help us maintain a voice as a community driven ecosystem, so events like Meet Magento are important. Magento really took off with the small and medium business market. That’s where Magento made its claim to fame. Magento Inc is shifting focus to serve the mid-market, creating a gap with the small/medium business market. Today is about discussing the problem and the
This is the Meet Magento New York 2014 talk "Saving time and money with Vagrant" with Tim Broder. Vagrant lets you QA server configurations for your Magento site just like you do your code. Vagrant lets you setup a dev environment for a new project in 5-6 commands and about 10 minutes. Everyone benefits from Vagrant - solo developers, startups, agencies, large scale businesses. Vagrant helps with complex stacks - such as using Solr, Varnish, etc. - getting it all setup in one Vagrant box save
This Meet Magento New York 2014 tech track presentation is Magento Security and Us by Lee Saferite. Limit your attack surface - don't open unnecessary ports, and ideally use a server in a different subnet from your web server to provide SSH access into your site. External log file storage - if your server is compromised, you can't trust anything on it. Transfer logs to a 3rd party service or another server in realtime. Backup security - your backups contain all of your data - it should be secu
This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is "Beyond the Blinders: Unseen Opportunities in SEO" by Seth Dotterer. Search has fundamentally changed how consumers consume and how marketers market. The average US adult now spends half their time online. Online is pulling attention span from TV, radio and print media. Buyers are revolting against traditional marketing channels. Web consumers choose organic content - no one is clicking on banner ads, and most click on organic, not paid search results.
This keynote from Meet Magento New York 2014 is "Persuasive E-Commerce" by Guido Jansen. Online merchants have a big problem because online conversion rates are very low versus offline. Offline - 20-25% conversion rate; online is 2-10% conversion rate. Online sales don't have the same level of personalization and sensory input as offline stores. Automatic thoughts and actions drive much of our purchasing behavior. These are called heuristics in psychology, and they can lead to cognitive biases
This keynote from Meet Magento New York 2014 about the state of Ben's role as Magento evangelist after 6 months on the job, and discussing the Magento community as a whole. Ben is discussing Intent vs Reality of his first 6 months on the job at Magento. Advisory board - intent - empower core group to work with Magento employees. Reality - Ben is still directly facilitating communication. Use GitHub like GitHub - intent - use Github for Magento 2 in the proper way. Reality - requires a lot of w
This talk is "Magento: A Journey Down the Open Road", a Meet Magento New York 14 Talk by Yoav Kutner. It was surprising to see how many people were using Magento for non-eCommerce purposes. Based on this experience, OroCRM was written with a layer between the app and the framework - Oro Platform. Oro Platform has ACL's built in, also Grids and reports and a workflow system. The technology stack for Oro Platform is great thanks to it's fresh start. PHP >= 5.4.4., Symfony2, Doctrine, PHPUnit, H
This talk is from Karen Baker from Web Shop Apps, entitled "Working with Magento Extension Providers". Badly written extensions have literally caused eCommerce businesses to fail. The Magento ecosystem consists of Magento itself, design agencies, individual developers, technology partners. There are several types of extension providers: 1. Domain experts 2. Innovators 3. Custodians - selflessly look after things 4. Hackers 5. Copiers The current Magento extension marketplace is Magento
This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is Hacking Magento: Creating an HTML5 Canvas Customizer on Magento Bundles by Philip Jackson. When consumers control the features of a product, they have control over the process. Customization vs personalization: customization is unique, has unlimited choice, is made to order. Longer turnaround, lots of planning. Personalization is prefab, limited choice under an existing SKU, shorter turnaround, could be purchased on impulse. In the next 5 years, 20% of e
This talk at Meet Magento New York 2014 is Varnish Cache and its usage in the real world by Ivan Chepurnyi. Varnish is a way to accelerate sites such as Magento websites by caching as much content as possible. Varnish is controlled by VCL - the Varnish configuration language. vcl_recv is the entry point for a customer request, and you can detect a customer segment based on cookies and serve a specific type of content for that segment. vcl_hash builds the cache hash for a page - it gives the p
This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is Brendan Falkowski's "Two Approaches to Responsive Design" presentation. Adaptive vs responsive - adaptive design serves a specific size; you basically have 2 sizes - small screen and large screen. It doesn't support both tablet and mobile well. Adaptive layouts don't work well for new or 'in between' screen sizes - i.e., the iPhone 6+ screen size isn't served well by adaptive layouts. Responsive proxy sites are a good middle ground - build a mobile-first
This is IRCE workshop Two Approaches to Responsive Web Design: Pure and Hybrid, presented by Brendan Falkowski, Founder - Gravity Department. You can find Brendan on Twitter as @Falkowski. There's a lot of ways to talk about responsive design, but from a frontend aspect, responsive web design is: 1. Fluid grid 2. Flexible content 3. Media queries You deliver the same HTML to every device, and the CSS customizes the view. There is some waste with responsive design - it serves desktop-speci
This is IRCE workshop Smarter Bidding Boosts an E-Retailer's Returns from a New Google Ad Format, presented by Tom Novellino, CEO - Metaverse Corp. and Dave Schwartz, General Manager, Product Ads - DataPop This session is about Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs), which are being converted from PLAs to "Google Shopping Campaigns" by August. PLA's have grown to > 25% of Metaverse's PPC revenue. Feed quality and the data in your feed to Google really matters for product listing ads. Make sure you
This IRCE workshop is Rounding up the Whole Story: Google's Search Tweaks presented by Jeff MacGurn, Senior Vice President, Earned Media Services - Covario and Seth Dotterer, Vice President, Marketing & Product - Conductor Inc. If you're out of the search marketing world for a year, you're horribly behind - Google made significant high-level changes in 2013. Panda is a learning algorithm, like no other. It updates on a monthly basis and can affect a page or spread to an entire site. Google has
This IRCE workshop is Growing a Paid Search Program Year after Year, presented by Jim O'Brien, Chief Marketing Officer, ThinkGeek and George Michie, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Scientist - RKG. A personal aside - I'm a huge Thinkgeek fan, and even have a sticker of their mascot, Timmy the monkey, on my laptop, so I'm excited for this session. Thinkgeek wants to capture demand from everyone who's searching for a geek interest - search is about connecting to people who are already searching for
This is the IRCE workshop Boost Conversion without a Social Cast of Thousands, presented by Michael Lee, Senior Vice President, General Manager - Epsilon, Susan Kim, Chief Executive Officer, Plum District and Jai Rawat, Chief Executive Officer, Founder - ShopSocially. Leveraging social media can be challenging, and measuring ROI can be difficult. The big 4 social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Each are used differently: * Facebook - nonpaid (engagement) and paid (acquis
This IRCE workshop is 10 Most Important Components your Social Presence Needs, presented by Sarah Evans, Owner - Sevans Strategy. Great content makes people want to share, care or swear. What does great content look like? Your readers will tell you. 80% of people will read your headlines, but only 20% of those people will read the rest of your content. Great content is trustworthy, credible, interactive, actionable, emotional, unique or relevant. Great content is portable, personal and partic
This is the IRCE workshop A Year Later: The Impact of Enhanced Campaigns, presented by Adam Garcia, Director, E-Commerce Marketing - The Walgreen Co. and Aaron Goldman, Chief Marketing Officer - Kenshoo. This session is basically about the change Google made last year that no longer allows you to exclude mobile and tablet from your ads - you have to submit bid adjustments instead. Before this change, Walgreens has targeted ads and bids down to the specific level of, for instance, AT&T iPhone use
This IRCE session is Neuromarketing: Where Science Meets the Visuals of Web Design, presented by Kurtis Morrison, Vice President, Client Services - EyeQuant and Jered Goodyear, Manager, E-Commerce & Digital Marketing - Epson. You have more that one brain - sort of. Many things become effortless and automatic - system 1 processing or 'the fast brain'. Thoughts at the conscious level, system 2 processing, require effort and involve logic and reason. Most of the time we're using both systems, and b
This is IRCE session Conversion Drivers: Go Beyond the Like to Make Social Work for Retail, presented by Nicolas Franchet, Head of Retail, E-Commerce, Global Vertical Marketing - Facebook and David Atchinson, Senior Vice President, Marketing - Zulily. Facebook is building systems to help brands drive discovery, personalization and ROI on social. Facebook is launching multi-product ads - Facebook ads featuring 3 products in one ad unit. Measuring cross-device ROI is challenging. 67% of users st
This IRCE session is Beat the Competition by Personalizing Content and Communication, presented by Amy Larson, Vice President, Digital - The Children's Place and Rama Ramakrishnan, Founder & CEO - CQuotient. Children's Place goal is to provide a great product at a great value with great service. Depth can beat breadth - Amazon is the 'everything' store. Other eCommerce retailers win by knowing their core customer + product category better. If someone opened an email last week, should I send th
This is the IRCE session Make the Most of Your Traffic: Maximizing Conversion, presented by Karen Van Ert, Director, E-Business Consulting - Zeon Solutions and Lauren Wright, Marketing and Merchandising Manager - Cooper Safety Supply. Research your current data - Google Analytics, etc., then develop some ideas of what you might want to change. Before moving into split or multivariate testing, perform user testing. This will help you see why consumers are doing what they're doing now. Also check
This is the IRCE Featured Address, How the Video Experience is Transforming the Way People Shop, presented by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Chairman & Founder - Joyus.Joyus made their default experience shop by video instead of shop by product. 78% of consumers watch at least one online video per a week. Video accounts for 50% of mobile traffic. Content and commerce convergence is here - provide excellent video content. Shopping at Joyus is video-focused. Video player is the product page, with a
This is the IRCE keynote, Connecting with Consumers by Giving Them What They Want, presented by Niraj Shah, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder - Wayfair.com. Wayfair is #45 in the Internet Retailer Top 500. Listen to shoppers to decide what to do next. Be customer-service focused. Enable customers to choose how to interact and find your products. Many customers don't know what they are looking for until they see it, so you need to marry inspiration with selection. Visual navigation matters.
This IRCE session is Building on Strengths: Why Data Should Change Your Marketing Plan Every Quarter, presented by Ryan Bonifacino, Vice President, Digital Strategy - Alex and Ani. Foundation for success - centralize digital under one department. eCommerce + Analytics tie into digital marketing and social media, and all three should be generating usable analytics and data, sharing that data and making decisions based on that data. Get your relationships working in a healthy way - you don't want
This is IRCE session Recruiting Bloggers as Affiliates: Why—and How, presented by Carolyn Kmet, Chief Marketing Officer - All Inclusive Marketing and Carrie Rocha, Blogger - Pocketyourdollars.com. Bloggers have an established, third-party credibility with loyal, engaged audiences with creative positioning extending brand reach. Keep in mind FTC rules that bloggers must disclose if you've paid them or provided them with a giveaway, etc. Make sure you realize you will lose some brand control. Bl
This IRCE session is Lessons from the Internet Retailer Second 500, presented by Stefany Zaroban, Associate Director, Research - Internet Retailer. There's lots of lessons we can learn from the Internet Retailer Second 500 - the 500-1000 largest eCommerce sites. The Internet Retailer Second 500 includes retailers from under $1 million up to around $23 million. #1 lesson from the 2nd 500: it's getting tougher to compete, but there's still plenty of room for a good idea. The biggest retailers a
This is IRCE session How to Compete as a Niche in Today's Mass Market, presented by Shelley Nandkeoylar, Chief Executive Officer, President, Founder - The Ivory Company.Niche brands should view their role as curators - you won't be the cheapest, you won't have the largest assortment. Have a limited point of view, but become the expert on that point of view. Omnichannel means one view, one experience, one brand among all channels and experiences, no matter how many channels you have. Serve your
This is the IRCE Session: Five Hot New Technology Developments from the technology workshop. Presented by Aaron Mandelbaum, Howard Blumenthal, Marta Dalton, Ross Higgins and Ryan West. Please forgive any typos - my Macbook battery is drained and my external battery pack for it apparently has failed, so I'm doing my best to keep you updated from my iPad. SEO & Social Manual penalties are now being applied to guest posts - SEO now depends on solid content and inbound marketing. Responsive desig
This IRCE session is from the Video workshops, and is entitled Harnessing Video to Boost SEO, presented by Stephan Spencer, Co-Author - The Art of SEO and Jamie Salvatori, Owner - Vat19. SEO requires good content. Your videos need to be good, first and foremost. Make them interesting and engaging and keep people coming back. SEO doesn't fix bad content. Make a video worth SEO efforts. It's difficult, it's an art form, not a process, and there's no formula. Top 100 subscribed YouTube channels (e
This session is from IRCE's Video workshops. It's entitled Video Without Breaking the Bank: Creating Professional Videos on an Amateur's Budget. Presented by Angie Seaman, E-Commerce Manager - Marbles: The Brain Store. Marbles has a lot of products that are unique but hard to demonstrate via a website, so product videos have to really make it clear how a product works - for example, the Catchoo product video. Marbles uses videos for different purposes - showing how to use a product, customer se
This session is Navigating Choice: Platform Selection & Implementation, a session of the IRCE tech workshop. The presenters are Kim Hansen, Senior Vice President, Marketing, E-Commerce - Winston Brands, Nicole Tolbert, E-Commerce Manager - HUE.com, Kerry Martin, Vice President, Senior Consultant - FitForCommerce and Joe Warfield, Technology Director - Mardel. Many people are selecting platforms based on what has the best support for omnichannel, even when a large number of people don't understa
This IRCE session is Conquer the Pain Points and Capture the ROI of Product Information Management Systems, presented by Cynthia Rodgers Maignan, Director, E-Commerce Content Strategy, Management - Office Depot and Ryan Lee, Manager, Technology - Gorjana Griffin. Companies that aren't using a product information management system will waste a combined $2.1 billion. Much of this comes from products that are sitting in warehouses but aren't listed for sale. Some of the pain points with product da
Welcome to my first live blog of IRCE. Today is a workshop day, and I'll be covering some of the eCommerce technology workshop and the video workshop. This session is the first session of the technology workshop track: Get Smart: A Roadmap for Sound Technology Investments, presented by Charles Hunsinger, SVP, Chief Information Officer - Harry & David; Michael Arking, President - Frenchtoast.com; Bernardine Wu, Chief Executive Officer - FitForCommerce. 52% of eCommerce businesses are looking int
I plan to post all of the slides, sessions and reactions to Magento Imagine that I come across in this article - I'll update this article as I find more. If you presented at Magento Imagine, please tweet a link to your slides with the #MagentoImagine hashtag and I'll add it here, or post a comment below with the link and I'll get the post updated ASAP. Thanks, and thank you everyone for such an amazing time at Magento Imagine this year - already looking forward to 2015! Simple Steps to Win the S
Well, it's that time again - time to say goodbye to Magento Imagine. With a lot of excitement in the air, the attendees of Imagine have gathered again in The Joint at the Hard Rock for the final general session of Magento Imagine. Announcing winners of the giveaways, etc. Showing a customer success story of Terracycle, a Magento customer, and the CEO of Terracycle is now on stage. Garbage doesn't exist in nature. Everything around us will become garbage one day. Consumption + complex materials
This session is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce: Double Down on Content to Create a Scalable Customer Acquisition Strategy with Ethan Giffin, Founder & CEO, Groove and Michael Sapera, CFO & Director of IT, Perlis Inc. Why focus on content? Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram - 79% of online shoppers spend at least 50% of their shopping time researching products. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their blog. 67% of B2C companies and 41% of B2B have acquired a cus
This session is Magento 2 Service Layer: A Deep Dive into Customer Service presented by Chris O’Toole a Software Engineer at Magento. Chuck Choukalos, a product manager at Magento responsible for the service layer, is introducing the overall idea of the service layer. The service layer streamlines customizations to allow easier installation & upgrades and simplifies external integrations. Consolidate business logic into the service layer. What is a service layer? The service layer encapsulat
With a lot of groggy faces in the room after last night's legendary Imagine party, the general session started off with a bang - literally! A Native American dance group, complete with pounding drums snapping everyone awake. Jamie Clarke joined the stage, and shot Magento t-shirts containing free passes to Magento U courses into the crowd. Then, Jamie discussed how Purina used Magento to launch their innovative Just Right system. Mark Lavelle is now conducting a chat with PayPal CEO David Marcu
This session is titled The Gifter’s Dilemma: How Behavioral Economics of Gifting Impacts Commerce and is presented by Kristen Berman, Co-Founder, Irrational Labs and Roy Erez, Co-Founder & CEO, Loop Commerce. Buying gifts is challenging - is it the right style? Size? Will they like it? Is it the best possible gift? There are financial relationships and social relationships. Gifts should be focused on the social aspect of relationships. A gift is an absolutely personal and thoughtful gesture tha
This session is Brendan Falkowski's Responsive Evolution: Refining Priorities in Multi-Device Frontend Strategy presentation. Brendan will post slides for the presentation soon, and he moves fast, so I won't cover everything here. Multi-device commerce keeps changing and becoming more important. Users are switching from device to device, and just expect responsive design now. So look beyond responsive design to frontend strategy. Content, branding, copywriting, interaction, user flows, informa
This breakout session is titled Standing Out From the Crowd: Innovative Approaches to Engaging Customers & Sustaining Success and features: * Jonathan Hiltser, Head of IT, Frank & Oak * Paul Johnson, Sr. Product Manager, Peet’s Coffee * Paul Kasinski, CIO, Brighton Collectibles * Gorden Nugent, VP of eCommerce, Harvey Norman * Matthew Plant, Sr. Software Engineer, Julep * Ben Pressley, Head of Worldwide Sales, Magento The only sustainable advantage is deep knowledge of and deep engagemen
This session is titled What Happens in the Lab, Stays in the Lab: 10 Secrets to User Research, presented by 2 user research leads from eBay Enterprise: Elizabeth Zietlow and Palak Desai. eBay Enterprise has two eye-tracking labs and one mobile/tablet testing lab for user research. Will discuss why research matters and the right research methods and when to apply them, as well as how to get the biggest bang for your research dollars. #1 - OTB - Pick your Objectives, Timing and Budget. What's you
This year's theme at Imagine is Transform - transformation in commerce. Powering brands of all sizes - not just large brands - to connect to their customers and compete on a level playing field. Roy Rubin's keynote is covering 4 types of transformation - industry, business, community and merchants. The following notes are from Roy's keynote. Industry transformations - major brands with brick and mortar stores are cutting store sizes by 25%. Online pure-plays are now also opening brick and morta
Responding to requests at Imagine 2013 for eBay to give solution partners better tools to provide to our clients, eBay held a forum this morning at Magento Imagine to introduce a number of eBay and PayPal leaders to the solution partner community and outline new tools, techniques and support offerings from eBay to Magento partners and users. Bill Me Later is built into PayPal, allowing users to obtain no-interest financing for 6 months on any purchase over $100, leading to an increase in average
This article was inspired by this response from Piotr: https://twitter.com/piotrekkaminski/status/461551105554386944 For some reason, the 'what about regular [...] devs' part struck a nerve and made me realize that many people aren't aware of my varied background in eCommerce and even with Magento. Long before Magento existed, I was a developer. My first experiences with eCommerce took place before the dot-com boom and bust; at roughly the same time I began shopping online (everyone thought I
Twitter is filled with people posting Magento Imagine 'survival guides' that read more like 'How to Survive Spring Break in Cozumel' than a guide to attending a professional conference. So, since those guides cover the basics of how to avoid passing out (get lots of rest before Imagine), embarrassing yourself (don't Tweet, especially from company accounts, while drinking) and dehydration (drink lots of water), I thought I'd share something that I haven't seen yet - a packing & prep checklist tha
Last week, Brendan Falkowski, Piotr Kaminski and I engaged in a high-speed friendly discussion on Twitter about the recent Magento Connect purge of extensions and how the metrics used by Magento to purge 'low quality' and 'unsupported' extensions may not have been the best metrics to use (at least, that was my position). Throughout this conversation, I realized that Twitter wasn't the best platform for this - 140 characters at a time (less, if you're mentioning people to get them involved in the
There was a flurry of activity in the Magento Community today on Twitter, Reddit and StackOverflow as for about 4-5 hours, the Magento Community Edition download page - http://www.magentocommerce.com/download - was redirecting all users to a new page on Magento's site entitled 'Magento Community Edition Hosted Solution' - http://magento.com/products/magento-community-edition-hosted-solution - and preventing users from being able to download Magento's open source edition, the Magento Community Ed
A couple of weeks ago, a happy coincidence made me realize I hadn't rearranged my desk setup since we moved into our current offices at Creatuity almost two years ago - I read a brief article in Inc. that mentioned that people are more creative and less stressed when they can look up and see trees and natural light on the same day @PhilWinkle was awesome enough to retweet this tweet: https://twitter.com/jakeasmith/status/452957078047293440 I decided to combine these ideas with my own unique twi
Kalen recently asked on Twitter for tips on hiring frontend developers: https://twitter.com/kalenjordan/status/453902785948311553 Many people responded with great advice - giving candidates a test project was a frequent answer, and a great step to take. However, even before you assign a test project, I think it's important to evaluate each candidate on several things above and beyond just their development skills. At Creatuity, I've built our hiring process over the years with input and ideas
Over the years as I've grown Creatuity from a single developer (myself) to a company employing over 25 people, my average day has changed quite a bit. Originally, I did everything - sales, billing and all of the development work. With my background in PHP development (I've been working with PHP for over 15 years - I have to catch myself when I talk to our new developers and development interns, because I have found myself saying things like "Back when I started, we didn't have all these object o
Fear, not a lack of time, money or opportunities, prevents us from reaching our goals. The first step to overcoming this is simply to acknowledge our fear. It's been an interesting week, throughout which a random set of coincidences has led me to realize that the biggest thing that has slowed me down, that has kept me from reaching my goals and that has done the same thing to countless people I know has been fear. Not a lack of time, not a lack of opportunities, not a lack of money, but fear, p
Don’t talk about it, be about it Seeking Fulfillment Beyond Work After spending entirely too many years focused on launching and growing Creatuity to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life, I recently decided to sit down and identify what I enjoyed in life and seeing and if I was actively pursuing activities that brought some sort of enjoyment or value to my life. Being a dedicated Omnifocus user and a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to productivity, I decided to
Long live books! Scribd - the new Netflix of Books As you may have heard, today Scribd announced an all-you-can-read eBook subscription plan. However, there are some notable limitations to this $8.99 per month program - thus far it only includes 1 of the 5 major US book publishers, only includes books published before July 2012 and while it supports most devices, it does not appear to support ‘basic’ Kindles and Nooks - i.e., those with an electronic ink, paper-like screen. Even with these li
My Blog This Year or: A Lesson in How Not to Succeed as a Writer There’s a few secrets to success as a writter or especially a blogger, such as: post a consistent number of posts over time, write about topics that are timely, popular and you’re passionate about, and when in doubt, just write! As you can see from scrolling through my blog, I’ve failed at all of these! I sat down and asked myself - why am I so horribly inconsistent with writing new blog articles? Is it lack of time? No, I make t
Do you duplicate products in the Magento admin interface? If so, you've noticed that Magento doesn't change the 'URL Key' field by default, which means every time you duplicate a product, you have to edit this field manually. If duplicating products is the main way you add new products to your site (and for many Magento users, it is), you're spending way too much of your time making this manual change, when Magento should be doing it for you. I've put together a quick userscript (so this require
Some time ago, I added a Crucial m4 256GB SSD to my iMac. The performance boost was even better than I expected - the iMac now writes data about 2.5 times faster than the stock hard drive, and it reads data over 5 times faster - considering how much time I spend working in front of a computer, this really improved my day! What didn't improve my day, however, was that some time ago, I noticed that my iMac would never wake back up after it went to sleep; I might get as much as the login screen to
I wrote this two-part article series for the oDesk blog, where it originally appeared. Growing a small business, even with the amazing tools available to the modern business owner, can be a challenge. One of the biggest challenges is often finding the time and money to power that growth. There are many time management gurus out there that know quite a bit more about the subject than I do, so I’ll leave that subject to them (for what it’s worth, I’ve learned that finding good employees, in person
My first guest column for oDesk is now live; they've been kind enough to give me permission to cross-post it here on my site as well. Let me know what you think!What do Dropbox, Intuit and HP have in common? Aside from being tremendously successful tech firms, they have all employed the Lean Startup methodology—a new approach to starting and building companies, services and products that focuses on shortening product development cycles, launching with the simplest possible product and then exte
I love music - even when I was young, I almost always had headphones on and have over the years developed an interest in almost every genre of music out there. So, when Spotify, a music streaming website, finally made it to the US, I signed up right away! Spotify lets you use your web browser to search for an artist or track and listen to that track right away - free. Or, you can upgrade to an inexpensive paid membership and listen to music from your iPhone or Android smartphone and store music
We've all had weeks that went by in a flash, where you sit down at the end of the week and say "what just happened?" and feel like achieved little, if anything, of value - it's like the entire week just disappeared. A recent article by 99%, a think tank inspired by Thomas Edison's quote that "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", included a statement that really resonated with me -- "Whole weeks can flash by in a blur of relatively meaningless emails, meetings, and admin tasks while th