Magento, OXID, xt:commerce - evaluation guide for enterprises

Magento, OXID, xt:commerce, home-grownShops – Evaluation Guide for Enterprises05.05.2009 | Björn Schotte

© MAYFLOWER GmbH 2009

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„Commercial OS Shops“

Who is MAYFLOWER GmbH

❙Germany‘s biggest PHP solution provider❙70 employees (Munich, Würzburg, Hamburg)❙Subsidiary company SektionEins GmbH (Web

Security)❙Customers include

❙neckermann.de❙Globetrotter❙E.ON IS❙TV stations❙Nintendo❙…

❙Experience in implementing OXID eShop EE, xt:commerce and self-made shops, experience with Magento


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Agenda

❙Feature pyramid❙Short overview about Varien, OXID eSales,

xt:commerce GmbH❙Case study self-made shop❙Google Trends – a brief view❙Evaluation criteria

❙Performance❙Developer documentation❙How to develop for/integrate these shops

❙Short summary matrix – Community, Enterprise area, modernity, TCO

❙Summary


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Feature Pyramide

Layout/Frontend

PerformanceShopping Cart

PIMePayment

CRM

Logistics

SAP

ERP

SEO/SEMClub

ControllingEnterprise Search

E-Mail MarketingB2B

eBay, billiger.de, ciao.com, …UTF-8

Play

FascinationData migration Usability


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Who is Varien

❙Company Varien, USA❙50+ employees

❙Editions Magento Community Edition and Enterprise Edition

❙22 partners

❙License EE: USD 8,900 per year per server, no singlelicense

❙No PCI certification yet

❙Marketplace „Magento connect“


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Who is OXID eSales AG

❙Started as a pure commercial entity, 60+ employees, headquarters Freiburg/Germany

❙Concentrates on DACH❙60+ partners

❙OXID eShop Editions: OXID eShop PE, OXID eShop EE

❙Innovations: OXID eFire (SaaS platform)❙End 2008: open sourced eShop as OXID eShop CE❙April 2009: introduced OXID eXchange❙May 2009: introduced OXID Forge

❙License: ~ EUR 4,000 per server per year or EUR 12.990,00 single license per server, subscription model, hosted model


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Who is xt:commerce

❙xt:Commerce GmbH, Austria❙number of employees currently not known (20?)❙Follower of OSCommerce

❙No free OpenSource edition possible, only test version with about 1% of source code encrypted

❙License: EUR 97,00 up to EUR 990,00 (VEYTON 4 – Version Ultimate)


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Case Stuy self-made Shop

❙Vaillant spare part store❙Developed since 2004❙Distributed also offline on

>100,000 CDs in europe❙Embedded OCR

technology inside web application

❙CountryAdmin can create a CD edition inside online shop (using InstallAnywhere)

❙Uses SQLite instead MySQL on CD

❙Order only via distributer, no direct cart checkout

Make or Buy? In the E-Commerce

area only if you have very tailoredrequirements


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Google Trends

Worldwide

Germany


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Google Trends – what does it mean?

❙Trend for xt:commerce is difficult („XTC“, „xt:commerce“ etc)

❙Traffic on google has been increased since 2007 for Magento

❙… has outperformed traffic for OXID and xt:commerce at the end of 2008

❙Varien uses Google Trends as a marketing tool

❙However: only gives us a trend of the popularity – not real exact numbers


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Criteria: Performance

ATTENTION:

Numbers only visualise a trend!

Measured in laboratory.

Every system can be optimized. Varien knows that it has to optimize for future releases.


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Criteria: modules and 3rd party modules

❙OXID eShop and Meganto do have a lot of out of the box modules

❙A professional commercial SAP connector is available for OXID

❙There are many modules for payment, PIM, CRM, ERP, … available

❙See comparison table that‘s available upon request


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„Developers, Developers, Developers!“

❙Customizations are often

neccessary

❙Please look at the TCO!

❙What about service &

maintenance, quality

assurance?

❙Developers need to instruct

themselves in the source

code

❙Own developers at the

customer

❙Does the shop software

support a cost efficient

TCO?

Be careful: „But my

service providerdoes everything!“


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Developer documentation

❙no consistant developer documentation❙many examples with short documentation are

available at the Wiki (only in English)❙community wants to have more documentation❙API documentation has examples – this is helpful!


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❙API Dokumentation has not sufficient examples yet

❙theres a beginner‘s tutorial available (at the OXID blog)

❙many commercial trainings for developers, admins, users available


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❙Only very short tutorial for creating plugins available – and it is too complicated

❙There‘s no single-source developer documentation available

❙It‘s not clear which function names/variables come from which files – no coding standards


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Development

❙we analyzed the source code randomly (as on all systems)

❙sometimes ZF mechanisms will be overruled (like autoloading, caching, …)

❙sometimes code documentation is missing❙sometimes @ operator will be used (dangerous for

debugging)❙sometimes crazy development (ie wrong usage of

catch blocks), there‘s a necessity of changing the core code

❙administrators and developers get help at the Magento forum (http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/6158/P15/) for creating a text file where you simply note your changes on the core file in order to make that again when you update. That‘s not good.


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Development

❙source code of EE is encrypted but after signing NDA you get the full source

❙sometimes usage of @-operator❙there are some areas like tag cloud where the

shop outputs ISO while everything else is made for UTF-8

❙strong modularity makes the shop easily extendable

❙partners do have acces to quality assurance protocols, code coverage measurements, unit test statistics, bug stats over time etc.

❙strong emphasis on quality assurance


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Development

❙plugin source code is saved inside database❙will be executed via eval() („eval is evil“!)❙execution is up to 20 times slower❙plugin code can be save on disk, but the

webserver needs write acces = security issue❙we don‘t know about emphasis on QA


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Summary matrix

Community

Enterprise experience

Code Quality

Modernity

TCO Factor

~2007 ~2002 ~2003


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Summary

❙hyped shop system on the market

❙positive: OS framework (Zend Framework) on the ground, but sometimes ZF will be overruled not on the „Use at will“ approach

❙company from USA - no department in Europe/Germany

❙international community

❙performance problems but Varien promised to work on that in future versions


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Summary

❙core code developed by a company with strong E-Commerce experience for ~10 years

❙2 years time for refactoring -> V4

❙very innovative: OXID eFire (SaaS)

❙very experienced with bigger customers, especially regarding performance

❙good partner network (60+ partners)

❙not strong in U.S.

❙community edition drives usage, but has to create a strong and vibrant developer community

❙very good QA of source code


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Summary

❙experienced player: many years on the market but a bit of unorganized development

❙changed from OS product to a company/bit of closed shop (only test version available)

❙developers sometimes complain the arrogant tone of the company – sorry guys, we CAN NOT confirm this!

❙has to try to bind the community on xtc – otherwise, developers change to other systems (OXID, Magento, …)

❙license seems to be too cheap especially in the enterprise area

❙we recommend it for smaller shops

Questions?

Björn SchotteMayflower GmbHPleichertorstr. 297070 Würzburg+49 (931) 35 9 65 - [email protected]

Technology

Magento, OXID, xt:commerce - evaluation guide for enterprises