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Jansen
As you probably know by now: eBay agreed to acquire Magento. Everything looks like it will stay 'business as usual' at the Magento offices, just with more resources to do what they do best so I think that is great news for everyone at Magento (and eBay) and everyone using Magento at the core of their ecommerce business. Although there are no concrete plans about any further integrations (at least not that are being disclosed yet), the acquisition got me wondering what integrations between Magento and eBay services/ companies and other x.commerce partners might be pretty nice to look forward to. Let's start with the obvious ones and work towards some more exotic integrations.
The most obvious one I suppose. Managing listings, importing orders and customers from eBay and syncing stock levels. Of course working for all international eBay stores and with multiple Magento shops. Adding this as an extra sales channel fully integrated with Magento would be great I think.
Well, we already have a tight Magento and PayPal integration since the 49% acquisition in May 2010. Multiple payment channels, Website Payments Pro, Credit Card Payments, Express Checkout... it's already available within your Magento store. But I'd expect an even closer relationship and faster integration of every new PayPal functions including mobile payments which seems to be PayPals focus recently.
Adobe's web analytics tool Omniture already has a tight integration with GSI commerce (eBay's other e-commerce platform, positioned above Magento's enterprise version). Combining the strength of Omniture’s SiteCatalyst and Magento’s e-commerce platform would provide a powerful offering for the marketplace. The integration will help to create a comprehensive and deeply-integrated online marketing services solution. The combined solution will be able to capture, collect, and organize real-time information about online marketing initiatives and will provide companies with the ability to automate, measure, manage and optimize customer marketing programs in real time.
Terapeak is an eBay Market Research Solution that helps eBay sellers to become more profitable by providing essential information and analytical data. They provide strategic information on Smart pricing, Trending products, seasonal information and provides keyword suggestions. I can see this providing Magento (GO) users with strategic Market research about other stores and what is happening in the market right now.
Where develops a range of location-based services, including mobile advertising as well as search and recommendation services. Integration with Magento would enhance the ability of retailers with both online and offline shops to connect with local shoppers.
Kenshoo Search and Social are SaaS solutions to provide businesses with enterprise search advertisement and social (Facebook) campaign managment based on real-time inventory. Integrating it with Magento would make these campaigns a lot easier for the merchants.
Milo too is all about local shopping. The service connects merchants of all sizes with consumers in their local vicinity, blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping. A great way for local retailers to reach more buyers.
BillMeLater (acquired by PayPal) provides a service to pay after the order is completed, no credit card required. Yust a checkout with your birthday and the last four digits of your social security number is enough to purchase a product.
Not really an integration, but with the acquisition of Magento, eBay now owns the complete B2C spectrum from low-end sales on eBay.com to Magento Go through Magento Enterprise until super-high end GSI Commerce. For starting merchants it would be great to have some kind of upgrade path from beying an eBay seller, to Magento Go, Magento Enterprise and maybe even GSI. This way you don't have to worry if the platform you choose will be able to sustain your growth: the whole spectrum is covered.
For us Europeans, the above services are mostly unknow (except for PayPal and Omniture) because they are mainly focused on the USA. But still there are some nice ones to look forward to, and the integration of these services with Magento might actually provide a large anough customer base for these services to take a look outside the USA and into the rest of the world. What services/ integrations are you looking foward to now eBay and Magento have joined forces?
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Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.
