E-Commerce Technical Aspects Tzahi Fridman

About Me  Over two decades in the Hi-Tech industry  Technical & Engineering positions  Always HANDS ON  Experienced technical entrepreneur  Current position: CTO & Co-Founder at Evolero

Let’s Talk About …  Know your neighborhood  Common vs. Unique  Who’s in our team?  Solutions overview  Some user stories …

System parts / features  Data persistency (DB)  Back end  Front end  Back-office / Administration tools (upload products etc.)  Reports – given, custom  s – receipts, notifications, newsletters etc.  Backups

Hosting  Shared (GoDaddy)  Performance …  SaaS (Shopify, Etsy, ebay, Amazon)  Customizations …  My servers (location is important)  Physical  Cloud

Common vs. Unique  CMS platforms – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento  Self installed OR SaaS  Given modules  Designs  Developers – usually for the latest version  Unique  Custom modules for existing platforms  Scratch development

Be AWARE from …  “We have our own platform that does …”  “I can develop it in a week …”  Too cheap solutions from young people  Agencies (over rated, their common practices) – check carefully what you get

Common vs. Unique  Common  Same behaviors, funnels, flows  Usually same designs & blocks  Can develop custom modules but its hard to fully customize  Unique  Your own flows (do you need it?)  Your special UI – better experience  If done right, better performance  Example – using Drupal views  Scaling cheaper

Who’s in our team?  Architect  Designer  SEO / Marketing  Developer/s – custom modules, front-end, back-end  IT / Maintenance

Architect  Analyze your needs  Which technologies / solutions are best for MY needs  Help me find a developer / agency  Define maintenance procedures  Take me hand-in-hand along the procedure  Cost effective in medium/large projects

Designer  “Make it nice”  Experience in mobile & web  A (common) designer is NOT a UX/UI expert!  YOU should give the flows, hierarchies etc.  Use real content when reviewing

SEO / Marketing  Be aware of amateurs  SEO requirements are part of the website structure  Analysis & changes may need code change, especially in product pages etc.  BE AWARE – recent cool front-end technologies are NOT SEO friendly!

Developers – what is this?  Web development – low barrier  Many cheap web developers (mainly PHP)  No large scale experience  Usually using their best known technology  If not well defined, you may not get exactly what you expected

Developers – what to look for?  Experienced in more than one technology  Available for long time ahead for maintenance  Using common practices & technologies  Can support previous releases / versions  Front-end / back-end

IT / Maintenance  Keep your system monitored and running  Backups procedures  Expansion options  SLA – downtime is money!  Usually freelancers

Solutions Recap

SaaS  Etsy  Shopify  Amazon  …  Pay attention  How much can I customize?  What if I want to move? Exports? Customer base?

WordPress  WordPress  Almost everything ready  Themes  Plugins for almost everything  Very common platform (for developers as well), PHP based  Installations options (shared servers, dedicated hosting etc.)

Other CMS / Platforms  Mostly out-of-the-box  Existing themes / easy customizations  Modules / Plugins  BEWARE of older versions maintenance – hard to find programmers/agencies

Custom Developments  MVC Frameworks  Ruby on Rails (Ruby)  Django (Phyton)  PHP frameworks  Front-End frameworks (Javascript based)  AngularJS  Ember  Mobile  Native (iOS, Android)  PhoneGap, Ionic

Tzahi Fridman Thank You!