OXID eSales Blog

Interview with Roman Zenner

Caroline Helbing — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:56:22 +0100

Roman Zenner is an author, speaker, consultant and entrepreneur. In his latest book “Online-Shop mit OXID eShop” (published in German by O’Reilly) he guides the reader through the installation of OXID eShop Community Edition, focussing on topics such as payment, basket, social media and fitting the shop to the needs of the own business model.

We asked Roman to give us a little insight about the work on his book.

When O’Reilly asked you to write a book about OXID eShop – why did you decide to take the job?

There were several reasons why this project got started. First of all, after having spent a lot of time working with the Magento platform (and writing two books about it – also published by O’Reilly) I had the feeling it was time to get to know another system better. In my daily job I advise companies which shop software best fits their individual needs, so I need to be objective about those kinds of things. The OXID eSales team was my first choice because I think they make good software since 2003 – and a user handbook was well overdue. As far as O’Reilly is concerned - they are simply fantastic to work with!

How easy was it to get to know the OXID platform? Which difficulties did you face during the research?

Since the Community Edition can be easily downloaded and installed, I could play around with it practically within minutes. Although it’s not the most elegant thing in the world, the admin interface is easy to get along with after a short while, so doing things like adding products and categories wasn’t a problem. Thankfully, the OXID team invited me to a three-day workshop, so I got an even closer look at the nuts and bolts of the system.
What I found difficult was my lack of experience with the everyday-use of the system and all the little tricks you can do. There are people out there who use the system since the early days and have much to say about tweaking the system to make it run and look the way you want. Fortunately, there were members of the community who could help me out here – especially our technical advisor and editor Andreas Ziethen, who provided invaluable insights.

Why is a book necessary at all? The documentation for OXID eShop Community Edition can be found on the internet, the community is very agile to share experiences, and many OXID partners advise future shop owners if they want to use the Community Edition.

I’m an avid user of forums, wikis etc. and clearly see the advantages of digital publications – one of which being that obviously, one can keep track of new developments and keep everything up to date. Yet, a printed and bound book still has unmatched authority: As an author, you are very careful to make sure that everything you write is correct, and the publisher checks and double-checks that no mistakes are made with regard to language either. Also, the aim is to construct one’s text in a way that it contains a clear didactic path.

The OXID employee Juergen Busch counselled you for the book – isn’t there a danger to lose the neutrality towards the product a writer should have?

When discussing the book project with all stakeholders, I made it very clear from the beginning that I wanted to in fact write a neutral book about the subject and not let marketing lingo and cover-ups take over the manuscript. If something does not work the way it should or a function is not solved ideally, I wanted to have the freedom to call a spade a spade, and I think I succeeded in this respect.

Who are the soon-to-be shop owners who should concentrate on OXID eShop and read the book?

That’s a tough one. I would say that everybody thinking about starting an online business should have a look at whether OXID eShop supports their business model, i.e. provides the desired functionality. If this is the case – and will be in most cases because the software itself is quite flexible – people should buy the book and ideally follow it from cover to cover to setup their own onlineshop.

Other than reading the book and using OXID eShop – which additional advice would you like to give those shop-owners?

Very often I see shop-owners using features not because they provide an additional value for their customers but simply because they can. OXID eShop has many functionalities ready to be used out-of-the-box – but only in very rare occasions it is advisable to use all of them. For a retailer of automotive parts, for example, it does not make a lot of sense to automatically show all the latest products when those products are vehicle-specific and this kind of information would only be interesting to a very small subset of your users. So: the more you can leave out, the better. Or to quote da Vinci: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Most of our readers are not so familiar with writing books for special needs – could you explain us a bit the writing process?

Typically, you begin by building a table of contents that structures the sheer endless amount of information you face when you begin writing a book. What I like to do is to think about the book as being a class with a couple of consecutive units: You start with installation and configuration, then move on to entering product and category data, talk about altering the design and push the shop online etc. When you follow the line of argument, the book should guide from beginning to end, covering everything important along the way.
When a raw structure has been set up, it’s just writing, writing, writing. I’m the type of author that needs to write something in order to find the structure and I’m constantly shifting things around as new ideas come up. Fortunately, my editor constantly reads the manuscript and provides ideas as well as criticism so that I’m not missing important details but also not dwell on the little things too much. So this constant shuffling around and ping-ponging of text is what at the end of the day results in such a book.

Will you have another book project coming up soon?

After having written three books on onlineshop software now, I think it’s time for me to do something different this year. I have a number of ideas I’d like to see published, all of which are strategy- and business-related commerce-topics I usually blog about on ecomPunk [ecompunk.com], one of my latest ventures. I’ll let you know when I fire up the old word processor again ;)

Thank you for the interview.

You’re very welcome.

Number of satisfied online retailers in Germany increases!

Caroline Helbing — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:17:07 +0100

The global financial crisis has no negative impact on Christmas
Sales 2011 for German online retailers. According to the 12/2011 OXID
market survey 90% of all retailers can increase or maintain their sales
on the level of the previous year.

In fact, only 10% of them report decreasing revenues in 2011. It is the lowest level since the last five years.

Overall, the number of German online retailers benefitting from
Christmas Sales increased and every tenth achieved almost half of this
year’s turnover in November and December.

According to 2010, almost 75% of the retailers surveyed are satisfied
with this year´s Christmas Sales and 40% can keep their revenues
constant (2010: 20%). Every second (50%) has reported increasing
revenues which is less than 2010 (60%).

Artedona on OXID eShop

Caroline Helbing — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:24:06 +0100

About Artedona:

Artedona offers private and business customers broad and upscale selection of products in the areas of tableware and home decoration. Artedona was founded in 1999 in Grasbrunn/Munich, Germany.

As an early mover Artedona launched an online shop (www.artedona.com) already in 2000. Almoster after a decade Artedona decided to set up a new shop system on the OXID eShop Enterprise Edition. The existing shop software was no longer able to meet the requirements of high performance shop systems, especially in the field of search engine optimization.

Artedona made the decision to set up their new shop system with OXID eShop due to the modular architecture, which can be easily adapted to future needs of Artedona.

Highlights of Artedona on OXID eShop:

International taxation and net prices

The Artedona online shop is designed to handle international purchases for both private and business customers. OXID eShop was extended with the following functions by developers of Artedona:

-Automatic pricing for B2B and B2C (Price including and excluding tax)

-The multi-currency-modul calculates orders in Euros, U.S. dollars, British pounds or Swiss francs

-The shipping costs are calculated automatically based on the order and delivery address

-The “landed-cost” process considers national or regional taxation

Various methods of payment
The shop offers various method of payments such as credit cart, direct debit or payment in advance. The offered payment method is based on a sophisticated decision matrix (based on the order value).

Search Engine Optimization
Improved SEO allows Artedona to increase qualified site traffic and hence to acquire new customers worldwide, especially with the OXID eShop SEO:

-Permalink: is more meaningful and therefore optimized for search engines for instance: www.artedona.com/en/Home-Decor/Picture-Frames

-Canonical URL: helps to solve duplicate content issues and makes it easier to prevent tagged URL's from being indexed.

SOAP Interface

The data exchange between third party systems and OXID eShop is guaranteed by the implementation of the SOAP interface. The bilateral interface coordinates an acurate and fast data exchange.

"The development of the whole project proceeded quickly, this was only possible due to the clean and transparent source code of the OXID eShop Enterprise Edition", says Beyer (Executive Board, Artedona AG). Noteworthy the whole extensions, for instance the landed-cost process, were realsized by a 2-person development team of Artedona, without external experts.

Further reading:
Read the whole case study in German

German etailers are very happy with 2010 Christmas Sales!

Caroline Helbing — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:04:32 +0100

German etailers seem to have fully recovered from the Economic Crisis - according to OXID eSales' latest market survey German online shops recorded strong Christmas Sales in 2010.

In fact 30% even reported postive effects from the subsiding Crisis on their Christmas Sales results!

By the end of 2010 two thirds of all surveyed online retailers were satisfied with their overall sales performance during the months of november and december, among them 25 percent who reportedly achieve almost half of their annual turnover in this period!

A novelty this year is a striking 2 percent -presumably located in niche markets- generating more than 75 and up to 100 percent during these last weeks of the year.

In total: 60 percent confirm an increased turnover compared to the same period in the previous year - this means an increase of 10 percent compared to 2009.

Download an englisch summary of the survey results here! (and click here for a more detailed German version)

This OXID market feedback corresponds nicely to the interim results just released by German bvh (German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association).

According to a first prognosis German mail order generated a volume of 3.1 billion EUR via the internet during Christmas Sales, which amounts to an increase of about 15 percent compared to 2009 (2.7 billion EUR).

And it's mostly due to these terrific ecommerce figures that the entire Christmas Sales volume (online as well as point-of-sales) during the months of november and december grew from 5.7 billion EUr in 2009 to 5.8 billion EUR in 2010 - a growth rate of almost 2 percent.

bvh expects a high overall ecommerce turnover of up to 18.3 billion EUR in 2010.

Webshops going mobile at last?

Caroline Helbing — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:29:43 +0100

It’s been a while since people were actually discussing mCommerce as a true hype and latest trend in digital media. Yet slowly but surely the use of mobile devices and services grew more and more intense and today, as the mobile internet is quite popular, almost everybody involved in digital business has at least heard of mobile commerce.

The necessary hardware is wide-spread nowadays as a great variety of PDAs and smartphones has been brought to market within the last years and months. Especially in business context a smartphone has become a true essential: there are only very few managers left without a mobile inbox and 24/7 WLAN access - thanks to network operators’ special interest in premium customers, as well as their flexible flat rate contracts, and probably some peer group dynamics…

The Blackberry was for a long time the most common mobile internet device until summer 2008, when Apple's iPhone 3G hit the market. With new conceptions of mobile internet and cell phone usability suddenly present in any kind of media (virtually and literally): the new age of mobile digital lifestyle was finally publicly acknowledged - … and iPhone declared its king by the large community of Apple fans.

Looking back today with some months’ distance it has to be admitted that, certainly, there was some kind of hype around the iPhone, marvellously staged by a yet another ingenious Apple marketing campaign. But it is equally true that the iPhone’s new navigation and display capabilities and many genuinely interactive applications in the ever flourishing Apple AppStore introduced some new standards in technology and customers enthusiasm to the mass market. This set the bar very high for any competitor attempting to follow and fuelled competition for new standards in usability and convenience for surfing the internet.

T-Mobile G1, launched about 5 months ago, still is the most promising competitor to the iPhone today. According to some recent announcements the soon to be launched Palm Pré might become the strongest rival to the iPhone, as Palm seems to be accepting the challenge to offer something entirely new to early adopters.

Any appraisal or disbelief today being premature, nevertheless this recent development can already be rated something clearly positive for the evolving market: As competition is always good for business, users might be so lucky as to experience some more competitive pricing and a shift in quality soon.

But -of course- the simple purchase of a mobile-internet capable device is by no means an indicator of its actual use.
Some voices claim mobile internet and mobile commerce are broadly used already. But seen up close there are still more surveys on mCommerce being conducted than reliable survey results being published. (some random survey on mobile ticketing, a special form of mCommerce)

But rumour has it that Google web search already detects a considerable percentage of queries stemming from mobile devices. (no recent figures confirmed though)
And those who are frequently checking their twitter account cannot help but notice an increasing number of entries submitted via some mobile application.

Departing from this data basis -knowing that there are suitable devices at hand and also a considerable user base willing to actively engage in mobile internet usage- there is still one premise missing to provide the condition of possibility to mCommerce:

Do the duly equipped mCommerce prospects find some adequate content to deal with?
Are there shops (and products) to entice people to actually engage in mCommerce?

This might be boiled down to e.g. the following three (to name only few):

Is the shop's search field visible at first glance? (Mobile shoppers mostly prefer the quick way to shop as they are usually perfectly aware of what they are looking for.)
Does the shop offer appropriate payment methods and delivery conditions to guarantee a smooth shopping experience?
And finally did the merchant take all security precautions required and (very importantly!) did she choose the appropriate means of communication to make their mobile shop visitors feel safe to shop regardless of whether they are browsing via cell phone display or laptop screen?

OXID eShop’s standard templates were made to fit some basic mobile commerce needs, but of course only very few OXID eShops out there left it at that and instead succeeded in creating a vast variety of individual front end designs. And just like that: payment, security, and most of the other key success factors for mCommerce are up to the merchant’s individual business model.

In business development at OXID we have been evaluating several options to truly embrace mCommerce and we started working on some specific ideas since beginning of last year already.
With long term partner and well-known usability expert Shoplupe we are now taking the next step to further this topic!

This morning Shoplupe launched a new consulting product: iPhone expert report:
an overall shop usability to check your online shop for iPhone compatibility. There is a two weeks special offer exclusive for OXID eShop merchants that any OXID owner attempting to approach mCommerce should not leave unexploited.

Read more about the offer at OXID Forum and shoplupe.com.

And also don't miss the interview with mCommerce authority Robert Rieser (Mobilemojo), whose customers include German mail-order house Quelle GmbH: http://blog.shoplupe.com/.

I hope for feedback and lively community discussion in our OXID forum. Share your know-how and individual mCommerce experiences with all of us.

Powered by OXID eShop: EDEKA24 and EWORLD24

Caroline Helbing — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:31:13 +0100

The Edeka Group is one of the largest German supermarket corporations, currently holding a market share of 26%.

Edeka Group is subdivided into seven regional corporations, one of them, “Edeka Südwest”, is in charge of the southwestern part of Germany (Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Southern Hesse) and also runs two webshops.
OXID eSales is listed as a partner of Edeka on Edeka24 and Eworld24 as both shopping platforms now run on OXID eShop.

OXID at Open Source Meets Business Congress 2009

Caroline Helbing — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:05:19 +0100

Last week’s Open Source Meets Business in Nürnberg was the first major open source event in 2009 and certainly a true highlight of this years’ conference calendar.

Some days have passed now and gave us some time to absorb the new information gathered and also to reflect on the experiences and impressions this conference left on us.

In my previous blog post I already praised the selected choice of topics and international speakers. And in retrospective I can now add that the actual program really met the high expectations!

Andrea (@OXID_andrea), Roland (@OXID_Roland), Erik (@schrotty) and myself (@aelektron) have been present throughout all 3 days of conference, missing Ralf (@ralftrapp) and Marco (@marcosteinhaeus) who both fell ill right before the conference started and thus were unable to join us.

I guess I am also speaking on behalf of the other three when I tell you that it was really thrilling for us to represent new open-sourced OXID at this major event. We attended OSMB for the first time this year and you will certainly meet us again there in 2010.

If I had to choose three most compelling topics this would be my top three:

I was excited to see that the combination of SaaS and FOSS was unequivocally promoted as the perfect match and the future of software development. The more so as this is exactly where OXID is heading with SaaS eCommerce intelligence (OXID eFire) and FOSS shop system (OXID eShop Community Edition and our agile development methods)!

I also enjoyed very much being introduced to the “Linux scene”, who was quite present at OSMB, announcing and looking forward to LinuxTag in Berlin soon.

And finally OSMB conference to me felt like a kick-off to a new trend in the German market as it seemed to introduce a more elaborate approach on architectural topics like cloud computing that might be one of the major topics this year. At OSMB cloud computing seemed to be everywhere, literally, and I guess we may hear a lot more about it these next weeks and months.

Also, up there in Nürnberg at OSMB we got soaked into “participation culture” as for the first time all of us really tried to keep up with the conference’s pace via twitter: quickly and truthfully reporting the most outstanding thoughts among the great variety of remarkable talks presented, but also commenting on some joyful moments (winning the award!) and amusing incidents (blue screen and booting during a talk – and the subsequent convivial laughter the audience shared ).

I thought it was rather impressive how bad-quality-cell-phone-pictures and a window of only 140 characters allow people to connect to each other!

I hear the charts of the talks and keynotes held at OSMB are supposed to be provided for free download at heise.de/events platform pretty soon. On the topic of community management and development I’d personally recommend the talks of Mozilla’s John Lilly and Jaspersoft’s José Morales as I regard both to be quite inspiring. And you might want to have a look at OXID twitterers (see above for their aliases) tweet history for their very personal impressions and illustrated memories.

All our OXID talks at OSMB also went really very well, and again to my compliments my OXID colleagues (Andrea, Erik, Roland) and to Holger Schuldt! I enjoyed all your presentations really very much (and so did the rest of the audience as far as I can tell ). Well done!

Tuesday afternoon Andrea and Erik did a wonderful job presenting the latest generation of OXID eShop version 4. It was a nice mix of ecommerce market and practice -sketching e-tailers actual needs and showing how they are met by specific product features- and the technology behind the scenes – xtreme programming and two years of refactoring.

Right afterwards Roland presented once again the OXID business case during OSBA Investment Summit. The audience was mostly composed of OSBA jury members, and you can tell from OXID’s success in the Open Source Business Award (see below) that his talk didn’t miss the point.

Wednesday afternoon long term successful OXID customer Holger Schuldt of Deicke Kirchenbedarf (www.deicke-kirchenbedarf.de) gave a very charismatic talk and deep insights

on how to run a successful long-tail online shop in a market segment that only partly and very slowly finds its way into online media and that is not all too well known to most of us: international online church retail! I particularly liked this very vivid and humorous speech (“When I started my business, my mother just commented: There certainly is a market as people die all along…” ) and this shop actually faces the same challenges as any fashion shop, the more so as he offers custom-tailored cassocks! Very instructive and refreshing, thanks a lot!

27th – 29th January: meet OXID at OSMB 2009

Caroline Helbing — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:58:10 +0100

These first days of January passed so quickly and the first huge Open Source Meeting in 2009 is very close now!

This year – for the first time – also OXID is getting ready to attend Open Source Meets Business conference and we are all very excited and happy to meet the international open source scene which OSMB is so well-known for.

The speakers invited, the variety of topics, just the entire program is absolutely amazing. (See for yourself)

And it is my pleasure to announce that there will be three OXID talks contributing to the conference program, too!

Tuesday afternoon (27th of January) Andrea (Executive Board, Marketing Director) and Erik (Head of Technical Development) present OXID’s 4th generation shop-software and new OXID eShop Community Edition.
(Neu als Open Source - Shop-Software OXID eSales, panel T01 Business Intelligence, Content Management, room: Zürich, CCN West 2, 16:30 - 17:00 o’clock).

As we also participated in this year’s Open Source Business Award, right afterwards Roland (OXID CEO) is giving a 30 minutes talk on OXID’s new commercial open source strategy.
(OXID Partnerprogramm und Community Management, panel I01 Start-ups, room: Mailand, CCN Mitte, 17:00 - 17:30 o’clock).

Mind that you will have to be quick to shift rooms!

And finally, Wednesday afternoon, don’t miss Holger Schuldt (www.deicke-kirchenbedarf.de) as he will tell all on what running an online shop really is about, why online church retailers are sorely needed, and why he chose OXID eShop to run his business.
(OXID eShop im Einsatz bei Deicke Kirchenbedarf, panel E03 Handel, room: Dublin, CCN West 2, 16:30 - 17:00 o’clock).

Apart from the speakers there will also be Ralf (Manager Technical Products), Community Guide Marco, and myself attending this event.

If you plan to attend the conference and haven’t registered yet: here’s the link to heise registration form (very convenient online registration, I have to say!).

And be sure to have a look at heise’s smart program planning device “Programmplaner” – this will make your scheduling a lot easier!

We are very much looking forward to see you all.

OXID releases results of 4th annual market survey on Christmas Sales.

Caroline Helbing — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:36:32 +0100

In spite of many market segments suffering from the effects of the financial crisis German online retailers recorded strong Christmas Sales in 2008!

By the end of 2008 more than 75 percent of surveyed online retailers were satisfied with their overall sales performance during the months of november and december, thereof a third is even very or extremely satisfied with this year’s Christmas Sales.
Surprisingly 54 percent even record an increased turnover compared to 2007’s Holiday Sales. For 33 percent this growth turns out to be quite significant as they record an increase of more than 10 percent compared to the same period in the previous year.
Download a summary of the survey results here.