Optaros Best Practices Magento Deployments eBook

8/8/2019 Optaros Best Practices Magento Deployments eBook

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1 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved.


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Why a Magento Deployments eBook?

We continually hear misconceptions about Magento fromorganizations considering it as an ecommerce platform option.

Through our many Magento deployments we have first-hand

knowledge of what is and is not possible with Magento, and willaddress a number of the misconceptions here.


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Design & User Experience

IT generally loves open source software, but the marketing folkswant to make sure the design of the site is compelling, brandrelevant and incorporates ecommerce best practices.

Following are some best practices in ecommerce and design,and how to achieve them w ith Magento.


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Home Page

Often the home page will be the first place consumers have a true

interaction with your brand online. Carefully consider the emotions itconveys to site visitors. Think about the big picture how dodesign, features and functionality, and content interact todifferentiate your brand?

Help your visitors answer the question, Does this brand reflect who Iam? (This is particularly important for luxury and premium brands.)


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7/367 2009 Optaros, Inc. All rights reserved.


Category Pages & Navigation

Making minor tweaks to the existing Magento framework for category

pages those listing different options for a particular kind of item can make your site stand out from the crowd due to its uniquelayout.

This kind of development doesnt require heavy coding; rather youneed a creative design team, and the ability to restructure and stylizeelements of the page.




Category Pages & Navigation (Cont.)

For example, again looking at 36Boutiques, we can see the differencebetween a standard page layout in Magento, and that which we

created for this private-event retailer to make current sale events moreprominent, while still outlining upcoming events as well.




Category Pages & Navigation (Cont.)

The same concept applies to site navigation Magentos out-of-the-box navigation may not match the focus of the site.

Consider if standard navigation is what makes the most sense for your

site. In many cases, a custom navigation is more appropriate andcan have a significant impact in leading customers through the buyingprocess.




Product Detail Pages

Though your home page may be the main doorway for many visitors,

its important to also understand that due to search engines andsocial networking sites websites can no longer be seen ashierarchical. Instead, visitors can enter your site from any page, evenone very low on your standard navigation.

For this reason, every page in your website has to be able to standalone. Product pages are no longer the end of a navigation processthroughout your site they are self-sufficient, optimized unitsthat must portray your brand ideal immediately.




Product Detail Pages (Cont.)

Some current best practices for

giving visitors a more meaningfulexperience within product pagesinclude: featuring video, consumerreviews and blog posts, and

offering multiple pictures, zoomand 360-degree rotation.

The screenshot here shows a product detail page from 36Boutiques,showcasing multiple product photos that can be scrolled across. This is

an update to standard Magento processes, which load a new page toview additional product photos.




PersonalizedNavigation

A sites organizationalstructure wont always

align with people'simmediate needs.Personalizednavigation offers a

consistent home,as a footercustomized for thatparticular visitor,that featuresinformation such astheir site profile, wishlist, cart, visual orderhistory, and groups.

(Image source: www.charlotterusse.com)
http://www.charlotterusse.com/http://www.charlotterusse.com/http://www.charlotterusse.com/




One-Page Checkout

Out of the box, Magento offers a standard two-page checkout process:

Page one - cart information Page two - checkout information

By reengineering this process to create a one-page, two-column

checkout with cart information on one side and billing/shippinginformation on the other retailers can decrease cartabandonment significantly.




One-Page Checkout (Cont.)

For example, one-page checkouts like the one below see a cart

abandonment rate of only 40-45% (20% less than the industryaverage of 60-65%).




Quick-View Modals

Using quick-view modals

rather than loading newpages when customersare looking to perform asimple task such as

inviting a friend to the site,sharing an item on Facebookor viewing product details helps keep site visitors in theirshopping experience, rather than navigating them across the site.

Magento does not support quick-view modals out of the box. Wegenerate quick-view modals for our clients via AJAX requests.

(Image source: www.gap.com)


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Improving Magento Speed & Performance

Magento Scalability by the Numbers

Sample statistics of live Magento sites we have deployed:

5 million monthly unique visitors

2,000 page views/second

15 add-to-carts/second

3 orders/second $200 million in annual revenue

In this section we will discuss some of the ways in which we have

achieved these results.




Strip Out Unnecessary Functions

Split the browse part of the application off to cacheseparately.

We used our own proprietary caching system wrapper that sits outside

of Magento and intercepts requests, and keeps them from goingthrough Magento unless it is necessary.




Strip Out Unnecessary Functions (Cont.)

Trimmed dow n the add-to-cart and order pipeline

functionalities.

In order to process high-volume orders quickly, we removed bits ofcode from Magentos standard add-to-cart and order processes so that

shoppers only see options to fill in the attributes that pertain to theirorder.

We also stripped out several modules that auto-fire on most Magento-based ecommerce sites, thus delaying order calculations until

necessary.




Strip Out Unnecessary Functions (Cont.)

Rewrote the checkout process.

To increase checkout speed and decrease cart abandonment, werewrote Magentos checkout process to offer a one-page checkout.

With this simplified design, users can enter their personal shipping andbilling information in fewer steps, thus increasing sales.




Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

80% of the page load time is spent downloading all the components ofthe page, such as: images, stylesheets, scripts and more. Think aboutthe impact that speeding this process could have on your overall sitespeed!

One way to speed this process is to deliver content from serversthat are geographically closer to the site visitor, and a contentdelivery network (CDN) can help you do just that.
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.htmlhttp://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html




Use a CDN (Cont.)

Essentially, CDNs enable you to offload your static content assets

that do not require the rendering of code, for example: images, CSSfiles and java script files to a series of geographically dispersedservers.

For example, in one client engagement, we built a content-drivenecommerce site using Magento, and integrated CDN along w ith full-page caching. This drastically improved page load time, even forthose with large amounts of content and rich media assets(particularly, in this case, videos).




Use a CDN (Cont.)

While there are some Magento modules available that facilitateintegration with a CDN, these require software modifications,additional configuration and testing.

In some cases, such as for the client mentioned above, total sitecaching in a preferred option. This directs all non-secure traffic tothe CDN so it acts as a site proxy serving cached content andpassing through requests for dynamic content to our Magento front-end servers.


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Cloud Computing

Use c1.medium for CPU . After testing several instances forhomepages and carts, it seems that a standard option that gets good

value for your money is c1.medium, which can handle approximately1,500 customers per hour.

Use a reverse proxy or l ight http server for serving staticcontent such as images, CSS and other media or a CDN if yourcustomers are spread out geographically.

Cache product catalog views, at least for anonymous users(typically 90% of site visitors). Magento Full Page Cache or reverse

proxies (i.e. Varnish) can help with this. However, if most of yourcustomers are logged in, you likely need to develop some customcaching (i.e. AJAX, server side includes, etc.). This will improve siteperformance for end users dramatically.


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Cloud Computing

Scale horizontally by adding servers. This will allow your site tocope with peaks of traffic an expected occurrence in ecommerce due

to busy times such as evenings, holidays and large-sale events. Toforecast traffic ebbs and flows as accurately as possible, a fullyautomated provisioning process of servers that records visitor behaviorby the minute is ideal.

Plan for disaster. Servers can fail at any time on the cloud, and do soat a higher frequency than on traditional hardware. Reduce the numberof SPOFs (single points of failure), and automate recovery procedures.Actively monitor server performance to avoid server failures. If a

customer cant access the site when they want to make a purchase,they may go to a competitor instead.


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Cloud Computing

Share Magento back-end cache between all servers to avoidinconsistencies. A mix of memcached (fast cache) and MySQL (slowcache) is the optimal setup, particularly if visitor sessions need to be

shared between servers.

Tune the database to best practices. However, this is surprisinglynot a major bottleneck in regard to performance and scaling. If

databases become an issue, you can split read-write traffic, or evenscale vertically, with only a short interruption of service.

Centralize or proxy-out your communications from a singleserver. This often involves integration with back-office systems like

static IP for firewalling.

Rely on infrastructure value-added services such as S3, ELB,EBS, SQS, Monitoring and Rightscale to reduce your operational

cost.


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Integration w ith Existing Systems

Magento is an open platform that follows standards-basedapproaches to integration. The community of third-party integrationsoftware has also written adapters to Magento that can easeintegration requirements.

Following, we share the most common integration requests, aswell as our approach.


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Common Integration Requests

Sending Orders to Order Management System or Drop Shipper,for robust order management processing. Inventory updates from Inventory Master/ ERP , providingcustomers with accurate stock information online (an ideal way toincrease customer satisfaction and revenue). Receiving order and ship status from Order Management

System, allowing customers want to sign in and track their orderstatus. Customer account creation or and updates to CRM , offering a360-degree view of customers for better multi-channel experiences.

Export to Business Intelligence (catalog, order, customer),providing real user data that can be tied to campaigns, used by R&Dand more.


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Tip #1: Have a master platform for business processessupported by distributed systems.

Each of your business entities (quote, order, customer, product, stock,etc.) should be owned by a single system at any given time. Othersystems should go through the master, and accept that their local copymight be overruled.

Maintaining this clear model and chain of command simplifies ahuge amount of standard integration pains. Multi-master modelsare for more difficult to handle in distributed environments.


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Tip #2: Use systems that can support the real-timenature of the web.

You cant typically rely on ERP or WMS to reach ecommerce SLAs inreal time.

For this reason, you shouldnt build any synchronous connectivity to

ERP or WMS systems, unless you also have a very efficient fallbackmode that can provide acceptable functionality when the traffic on yourwebsite is high, or your inventory system is unreachable.


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Tip #3: Multi-channel adds to the complexity; considerthe complete customer experience.

Think about all the different ways in which your customers interactwith and order from your company, and how they will integrate withthe ecommerce experience.

For example: How will orders placed by phone be managed? Will theyintegrate back with online order tracking? What is the managementprocess for orders placed online to be picked up in store?


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Tip #4: There are few w idely adopted standards;determine your integration approach carefully.

EDI (electronic data interchange), OAGI (Open Applications Group) andUBL (universal business language) all offer good bases to standardizeprocesses and messages, but all are somewhat complex to put inplace, while none are yet widely adopted. They are also limited to only

a subset of what modern ecommerce platforms need.

Finding the best way to make your multiple systems talk with oneanother may be a lengthy process in itself.


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Tip #5: Understand compliance requirements.

Some integrations may be required to meet specific compliance

standards. For example, payments made with credit cards need tofollow PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards)regulations.

Other things to consider include: the transfer of customer databetween countries, and even industry-specific regulations (such asHIPAA for those in healthcare).


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Tip #6: Focus on Effective Data Migration.

How can you effectively transfer customer data from one system to

another? Manual transfer is a tedious and time-intensive task,especially when data differs across systems.

One way around this is to use cloud-based integration software, such

as that offered by our partner Boomi, to help ease data transfer. Forexample, this can export customer data inputted in an online orderform directly to your CRM system.
http://www.boomi.com/http://www.boomi.com/


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Conclusion

Hopefully this eBook helped address some of your questions. If there

are other questions you would like to discuss, please reach out to us atwww.optaros.com or contact me at [email protected]

Marc Osofsky, VP Marketing

You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or our Blog to let

us know your thoughts.
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Optaros Best Practices Magento Deployments eBook

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