Creating Digital had the pleasure of attending the first Meet Magento event in the USA this past week. It was a 2 day conference centered around Magento and e-commerce. It was a pleasure catching up with and meeting many colleagues from around the world. Many major players in the Magento eco-system were present and openly shared ideas, code, and tips of the industry.
The key differentiator at this conference was that those in attendance cared deeply for the platform, the development of it, and seeing its continued improvement and success. There was deep belief that in order for them to succeed they need you to succeed. It’s very powerful when many vendors come together and openly discuss tips, tricks, and improvements. Many “secret sauces” were shared! This will inevitably lead to happier Merchants and faster Agency turn around!
What does this mean for our clients? This means we’ve come back with a list of new, hot & tested features that we can implement and get rolling on your sites almost immediately. For brevity sake, here are our top picks.
Biggest Take Away: Performance
Magento is a big application! Add on any front end code, JavaScript libraries, and it’s very easy to create slow load times for visitors. There were many topics covered around how to optimize Magento and Front End Development to be speedy. 2-3 Seconds for a homepage load is the ideal performance budget. Anything slower could cause the merchant lost sales. And of course anything faster is excellent!
Coolest New Tool: MageFlow
Apparently everyone was having the same “time waste” of moving products, attributes, and other settings from development to production. MageFlow aims to fulfill this need by offering a module that will allow you to select and push or select and pull database changes from different environments. Be warned: This first version only supports Magento simple products. We’re looking forward to seeing the other product types in future versions!
Vendor to Steal the Spotlight: dotmailer
Let’s just say, Dotmailer is mailchimp/constant contact on steroids. It runs fully from the admin panel and is integrated into Magento. This gives you the ability to tie into your existing customer database in ways you’ve always wished of. Want to send an email tailored to everyone who has spent under $100 in your store, and a different one to everyone who has spent over $500? Done. Want to send an email x days after a customer has ordered? Point, click, done! Want to make a series of emails and create a decision logic on what to send next based on if they opened, clicked, or bought? Point, click, done! Want to send out normal newsletter blasts – Point, Click, Done! Hands down our recommendation for integrating with Magento. The only con we saw is that this is an enterprise ready tool, with an enterprise price tag. Merchants should expect to pay a monthly fee for service and a yearly Magento module fee.
Honorable Mention: Sweet Tooth
Sweet Tooth is a loyalty reward system that is plug and play right into Magento. Its priced right – new shop owners / merchants can easily afford.
2nd Honorable Mention: All in Attendance and All Speakers
Seriously! It was a great event with even greater people. The personalities and the willingness to talk shop and share in an open and transparent way made going that much more valuable. Seeing that a lot of what we do day in and day out is being replicated across the board makes us feel good about the procedures in place and the methodologies we use. It was great to bat new ideas off other developers and agency leads.
