At Keplar we have just completed a “soup-to-nuts” project launching a new image-heavy e-commerce site in the lifestyle space; the retailer has launched with 100 SKUs (each with 17 product images) with a plan to grow its catalogue aggressively to 1,000+ SKUs over the next 6 months. With these sorts of numbers, catalogue management – especially around product imagery – starts to be a real headache and also potentially a significant time/cost sink for the business: even something as simple as updating the watermark on each image becomes a major untaking.

The headaches of manual processes

Off-the-shelf technology solutions to streamline these processes already exist – typically referred to as Master Data Management systems, the leader in the field is probably Hybris with their Hybris PCM (product content management) system. But the Hybris technology stack is designed for major retailers with very large catalogues and/or complex product lifecycles – and it is priced accordingly; there’s no real equivalent for smaller retailers who want a better (i.e. less manual) approach to catalogue management than that provided by their ecommerce package.

Our client had selected PrestaShop as their shopfront and, in the absence of any good free/low-cost MDM technology, they started with a completely manual process for image creation (using Photoshop CS5) and image upload (using PrestaShop’s web-based administration interface). Manual processes can be painful but we recommend working with a manual process first before attempting to automate that process through custom scripting, Mechanical Turk or similar – that way you know that you are automating the “right thing”, and you can have confidence that the cost-saving from the automation is worth the upfront cost of implementing that automation.

Having mapped the retailer’s manual processes for product catalogue management, three things quickly became clear:

1. There were repetitive image processing tasks which were worth automating – in particular, there were adjustments to canvas size, watermarking and glow effects which had to be made multiple times across all of the 1,700 odd images
2. The image sizes were larger than usual for an ecommerce website – this was a deliberate strategy by the retailer, who wanted to differentiate their site from the competition with much higher quality product shots. This had a negative impact on page load times as well as contributing to:
3. The manual image upload process was very time-consuming and error-prone – the number of images plus the images’ file sizes made uploading the product photos into the PrestaShop back-end very time consuming. And as with all slow, manual processes, it was very error-prone, with some of the 1,700 images being missed or not being kept up-to-date

Once we had identified these three issues, we then worked with the client to determine the best solutions to each. The first problem was the easiest to solve – we recorded the repetitive image processing actions in Photoshop and then simply applied those “macros” when needed across the whole product image library (or a targeted subset of it). We will discuss this approach in more detail in a future blog post, as there are some specific tricks and techniques for a retailer working with a large product catalogue.

For the second and third issues we went with a more radical solution: we decided to decouple the shop’s product image catalogue from PrestaShop altogether, instead relying on Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront and some custom scripting. Amazon S3 is Amazon’s “cloud-based” file storage system, and it has a straightforward API which makes it easy to programmatically upload large numbers of files. S3 in turn works nicely with CloudFront, which is Amazon’s worldwide CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology: by serving your product photos through CloudFront, your site visitors are guaranteed fast download times wherever they are in the world.

So instead of directly uploading the image files into the PrestaShop back-end, with the new approach we simply wrote a script (in Haskell) to upload the files onto Amazon S3, from where they would be automatically served – very speedily – to site visitors anywhere in the world using CloudFront. In PrestaShop, all we had to do was specify for each product the URL to the CloudFront-hosted folder of product photos.

And so when we bulk-updated the product photography using our Photoshop batch scripts, it was simply a matter of rerunning the S3 upload script and telling CloudFront which files had changed. With this approach the client no longer needed to manually upload any product shots into PrestaShop – saving the client from a significant, ongoing time commitment.

As you can see, a willingness to start scripting repetitive tasks, and to look outside the capabilities of your ecommerce package, can pay real dividends in terms of streamlining your retail operations and even, in the case of CloudFront, improving your customer experience. At Keplar we believe that cloud services, third-party APIs and custom scripting provide excellent automation opportunities for those e-commerce sites which have somehow got stuck in the “slow lane” of repetitive  manual processes. To flesh this thinking out further, in our next post in this series we will take a more in-depth technical look at some of the S3 and CloudFront scripting we implemented for this client.

Are you a retailer stuck in the “slow lane” of repetitive manual processes? To discuss automation techniques for your online or offline retail business, get in touch with Keplar.

To keep costs down for our clients and avoid “reinventing the wheel”, where possible we make use of existing libraries, plugins and extensions for these platforms. However this isn’t always possible, and sometimes we see an opportunity to improve (hopefully!) on the existing options.

At Keplar we’re keen to open-source any such code which we develop and own ourselves (i.e. isn’t part of a client deliverable) which we think could be useful for a wider audience. Open sourcing in-house technology has two clear benefits in our eyes: firstly it helps to support the open source ecosystems on which we depend, and secondly, the more eyes we can get on the code we use in the wild the better.

As our first tentative steps down this route, we are open sourcing a PayPal e-commerce library for CodeIgniter which we are already using in production on a couple of clients. We are releasing this library under the guise of an initiative which we are calling “Orderly” – we hope to release other e-commerce software and libraries under this banner in the future.

The library is called codeigniter-paypal-ipn, and is already available for download on GitHub. The library is designed to make it easier for developers using CodeIgniter to receive, validate and store instant payment notifications (IPNs) sent by PayPal when an order has been paid for by a customer.

The library was inspired by an earlier CodeIgniter PayPal library – Ran Aroussi’s PayPal_Lib. Compared to Ran’s library, our library adds some additional validation to your website’s interaction with PayPal, and also it adds functionality to log your orders to the database. (The launch version of codeigniter-paypal-ipn uses Doctrine 1.2 to save the orders, but we’re planning a future version which should work without Doctrine.)

For instructions on installing the library, please see the codeigniter-paypal-ipn readme file. Once the library is installed, using it in a CodeIgniter controller is quite straightforward – just write a controller like this:

// To handle the IPN post made by PayPal (uses the Paypal_Lib library).
    function ipn()
    {
        $this->load->library('PayPal_IPN'); // Load the library

        // Try to get the IPN data.
        if ($this->paypal_ipn->validateIPN())
        {
            // Succeeded, now let's extract the order
            $this->paypal_ipn->extractOrder();

            // And we save the order now.
            $this->paypal_ipn->saveOrder();

            // Now let's check what the payment status is and act accordingly
            if ($this->paypal_ipn->orderStatus == PayPal_IPN::PAID)
            {
                // Configure to send HTML emails.
                $this->load->library('email');
                $mail_config['mailtype'] = 'html';
                $this->email->initialize($mail_config);

                // Prepare the variables to populate the email template:
                $data = $this->paypal_ipn->order;
                $data['items'] = $this->paypal_ipn->orderItems;

                // Now construct the email (create a template using Smarty or similar)
                $emailBody = $this->smarty->view('ecommerce/conf_email.tpl', $data, TRUE);

                // Finish configuring email contents and send.
                $this->email->to($data['payer_email'], ($data['first_name'] . ' ' . $data['first_name']));
                $this->email->bcc('sales@CHANGEME.com');
                $this->email->from('support@CHANGEME.com', 'CHANGEME');
                $this->email->subject('Order confirmation');
                $this->email->message($emailBody);
                $this->email->send();
            }
        }
        else // Just redirect to the root URL
        {
            $this->load->helper('url');
            redirect('/', 'refresh');
        }
    }

That should be everything! Let us know how you get on with the library in the blog comments below – or over on GitHub if you prefer. We hope you find it useful, and we look forward to making more “Orderly” releases soon.

And so for the second in our series of technical blog posts, we are going to look at the opportunities to enhance your e-commerce site using geo-IP location. Geo-IP location sounds complicated but it is simply the process of determining where your individual website visitors are geographically located in the world; this is achieved by looking up each visitor’s IP address in a database which maps known IP addresses to individual countries or even cities.

As an online retailer, knowing where your website visitors are located allows you to provide them with a much more personalised shopping experience – for example, you could:

• Show specific contact details for your visitor’s country
• Price your product catalogue in your customer’s local currency
• Automatically calculate delivery times and costs for their order

These sorts of personalisations work in two ways to improve your bottom-line: firstly, they increase the level of confidence and trust which a visitor feels in your site by showing that you can treat them as a ‘local’. And secondly, they reduce friction in the check-out process, removing difficult steps for the user such as converting the given currency into their own money. Using these techniques can significantly increase conversions among overseas visitors, as we have seen above.

On to the technology: although there are various providers of geo-IP address databases, we use MaxMind because it is free, simple to use and regularly updated. Also note that many e-commerce packages such as Magento or Prestashop have MaxMind integrations available already for free or low cost – check online to see if your e-commerce package has one too.

For this example we will be proceed as if we are integrating MaxMind directly with a simple PHP-based online shop; we will use MaxMind to display some simple internationalised information to your site visitor. In future blog posts we will explore some more sophisticated localisation approaches, to really drive more sales.

Now on to the technical steps…

The first step is to install the MaxMind API and database. The commands below all assume that you are working in a web root directory, in a Debian/Ubuntu-like environment:

mkdir MaxMind
cd MaxMind
wget -r --no-parent --reject "index.html*" -nH --cut-dirs=4 http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/php/
mkdir data
cd data
wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/GeoIP.dat.gz
tar -xvf GeoIP.dat.gz
cd ../..

We’re also going to install the country flags from the famfamfam icon set, so that we can show the user their national flag:

mkdir flags
cd flags
wget http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/famfamfam_flag_icons.zip
unzip famfamfam_flag_icons.zip
cd ..

Next, we write a simple helper PHP file which will be included into our shop and will make it easy to run MaxMind and lookup the user’s country:

mkdir includes
vi includes/geoip.php

And enter the text:

<?php
/**
 * This is a MaxMind helper library
 * Author: Alex Dean (@alexatkeplar http://www.keplarllp.com)
 */

// Include the required PHP file
require_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/../MaxMind/geoip.inc';

// Get the country code using MaxMind geo-IP lookup
function getCountryCode() {
    $mm = geoip_open(dirname(__FILE__) . "/../MaxMind/data/GeoIP.dat", GEOIP_STANDARD);
    $ip = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    $countryCode = geoip_country_code_by_addr($mm, $ip);
    geoip_close($mm);

    return $countryCode; // 'GB', 'US' etc, or null if not found
}

With this done, let’s next display the user’s current location, so that they know that this online shop is localised for their specific country. Start by creating an index file:

vi ../index.php

And add in the following code:

<?php
require_once("includes/geoip.php");

$countryCode = getCountryCode();
if (isset($countryCode)) {
    echo "Hello, you are from <img src='flags/png/" . strtolower($countryCode) . ".png'>";
} else {
    echo "Sorry, we don't know what country you are from";
}

A few things to note about this code:

1. We need to check that MaxMind successfully found the IP address, because some IP addresses don’t exist in the MaxMind database.
2. Rather than just displaying the visitor’s country’s flag, we could use the Zend Framework to map the country code onto the country’s name. (Installing the Zend Framework is out of scope for this blog post).
3. The MaxMind database is regularly updated (typically once a month) with new and changing IP addresses, so it would be worth setting up a cronjob to update the database automatically

With the basic country-detection code functioning, the next steps would be to layer in more country-specific features, such as pricing in local currency and country-specific contact details. Also it’s a good idea to allow the user to change their country manually, in case MaxMind got it wrong or their country could not be determined. Let us know in the comments what aspects of this internationalisation you would like us to tackle next!

I hope the above is useful and leaves you with a better understanding of what geo-IP location is, and why it is such a powerful tool for e-commerce. And do let me know how you get on with the code samples – I will reply to any questions in the comments.

Are you interested in internationalising your e-commerce site? Keplar can provide you with strategic and technical support – please drop us an email to find out more.

The report described the routes to markets for SMEs that wish to trade online, and commented on the economics of them.

The overall findings of the report are positive.  Innovation, often by large players (e.g. eBay, Paypal, Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook) has led to significant decreases in cost barriers to small businesses setting up online.

However, small businesses can face difficulties online, for example:

• Small businesses that depend on particular providers are sensitive to system changes or loss of service,
• The levels of innovation and cost reductions that have taken place online have not always been matched in those aspects of the value chain that remain offline.  (E.g. delivery of goods bought online.)

Download the report, or view the press release from the OFT.

Learn more about the research. Learn more about Plum Consulting.

In this, the first of our e-commerce surveys, we look at a number of big brands in the fashion e-commerce space, to look at how well they sell online.  The purpose of the report is not to rate the retailers surveyed:  after all, they will know if they are under- or over-performing.  Rather, the purpose is to identify best practice in the area, so that other online retailers can learn from it, and avoid the imitating the worst.

E-commerce is an increasingly competitive space.  Winning companies in the space can beat the competition by getting the basics right:

• Maximizing customer lifetime value
  • Encouraging customers to maximize the amount they spend on each visit
  • Encouraging customers back to the site to make repeat purchases
• Maximizing visitor to customer conversions
  • Making it as easy as possible for visitors who are looking for specific items to find and purchase them
  • Presenting the right products in the right way so that visitors “browsing” are encouraged to make a purchase
• Acquiring more visitors than the competition
  • Online retailers that have maximized their customer’s lifetime values, and visitor to customer conversion rates, can afford to outspend the competition on marketing because they get a better return on every visitor who comes to their site
  • This means they can profitably outspend their competition across marketing channels, acquiring more users taking share

The above approach should be bread-and-butter for any company looking to grow sales through their online site(s).  However, the simple truth, born out by our survey, is that many companies, including major online retailers, don’t get these basics right.

Download our Fashion E-commerce Report here.

Interested in growing your e-commerce revenue whilst improving your customers experience? Get in touch to discuss how to optimise your site.