 That's right. You're all set. OK, thank you all for coming. First, I'm going to show these slides that you've probably seen a couple of times. Come to the Contribution Day tomorrow. And remember to go in and give feedback on the event and the speakers. So welcome to this talk. I realized when I was writing the talk and the title of the talk that it kind of sounds like something you would expect to be a bit, like an enterprise kind of a talk. So this sounds kind of boring to me. And I made a little twist. So this is content-driven e-commerce, a love story. So to those of you who wanted a boring enterprise talk, I'm really sorry. This is going to be the love story into that. Checking if someone is leaving. This is good. So my name is Eric. I work at NIME, the Inkron name, in Norway. And although this is the slide where I brag about myself, I also want to note that this talk is not going to be very technical. And I'm a technical person. So I hope you will be kind to me, even though I'm speaking about something that is not technical. And I'm going to talk partly about some things that comes from an interesting cooperation we had at our company with three master students in media communication and information technology in the University of NIME. They were studying what would make a good web strategy for a brand new webshop. And by brand new, I mean they had a physical store and they wanted to start an online version of their store. So when I'm referring to the research project later in the talk, this is the research project. I will come to that. First, I want to come back to the title, The Love Story, because we're going to follow two young people in their adventures in love. And we will look at this love story specifically at the three scenes of their lives. And it's the aquarium scene. It's the balcony scene and the dramatic ending. Because of this story about content and e-commerce, it's a love story. And it's a classic drama of families and forbidden love. So I want you to meet Romeo. Romeo here, he comes from the content family. It's a family of poets, artists. And their history includes highly praised theater plays, classical novels, enchanting paintings. Their worldview is that of a romantic. They see the beauty in the world and they provide beauty to the people. And I want you to meet Julian. Julian comes from the e-commerce family. They are a merchant family with a long history of buying and selling. Their heritage is long. Their views towards commerce is conservative. They have always done things one way and they see no potential gain from changing their ways. Which brings us to the first scene of this love story, the aquarium scene. And it was really love at first sight. Julian was looking at Romeo. Romeo was looking at Julian and they just knew. And in some way, I think everyone knows content can drive commerce. So let's take a step back and think about the most basic versions of these terms. For example, what is content? Well, Wikipedia defines content as a, and right now I'm just kidding, who here doesn't know what content means? I mean, we're at the content management conference. So let's rather think about what content means in the context of commerce. And in the context of a commerce system built on a content management framework like Vruble, it can, for example, mean the body text of your product. It can mean pictures of your products. But it can also mean a lot of other things. But we're going to start with the first here. So consider the lamp. This is the lamp. This is a screenshot from a client of ours that I manipulated a bit to make a point. And it's a lamp that costs more than 1,200 euros, a really expensive lamp. It has one picture and there's no useful information. Or rather, there's some information there, but the translation is literally, this does not include a cord. So for me as a consumer, I would need to be sort of more convinced about why I would spend that kind of money on the lamp, but here there are really no compelling reasons. And to make the parallel to a physical store, I would go over to this lamp and see the price tag and I would not buy this lamp unless someone working there would come over and explain all of the wonderful features of the lamp. Maybe it's a very exclusive material, for example, maybe it's a lifetime guarantee, or maybe it's a super famous designer, all of those reasons to spend money on, or a lot of money on the lamp. So basically in its simplest form, content-driven e-commerce is actually providing content, the content that the consumer needs to make the decision to make a purchase. Good pictures and good text drives sales. And with Drupal, we have the tools to create both pictures and texts. And with other systems, you would not have those tools because, for example, some product inventory management systems looks like this, which is not a very good editor experience. But all of this is not something that I'm making up myself. It's also one of the findings in the research projects that I refer to. It states use clear professional pictures of high quality and text with a lot of product information. This is one of the findings in the research. But I also want to use an example from my own childhood. This is my friend Atla, he's reading a catalogue about Finnish hardcore punk. And why is this relevant? Well, if you consider the catalogue as a list of titles and their prices, there is no way one would kind of have enough information to make a purchase of a very obscure Finnish hardcore punk record. But they used a lot of time and editorial resources to write things about all of the records, what do they sound like, what do they kind of remind you of. Bear in mind, this is many, many years ago, so we couldn't actually download it to check it out. But even so, the content gave us enough information to buy records from this catalogue without ever hearing about the artists before. So first, in this first section, we have seen what is content. It's description and images. And what is it driving? It's driving sales by convincing the customer. So to return to our story, we have now seen Romeo from the content family, not only accompanying Julian and the commerce family, but actually providing value that directly makes their family business better. So at this point, Julian loves Romeo, but despite having family differences, even Romeo's family seems to tolerate Julian, which brings us to the balcony scene. Julian from the merchant family has come home after an exciting day. He has been struck by love. And from the balcony, he says out loud to himself, oh, Romeo, oh, Romeo, Julian knows they're meant to be together. He's actually so excited to now know what a good content management system can do. He wants them to be together, he says. Or if that will not, but be but sworn my love and I will no longer be a merchant. Wow, that's really hard to read. At this point, Julian does not know, but Romeo is hiding in the bushes, bushes overhearing the whole thing from the balcony. And he treasures the words. And at this point, Romeo and Julian, now they are meant to be together. And they don't care what everyone else thinks. For them, content and commerce will never be a part. And for this part of the talk, I want to focus on this. So first, let's just dwell a bit on not caring what everyone else thinks. Because my job is working with DrupalCommerce and I know that this is the right way to do e-commerce. And I wish I could say that I don't care what everyone else thinks either, but I know my boss do and that the platform will benefit from everyone else thinking so. So instead, I want to focus on making everyone else think that content and commerce belongs together. And I want to start by kind of elevating the term content compared to what we saw earlier. We saw earlier that making it possible to add text and images to product pages make them more attractive. That's a very basic form of content. So let's rather look at some examples of the opposite where we have the content in centric, like content pages, but the ability to add products to the content. And one such example is landing pages that our clients use for anything, front page, 30% on all Christmas products, all those are landing pages. And it's a classic problem for systems without an actual system for managing content. And here is one example from H&M, it's a landing page. They have a campaign page for their exclusive online offers. It's basically just a text sale. There's no info about what the campaign is. There's no inspirational text or pictures. Just some random links to the products. I think we can do better. And here's one example from a client. We're looking at here is a landing page. Oh, now we're at the product page. Okay. It was supposed to start with the landing page. Let's just wait a bit and enjoy this wonderful medium gif. It's a wonderful medium. This is the landing page. So what they've done is create inspirational pictures. And in all of the pictures, they are actually depicting products in their store. So they can also add these products to their pictures, which we can fetch real-time information about the prices for the loading customer. It'll go into the product pages and see more pictures, for example, some stock status. You can see big pictures and fetch real-time stock status for your closest store, for example. And all of this is possible because the system that have the information for the products is the same system that also creates these landing pages. This one specifically is also built with layout builder, another very nice content feature we have in Drupal. So here we can actually see that kind of the content on the marketing part is naturally woven together. And this is specifically a page about inspiration for the summer, so we can inspire the customers for what they feel is inspirational to buy. And we can show all of the products that are related to the pictures. Another example our clients and specifically their marketing agencies actually really appreciate is the ability to administer a page for categories in a more typical catalog type of a system where you maybe at best can add a category to your product. This will basically be just a list of products and it's limited to the method that you have. And here is one such example from Walmart and I'm not trying to talk something bad about Walmart here. Also I'm going to be completely honest, I also manipulated this screenshot to make a point. But here we can see what is essentially a pre-filtered search for the category bookcases. So the page itself only contains a list of products and it's just sorted in a specific manner. It's more about glorified catalog really. But what our clients and as I said, their marketing agencies really want is to be able to create content pages about these categories even though they are actually catalog pages. So these products are actually created through that system we saw earlier with the horrible interface. But they can still assign them to categories that we have managed in Drupal and then we can attach more metadata to those categories. For example, text and inspirational images. And then we can create what seems like it's an editorial page for that category even though it's still just a glorified catalog. And the best thing of this is that we can attach meta tags to terms. So now these pre-filtered searches are actually great SEO optimized pages so that they can score really well in a specific category that they are selling products in. And another area where the content can really benefit from the products and orders being in the same system is personalization of content. So imagine for example, building a landing page for a new campaign, a Halloween campaign for example. And you can send it out to your 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter. And maybe this is the entire content of that landing page, very short one, but let's just say that. And it can be for example, feature four products that have a super great price right now for example, 50% off. So how would you go about picking out these four products to display to the customers that are visiting the page? Well, the best way to pick those out, to convert them in the best possible way would to provide the products dynamically by actually creating the content within the same system that holds the order history. This way you could for example know that the person looking at this landing page already bought this bookshelf over here. So there is no reason to display it to them one more time. Or for example, if you have a store that sells dog food and you know that a certain person purchased the last dog food four weeks ago and they usually do it within such an interval, it's very likely if you display it to them now that they will also buy it again. Or it could be for example, your favorite color is green based on the order history. Let's just show four green products. And it's very interesting because that means basically that you can have one landing page with an infinite number of variations with minimal editorial effort. And why is all of this important? Many people will probably think that it's kind of stating the obvious, better content gives you better sales. But here we have some findings from the research project to back this up. Almost all respondents say that they like to be inspired from articles about the products and how they can be used is something that they found. And almost all respondents say that they value high competence from the store representative. So these two things is something that you might want to convey into your online shop. And here's one example of the last part here. This is how the last part being showing high competence. This is an example for a store that sells, for example, exclusive bedsheets. And we can see her there building a landing page with a quote from a person that is actually the manager at the store. So if you're used to going to that store, you know that she is actually the one that manages it and knows what she's doing. And here is what is seemingly an article that she wrote. So this conveys high competence. And there is another example on the product page showing the same very competent manager in a video demonstrating the fabric and how to use it. Which by the way is another thing people said in the research paper on why they like to go to the store. This is kind of exclusive for bedsheets type of store. They like to touch the fabric, see how it behaves when you touch it. And this is one way of transferring that kind of tactile feeling to an online presence. And here is another way to transfer that where they can use what we call a softness scale so that people can have an impression of how it's going to feel in their sofa or bedroom or whatever. And here is another finding. All respondents preferred an image showing the public place in an environment. And by all I mean literally 100% preferred that image. But this answer does not only relate to they preferred it because it's easier on the eye. The research project also shows that almost everyone thinks that providing a picture of the product in use together with a detailed picture would increase the chances for them to buy the product. Another interesting observation from the same study is the price and the expected quality versus the price. And what I mean is this study was conducted for a store that sells quality exclusive bedsheets among other things. And they have many competitors that sells similar products way cheaper than them. So the study found that customers could see themselves buying cheap bedsheets for the guest room, for example, at competing stores even if they did not excel in the content area for the web store. But buying the exclusive products made them need more information. They needed to be convinced. Which means that to distinguish yourself as a premium supplier as a web shop, you need premium content. And it's also the other way around. By providing premium content, you are giving your visitors the feeling of premium products. So we have come to the dramatic ending. Julian and Romeo have decided they would spend the rest of their lives together. And if some of you feel the history here has a familiar ring to it, it may be because I borrowed some parts of it from an English author. And if you have heard the story before, you might be afraid that they will both end up dead at this point. And if you know the story, they end up dead mostly because of communication problems and misunderstanding. This is an illustration of communication problems, by the way. But as you know, this is 2019. We have the internet. And as we all know, Drupal integrates great with other systems, communicating over the internet. So in this case, they don't die. So that's good. Whoo! So, out of the many things Drupal Commerce can integrate with are payment providers, shipping services, tax services, European systems. You name it, basically. But let's talk a bit about somewhat of content-related integrations. For example, AB testing and rich analytics. You already have all of the tools you need to create great landing pages. And the next step is to choose the right one and how to measure the impact of how you are creating this great content. Content marketing is also something you might do. Here's one example from a client where they use a famous Norwegian blogger and influencer to create campaign pages, which they also integrated with special offers and coupon codes. And all of this was in the same website toolbox since it's coupons and content and products in the same package. And other things like ads, Google shopping and retargeting and with Drupal Commerce and Drupal Commerce being Drupal, these things are available and work out of the box. So our story ends with Happily Ever After, as you can see. It ends with the Romeo and Julian buying a house in the countryside, adopting two kids, living Happily Ever After. So the story tells us that content and commerce belongs together and Drupal Commerce is the perfect platform to unite these families. But I want to go a bit further than the story. So this last part is going to kind of nuance the picture a bit and because I realized so far the story and the examples is more of a general praise of Drupal and Drupal Commerce, but to be fair, we still have some challenges that we can solve together. And since I am telling you Drupal Commerce is the platform to bet on, I want to focus on what we can do together to secure its position in the time to come. And one thing I want to focus on is this, I call it editor-driven e-commerce. And since this is a term I invented, I did as every inventor of term, I went on the internet and found an accompanying cat gift for my term. So this is the official cat gift for editor-driven e-commerce. But anyway, what I mean by this is that we need to have the editor in focus and have great administrator user interfaces. And this is an experience where we have some challenges. Granted, we do have some nice things in Drupal. Remember for some people, we are being compared to systems like this. And the fact that we have auto-complete widgets and dropdowns and I mean even colors is a step forward when you're working in this system. But I'm going to take some examples of things we have done for our editors and administrators to make their administrative lives easier. Here's one example where we're changing the promotion form to be easier to understand. And some of our clients find it hard to understand what the different selections actually do in a promotion condition selection. So we try to educate them to say, if you do a selection here, it's going to make an inclusion and if you do a selection here, it will exclude the product. So this is also a way to avoid getting support calls so that they are wondering when this goes into effect at midnight, is it going to price out my products? So is it convenient for us and for them? Here is one step that one thing that it's also convenient for us and them is communicating the sometimes advanced steps for order exports or this could also be an example of product import. But here we can see the lifecycle of an order coming in. It's getting a, I don't know if it's possible to see but it's getting a tracking ID from the shipment provider. It's getting exported to their ERP system. And then when it's coming back from the ERP system up there, it's printing the shipping sticker and it's capturing the money from the payment gateway. And this is convenient for them because sometimes they would, for example, call us and why can't I find this in the ERP system? And in here it's very transparent where the order is kind of flowing in terms of communication. But one other interesting thing we do here is error handling because when you have a store that integrates with many third party systems, it's quite often something goes wrong in that other system. And the client ends up calling us, of course. Then you debug a bit and you find out you have to call that third party vendor. The error is on their side. And so what we do in the order exports, I don't have a screenshot of that but we distinguish the log messages between internal errors and external ones. So in our logs, when there's an external error, it will say there was an external error with vendor A, this is their support email and their support phone. And by doing that, of course, that's their first thought so they call them instead of us. So it's convenient for them and for us, very convenient for us. Here is another thing that some of our clients is very relying on. It's the price debug tab. The screenshot is from a store that has 18 million products. And they find their prices from five different currencies and all the currencies are converted with a matrix for markup. And there are hundreds of price lists and promotions based on user role, prefix for SKU and the publisher where the book comes from. So when a very, very seasoned administrator would go into this page and look at this book, they would have no way of knowing why is that price 174. Because even if they knew all kinds of small parts of the system, it's very hard to keep track of it. So we have this price debug tab where we can say, for example, this one was priced up because of currency and then down again because of a promotion. And then we ended up using a price list because that is the best offer, for example. So this is also self-help for editors and administrators so that they can find out the problems themselves instead of calling us again. Because often they will find out that, oh, this book shouldn't be on a 50% offer and then they can go into the price debug tab and they see, oh, I made a mistake, my promotion. So now they don't have to call us. Other things we usually do for our clients is managing product images through Dropbox, bulk editing products through Excel, and product import debug log lines similar to the ones we saw in the order export. So basically what I'm saying is making high quality content tools makes our store administrators expect more from the backend system as well. And I think it's important to keep in mind. And I remember Boyan, he's sitting there, by the way, and he's the lead developer of Drupal Commerce. He said something along these lines last year. Sometimes interface issues ends up being just good enough and that's just the way it is with open source projects. Yes, I could shorten it to just good enough quote Boyan. Is that fine? Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we as a community should help each other raising the bar for backend administrator experiences. And maybe sometimes we end up doing this ourselves as agencies and maybe more people should share their experiences and maybe share their code and collaborate on solutions. And I think all of these issues are connected because creating amazing editorial experiences is just one part. We have to create a better store administrator experience as well and the easier and more user friendly the editorial part is the more our clients can focus on their content, which as we have heard earlier it generates more sales. And the less they can worry about their store back in the more they can focus on this content. And think about it this way, our clients spend their entire day working in the web store solution and it's simply polite to provide them with the tools they need to not hate their job. And for us as an agency that delivers a product that means we can deliver functionality catering to the marketing department, which means we are tasked to develop features with the marketing budget instead of the IT department budget. And just to remind you, an IT department budget gives interfaces that looks like this. And while we have this very futuristic screenshot of there I want to end this talk by talking about the future. And if I should try to speculate on the future of commerce I would say it lies in the content, good integrations, great editorial experiences and a content native e-commerce platform. And I think that is ripple commerce. And I also think that the future is love. It's love for sharing experiences, sharing code, maybe finance feature development for Drupal commerce and just make our current and future users love the platform and to share that love. And with that, I thank you for your time. And are there any questions? I have one question. Yes. So those lovely landing pages you showed, is that extending terms and having them automatically or are they content driven by editors with paragraphs? If they're extending what? If they are extending terms, how do you mean terms? Or if they are controlled by the editors with paragraphs? Yes, just to repeat the question probably for the recording, the landing pages that we saw, are they extending terms or controlled with paragraphs or something or if they are controlled by the editor, right? Yeah. So what we prefer to do is use Layout Builder for everything. The huge landing page is a single Layout Builder page. The landing pages for the categories. We usually do a mix of extending the terms with the picture and description. Or you can also create a full landing page with Layout Builder on top of the term, which would basically then use Layout Builder. But it's also kind of important to not be tempted to add too much content because then you would push all of your search results further down. But the answer to the question is at least that there's a familiar interface for editing information either through the terms or with Layout Builder. Yes. Maybe if I may. Yeah. Hi, Ms. Eric. I was wondering, is there any reason to extend your findings and your ideas to business to business kind of e-commerce activities? Well, great questions. I would say yes. I would also say that even more important would probably be to extend the research into the business to business area because this specific research project was focusing on a specific use case, so to speak, and business to business have other needs. But I don't know. Business to business solutions are evolving as well, even though they are kind of behind probably mostly in the content area. But I don't know. Maybe in the future, that could be something that you need to do to distinguish yourself in the business to business market. But I would say probably the most important takeaway is that having such a research project is very interesting and learning from the findings. And it would be great to have a similar one for a B2B project. Just as everybody's a bit tired now. Yes. Thank you for listening for the very last talk.