 This is called everything is commerce beyond the shopping cart Thanks for joining us. My name is Scott Dahlgren. I'm the managing director for North America for commerce guys And we've got Ryan. I'm Ryan Sarama former developer of uber cart non-dribble commerce been with commerce guys since 2009 and One of the few original us commerce guys remaining so it's a little badge of honor there. That's right We're happy to have new ones So following the the opera theme we missed it, but I heard that went on in the first session Ryan and I are gonna do a duet here So we did this at a Drupal camp in Austin a few months ago worked. Well We kind of bring two different perspectives to To open source to commerce to commerce guys. It's a bit like a romantic comedy You're pursuing me I'm fairly new to commerce guys. I've been there here for six months Prior to that I was at Magento for four years. So I know commerce well I know open source even better than an open source for about six years And really excited about the opportunity to do commerce right in the Drupal world So that's what we're gonna talk about Just a quick for those who may not know commerce guys. We're the creators and experts behind Drupal commerce We're getting close to 60 60 people. We're multinational in Paris in Ann Arbor, Michigan and in the UK Or VC backed And we're growing and looking for for good talent So what we're gonna talk about today Again, everything is commerce. It's kind of a theme that we've been has been percolating within commerce guys for a while When we Are competing against commerce the big commerce players who offer a great shopping cart functionality and customers want to know Feature function. How do you compare? We scratch our heads and we go? Well, you're missing the point You know, it's not about feature function. I mean that's important But when you get down to it and you compare all the commerce solutions that are out there They're all about the same even Drupal commerce. We can all do stuff and and commerce is really becoming a very kind of normalized utility It's not about that. It's about other more important things that Drupal really has the opportunity to leverage and and be big and really Map to the major trends happening today in commerce. So we're going to talk about that future of commerce is really changing and we see it as Commerce should exist everywhere not just at the at the store Where a customer buys or something? Whatever it is they check out and they leave That's not what the future of commerce is is going to look like Information social connections are going to be increasingly important and they're going to be in key influencers to what people buy With all of the commerce platforms that are out there some complex some simple It's gotten really easy for people to sell online and when it becomes really easy to sell online it's harder for merchants to differentiate and so another important trend here is the the importance of Merchandising really targeting and personalizing the message and you know the bottom line here is that Drupal is ideally positioned to win You know, it's a native solution that delivers content community and commerce you'll hear that theme a lot If you listen to aquia They're sending a much stronger message as well when I talked to system integrators both magento and Drupal commerce integrators particularly the magento ones they tell me I'm Finding more and more opportunities that I can't compete with with magento because they're highly content oriented and so these are the Kind of the key themes that we're going to be talking about today so Three trends that are really changing commerce and it's going to be the bulk of our conversation here and Really how Drupal is ideally Positioned to win the first is contextual commerce. So creating this rich digital experience this kind of experiential Journey for a user coupled with Engaging social connects connections really going to drive buying decisions more and more Merchandising, you know being able to target users and personalize the message is going to become increasingly important and then the idea of commerce anywhere really Kind of the essence of our talk today commerce everywhere It's fitting in and enabling commerce not plopping down a big store and taking over and then trying to integrate with the store It should be seamless When I think that with these trends the reason I asked at the beginning is anybody here actually selling Drupal commerce is because within the the Drupal commerce community we as developers aren't really focused on and Communicating about these things but these are these are the things that we're having to compete against or Promote our software as solving when it comes to actually selling the solution to a new merchant So, you know, yes, this this talk is aimed more at this sort of like How do you position commerce in Drupal specifically against the competitors to grow your e-commerce practice? But also how can we as developers? Kind of not miss the not miss the force for the trees while we're sort of focused on Entity API integrations and views field handlers and the like. How can we actually? Create the modules and solutions that will communicate Merchandising and recommendations and so on and so forth to the end user Otherwise, you know Drupal will not be able to sort of elevate itself to play against the people that do this messaging Like the hybris and demand-ware companies of the world. So, yeah, no great great point Ryan and You know, I think a lot of this is intended to help everyone who is focused on commerce bring thought leadership to your customers When you get asked, you know, how does from a feature comparison? How does Drupal commerce compared to Magento? I hate that question because that's not the point Yes, we all do 400 things like there's checkbox as it proves it to you Right and you could say look we could spend days and days doing that checkbox. You know what? What we'd find they're all about the same and getting Turning it around to what's really important and getting your customer to think about what's really important I think we'll separate you from the competition So contextual commerce here is Really about promoting and selling within the context of whatever it is. Whatever it is. You're doing whether it's a picture of video Document you're reading a blog you're reading. It's it's enabling commerce anywhere I Have a just a couple of examples here. I also we also call this buying in the moment, you know it's sometimes we know exactly what we want to buy and We find the store and find the product and we buy it but many times We buy things and we've never had the in the intention to buy That's why my wife no longer sends me to the grocery store because I always come home with a six pack of some crap here that I bought in the moment and I just want to show a couple of examples here. These are very simple examples, but you know images here Where you know, you can actually find information about the products and purchase. Oh, I'm sorry That means I need to move this Make a direction there we go Sorry guys So images here where these can opportunities to buy And simply pop up within the context of what it is. I'm looking at It can be more complex Involving videos actually I have that one And to be clear, this is not Drupal unfortunately, this is you said a Finnish company kiosk Yeah, it's a it's a Finnish company called kiosk That does some very interesting things But here's a video Which I need to start and this is a crocs if anyone's familiar with crocs But within the context of the video, you know, I can say well, I like those shoes and You know, we find out more about those and even buy them within the context of the video So as a user and we're all users we all buy things I knew intuitively that Rich content the experience connecting with my friends or people I respect really influenced the way I bought We all know that Really getting examples and this is one of the things that really sent it home to me one other example here is You know, for instance somebody buys Some some shoes or some boots in this case and likes them and wants to share it with their friends on Facebook Everyone's sharing things on Facebook But in this example, you can actually you can actually buy these your friend tells you hey I just bought these and I love them and You know, I can buy him right there from within Facebook. So think about the opportunity for a merchant to Sell something to a user who likes that product and who's now going to share it with their social network You know just examples lots of them. So let me get back to the presentation here So for me that really kind of cemented it made a little more interesting the other trend here is that the amount of information is really growing at an exponential rate and And and consumers are looking for more information to make their decisions They they really use that And finally, you know content delivered within the buying process So content and those social connections. They're all really key influencers looks to look quickly at you know, typical buying Buy buying journey, right? This is these are the key processes you Have a need you do a little research you Do what they call risk alleviation, you know, is this product better than that one and finally, you know your purchase Evaluate at the end, you know, whether you liked it or not. That's a typical buying journey again most commerce platforms Bring you ultimately to a store where you check out and leave the site If we look at this a little in deeper detail, we see that obviously And this isn't profound But I'm kind of speaking the obvious is that finding the need and doing the research is all about content and Delivering that content to the user when that user wants it to answer their questions And it's all about is a new research and determine whether this product is better than the other It's all about connections whether it's their friends or or maybe people that are like them And so content and connections are really really key to driving the buying decision And and not only do they influence buying decision, but they create a level of trust and Credibility that that makes me as a user comfortable with what I'm buying So let's look at how And the point is I can't commerce occur anywhere. We'll talk about that a little bit later Let's look at how most commerce platforms Provide their solution they provide their solution with Really the store at the center and they connect either they provide or they integrate with best-of-breed solutions to provide lots Of other functionality But some of that functionality is content Some of that functionality is social connections and they treat those as just one of many many solutions and they're loosely connected it creates because Information about the user is in multiple places it creates complexity that is Unnecessary and it also creates duplication of data and ultimately costs more And they're not leveraging all that they know about that user And ultimately what I believe is that e-commerce solutions today are becoming more of a commodity Because they are focused solely on the shopping cart solely on that store rather than All the other things that are more important leading up to a consumer making a decision to buy I think to a certain degree even the Hosted services are still sort of in that that space from Shopify to Etsy to eBay. It's I mean most these platforms aren't offering you the ability to Communicate effectively with your customers or to even build any sort of community around them at all It's more like you're tapping into a bigger community But still like this service that you're actually paying for is the shopping cart and then for everything else You're kind of left on your own That's exactly right very few are have any strong commitment to CMS and the content side So what we believe is the the a major trend in Commerce is having the content solution in the middle the content really should be driving commerce And that's why we say content-driven commerce and of course The social connections and the ability to conduct transactions should be part of that core They should all be intertwined into a single seamless solution, which is what Drupal can provide here and You know a good example of what simplicity Allows you to do it. It just reduces complexity duplication of data cost So Ryan, why don't you talk about the Drupal advantage and why Drupal is kind of uniquely sure fight To deliver on this. Yeah, whatever. We're pitching Drupal then as the e-commerce platform that someone should consider over Magento or hybris or whatever other solution that we're competing against at the time You know we acknowledge that they need this sort of seamless customer experience Where the customer can hop from sort of section to section of the website without losing You know where they were on the site. What were they doing at the time? What have they how have they interacted with you in the past? So they're not going from the store to a blogging platform where the user accounts, you know, aren't connected at all We're saying that we want them to have a seamless customer experience So we start with this seamless data We're all of the all of the e-commerce and user interaction data and any other data that we need the content their friend lists their status updates their email notifications, whatever is all sort of There in one pool for us to pull from so whenever we're trying to develop a robust customer experience We have we have sort of one API and one data set where everything is sort of all managed through one user account and we Sort of decrease the the development time the effort required So the projects can be delivered cheaper and quicker and still integrates Their purchase history with their commenting and posting history with their their browsing history Whatever else it is that that you are tracking on the side in the database. So that's that's really the Drupal advantage here is just the the seamless data and then the sort of single origin API and skill set that your developers are having to to bring to the table To implement whatever it is that you know you're doing whether it's a kiosk like functionality Or even just a buy it now button beside a blog widget or something. You know that we've sort of done the the full The full spectrum of solutions within commerce guys Thank reaching to the choir. Yeah, I think sort of stating the obvious, but sometimes that's that's necessary. We've actually seen Some good wins here one in particular won't name customer name because it hasn't gone live yet, but it was in the US Large customer. We were actually working with a magento partner and the customer Because they didn't know anything else. They were a Drupal customer but they thought jeez to do my commerce, I guess I need magento, right and We along with a partner really looked at their needs and we saw that their needs were heavily content oriented And they were going to really it was important for them to really build an engaging experience and really bring users together and You know talking with them and talking through that They were convinced or they believe themselves that having a single solution on Drupal to do all of that to handle content and community and commerce was the best solution and we snatched that away from from our competitors and We're in the midst of building that now So good example and and from a development standpoint as Drupal developers or if you have Drupal developers in your business It's not a guy. It's just not that difficult And I mean I sat in a sales meeting that went on for too long a couple of weeks ago It was most of my morning a little bit of my afternoon But the the customer was basically trying to get for me. What what is special about Drupal commerce? That's that's basically gonna help them provide a better integration with the third-party services. They were using for I don't know accounting and account management and campaign monitoring all that kind of stuff I said well, there's there's nothing really special here We don't like all the pieces are there. You just need to tell me what you want it to do And I can plug them together in a matter of hours It was almost like it was it was too simple for them. They they were almost Wanting to lock themselves into a more solid platform that had a definite offer than one that just said well No, really like I can just translate any data you need to wherever it needs to go Just tell me what you want to to embed So it's it's it's actually a bit of a bit of a customer education challenge to really communicate what that like this level of Freedom that you get from the seamless data and single API offers you And then another example that just came to mind is if you go to the Louisville web group Blog, they actually I think we recently posted a tutorial on how to actually Use Drupal to build a newsletter that actually makes product recommendations based on your customers purchase history And so again, yeah, you're sort of you know sourcing content from the site Matching it up with what the users purchased before and then probably running it through rules and the message module To send out these really targeted email campaigns and again It's you know, it's it's all because we have that single data source and single API that sort of ties everything together So that's on the Louisville web group. I think they spelled the name out. It might just be L webg I don't know but it was on planet really recommend the read so great. Thanks So let's get to trend number two, which is merchandising which is just all about targeting and personalizing and offer a message or content whatever And the key here is that as commerce is becoming more of a utility and just just it's just there people expect it It's it's easy for anyone to sell online Which makes it harder to differentiate merchants today are going to depend more and more on being able to merchandise and merchandising is simply Targeting, you know, the right content to the right user at the right time. That's what it is. It sounds so simple but Merchants today struggle with being able to do that. Well and technology and Drupal in particular has got Many of the foundational elements that that will make that very very easy So, you know knowing Starting with a single seamless system to do content community commerce means that you know more about that user You know how they interact with content. You know how they interact with Other people, you know, how they're interacting on the store, you know a lot of information You use that information to tailor the experience to that user And you know increasingly merchandising or tailoring and targeting and Personalizing the message is going to be much more important for success again the right content the right user at the right time You're driving connections between users and around their network and and you know, you're just making the experience much much better Along this talk of topic many of you may have been hearing this term omni channel a lot of people hate this term Because they don't know what it means including myself until they really started to dig into the television exactly And Really what omni channel is and I'll just go through a quick kind of history of commerce and and and why this makes sense Is really about providing a single view Of your customer and to your customer so back in the day and even today with many commerce platforms You know, it's a single view of a product a customer comes on and they either engage with that merchant through a store a local store or their online store or on the phone, but they have really a single view of the product and It's not integrated at all a couple years ago The big term within commerce was multi-channel. Everyone was talking about multi-channel most didn't know what it really meant But all it meant is that there was really a single view of the stock So regardless of whether I came into a store a physical store or a Online store a digital store or a mobile store, you know I was still seeing a single view of the inventory and and and the stock Regardless of where it existed great improvement But where we are today is what's called omni channel Which is a single view of the customer and this is all about What I was talking about in my previous slide Which is really knowing everything about that customer and their behavior and how they're interacting and using that to target them And really creating a very special and interesting experience for them And and I do have to give credit to Paul shang from flux I don't think he's here, but he's in the UK flux is in the UK And he was kind enough to kind of share his thinking along this And so Drupal when you look at it this way and having that single view of the customer and in the context of what Ryan was talking about There are very few commerce platforms that can tell a story as strongly as what we have a Drupal it the risk is Getting swallowed up in complexity and and and we suffer from that as well I think the whole Drupal community does Simplifying the story in the message, but I think the point is is that the message is there is real and Customers are looking to benefit from that. So Ryan, let me hand it over to you Talk about kind of Drupal advantage around merchandising when and first I'll sort of talk about the the challenge for us Just as e-commerce developers and integrators in general is that and we think about merchandising from a brick-and-mortar standpoint It's it's really pretty simple. I think you you're basically able to toy with You know, where do I put a product? Is it on the front shelf on the in the in-cap or is it tucked away in the back somewhere? Is it is the milk in the very back so people have to walk past all the goodies to buy their milk and eggs? Or maybe like what time of year is it so I can put the the Halloween stuff out around now? The Thanksgiving stuff out in a month It but there really aren't a whole lot of things you can change about your grocery store To to more effectively merchandise your product, but here we are on the internet Where it's it's not just about like what's going to be I don't think people talk about above the fold anymore Do they but like what's above the fold? Or what's and people are stopping to do this as well. What's in this the front page slideshow that? Nobody really cares for anymore either But but we have we sort of have this this broader context of who our customer is and what's in this current page request Run one tool that I integrated. I think last year the year before was called backstore that actually, you know, let you Change the the appearance and display of your website based on whether or not somebody liked you on Facebook And was a female browsing from an iPhone, you know over the age of 35, you know Like that that level of customization you aren't you aren't sending people in your grocery store to the 35 and up aisle and then 20 to 25 I like it's you have a lot more To manage and what's what's difficult about that then is getting the tooling right to make it simple For the merchant to actually manage and target these things because of contextual commerce is really about how do we as developers sort of Integrate the the different facets of the website so that it's it's a really seamless customer experience with merchandise And we're really trying to figure out how can we as developers create the tools that our merchants then use to to deliver the right content at the right time to the right customer and to personalize the message and Change the phone number because they're browsing from the UK instead of France and show a different graphic because Who knows maybe your your electrical outlets are different here versus in the US And you want it to be all really cozy and welcoming and known and whatever and so it's it's a much bigger challenge that's not just a matter of educating the merchant on how to use an in-cap and And how to how to place stuff in the store and track using you know customer walking through the store It's it's really how do you change every facet of the website based on the context of any given page request? And so the Drupal advantage here is that we have the tooling in place to let you as developers and dev shops to create the the sort of suite of Tools and and functionality that your merchants will use I'll come back to that in a second But the idea is that like it's easy for us to segment users for example because we have user roles And if that's not sufficient well We can just add a taxonomy term reference field to a user profile and start to tag them However, we want to to classify users just segment them put them in lists and then begin to target content to In one recent side that I built the business owner versus the employee All right, so that's that's really simple But then you can go from there to build an actual page request context that co-lates like their user information with Data on the content they're viewing and maybe the HTTP referrer and maybe the other The other pages on your site that they've liked using the flag module or whatever it is that you're using so then you have modules like context or maybe subdomain or or Panels that are able to take some sort of Part of this context and actually create an entirely different layout of the page So whether you're doing landing pages so in this in this pitch that we were part of a couple weeks ago or yeah a couple weeks ago Now the idea was they actually wanted Unique landing pages for what were essentially sub stores of the main store And we could do that just using the subdomain module based on what URL someone came in from and then we could see like What sub store are they a part of and then what products are they purchased in the past to fill the front page using views With the products from that sub store that are most relevant to them And so so we could do this we actually did this in a demo for this client We had one guy work on it for about two weeks. He didn't sleep a whole lot, but it's still like not a lot of effort And and he actually delivered a demo that really knocked their socks off because it was almost like a proof of K Proof of concept for that for their entire store like their entire needs Negranted it wasn't yet integrated into SAP and it didn't yet have the theme and all that stuff polished, but In a very short amount of time We were able to rapidly prototype exactly what they needed to be able to merchandise their products to their customers and another recent example that I've discovered is the power of The message module when combined with rules Because message makes it really easy for you to create basically email templates That have tokens and that you define however you want to define and then you use rules to pull data from The user account the order they just you know completed the product they're viewing or whatever and and then sort of don't sort of map Data properties from these different entities to the tokens in the message and send out a very personalized email So this was a nonprofit site that I was just doing you know at home for a friend and We had I think three or four different email templates by the time It was done that called people about their first name and put their address in it and how much they donated and what company They were a part of and invited them to do more on the website Without me having to really write any code to facilitate any of that So the tooling that that Drupal offers to help you help your merchants Merchandise is great But what's what's not there yet? And again, this kind of goes back to what I said earlier is that the Drupal sort of developers are our community of contributors Is not yet sort of packaged some of these solutions into more like concrete things So you can't just you can't install a commerce merchandising module one because merchandising is so different in so many different use cases But but also because nobody's really taking the time to really decide Okay, what what bits of functionality would be most useful as a merchant to be able to market my products So there's actually some room there for for interested developers or integrators or partners To to really take the lead on some of that in the meantime And what we can do is easily integrate with additional third-party service providers to either bring more data to the table Such as with Velachi's automator, which actually uses white labels a robust marketing automation tool And then brings campaigns and lists and segments and all that stuff into Drupal for use by rules And so we have with those kinds of tools that are bringing more information to the table But then we also have tools like no, so which we've recently integrated with commerce In partnership with no, so to actually make better sense of the data you already have In a way that doesn't necessarily require the you know the configuration of five different Drupal modules to figure out But it actually can make those recommendations and cross-selling and things like that on your behalf and then integrate it into You know the standard, you know Drupal Components whether it's blocks or views results or whatever email templates So that so that we're sort of beginning to sort of explore these opportunities from merchandising But I'd love to see there, you know be a lot more going on in the the commerce community Absolutely, and you know Ryan you make it sound so simple when you explain it This is a really tough problem. I think the the point is is that? You know within the Drupal world there are so many kind of fundamental Tools and just the way it's designed and architected that make this much much simpler as Ryan said, you know We've partnered with no stow, which is a personalization recommendation engine That's a common way and one of which will You know continue to work because they can do that better than us But I think we're also going to try to focus more on a Merchandising module It really takes all these elements and pulls them together into something that you could show a customer and the customer to go Yeah, that's that's what I'm looking for. That's what I need And so that's a lot of what we're trying to do is is make kind of recognize trends in the market We obviously want to put from everyone here, but really focusing on providing a better user experience And and out-of-the-box experience so that customers can visualize the story We also have Ryan An example here, this is sort of a high-level merchandising example was that commerce guys partnered with publicist modem, I believe Sure, hope I got that right. They're gonna let me know if I didn't To deliver the Cartier Cartier relaunch basically and Cartier has 22 different subsides for different countries And then they target content on a regional basis obviously with regional pricing regional language And then additional sorts, you know bits of what we call, you know product catalog enrichment So we're we're adding did I get that right? You know then enriching the product catalog with with videos and imagery and text that really are tailored to specific markets And we were able to help them build that their full back-end catalog enrichment sort of interface Using existing modules like views and inline entity form and flags and Translation interfaces and things like that so that they actually have this really robust, you know Merchandising platform that drives all of the content pages on their sites But it's gonna be different between Cartier US and Cartier JP and dot-co.uk and all the different subsides We very tailored to their markets now That's that's pretty high-level, you know This is something that has multiple sites and just wants each site to be tailored to that market It could obviously go even deeper to be personalized based on what somebody put in their wish list Which is about all I can afford to do on their website Or you know put in their shopping bag and save for later and all that kind of stuff But that that kind of example like brought a lot of value to the table for them and convinced them a large company and other you know French Jeez luxury retailers based in Paris to begin to choose Drupal commerce as their platform of choice Including Kenzo and Ghirlane and others from the the city and elsewhere in Europe Thanks so getting on to the the last trend which is commerce anywhere and everywhere We believe it shouldn't just end at the shopping cart, but should exist anywhere where it makes sense and The the key trend and Ryan has been talking about this for quite a while as it relates to Drupal commerce 2 and and and Drupal 8 is that Drupal commerce is really going to be a platform that tries to fit in rather than take over An environment and that's going to be increasingly important as a complexity the the tech technical or infrastructure complexity within companies Increases the last thing they want is a big system that plop down and kind of takes over and requires everything to integrate into it And requires lots of support what they would like is Particularly if they're using Drupal already for content is to enable commerce to exist very lightweight in many places and Take advantage of data and information so that that data information only exists once it doesn't have to be replicated And so the notion of kind of fitting in is going to be increasingly important And also being able to handle all types of transactions I was talking to somebody yesterday a partner from the UK who knows both Magento and Drupal commerce they say, you know Magento is great But only if I want to sell a thing, you know a widget something If it's anything non-standard like that, it's it's really hard you have to kind of take it apart and put it together yourself But really leveraging integrating all the data that's in there, you know, just Reduces complexity and duplication of data And as I've stolen your thing becoming a conduit of information rather than just another separate container that exists And the thing is is that being everywhere It's not easy for most e-commerce platforms. It's really hard they Drive the store model because that's what they do For us, it's much easier for Drupal. It's much easier and for your customers. They're gonna be thinking About this more and more about how they can one engage your customers and drive transactions not at the end But throughout the whole process Right sure and that like that This idea is kind of hard to communicate and this goes back to what I said earlier about the AM the sales pitch Where I was just kind of you know, we can do whatever you want and just define for us what you went down and we'll do it It's this idea that like Drupal commerce is this this conduit. It's not a container We want data to move freely between the back-end systems that are actually driving the business and then the point of sale system Which is just the website and then maybe into the mobile, you know the mobile interface or The the store kiosk or the point of sale system in the brick and mortar whatever it is And we want to we want this information to be free flowing up and down the chain And this is this is easy for us because all of Drupal commerce's data is you know modeled around the fieldable entity system And therefore it's the same as any other bit of data inside of Drupal Which means we already have the tools in place to facilitate the transfer of information back and forth whether it's using the migrate module to bring data in from an external data source and put it into your Drupal site or feeds or using the JSON encoding API is this in stuff out Defining rest API resources through the services module or in Drupal 8 through the rest module itself That's in core they all all of this stuff is just sort of standard Drupal and even more so in Drupal 8 So we're trying to begin to just communicate. What does it mean that Drupal commerce really can be a sort of Free-flowing conduit of information that doesn't just need to have all your data And in fact like it really shouldn't have all of your data when it comes to say analytics for example with commerce 1.x We thought well, let's retain as much information about every order as possible. And so we made the default Default revision setting for orders to sort of create a new revision every time something changed in the shopping cart So you end up with this this order that maybe has like an order ID of three and it's checked out Maybe ten years later. That's a bit extreme ten weeks later Because that order never died and the customer came back and left and came back and left and added stuff or move stuff And you end up with this huge mess of data that no one's actually able to use Because it's still tucked away in revision tables And it's really not in the place for that if you really want to track the customer touch points and and the effectiveness of email Campaigns and when did they click and how long did it take them to check out and convert? You're really integrating with some sort of external Analytics You know engine that says doing all of that for you and we just seem to make sure that it's easy to send data from the Drupal Commerce site to the analytics system because you already have you know a best-of-breed, you know solution that does that for you so Really trying to mature in that regard And again with Drupal, Drupal 8 and commerce 2.x will see this sort of develop even further Because we have a REST module in core and a better API for consuming remote web services. It's called guzzle I think that's right. It's just a just a library that we've added in Drupal 8 to actually make HTTP requests and interact with them So so Drupal is maturing in commerce is sort of benefit by default Yeah, yeah, but it's it's still like there's still that that customer education challenge because they asked me on it All I can imagine is that Magento whenever they came in to make the pitch sort of had a spreadsheet It said here are the different API in points at your disposal if you need to do an API integration And they asked me for this chart and I said well, there isn't a chart Every entity type has a resource, you know, there is no there is no chart It's just like everything is available to you. What more do you need to know? Do you understand how REST works and I either they didn't understand how REST worked or they were bedazzled by a pretty chart That sort of laid it out that maybe I need to go get on Creating but it was it was just sort of like this this level of flexibility. I think was just kind of unexpected and so as a community and maybe as as a maintainer in a company we ought to be Really really communicating this more effectively Maybe that means sort of dumbing down the content a little bit to sort of speak at our competitors level That sounds really ivory tower doesn't it? But maybe that's what actually needs to happen so that people really grasp the idea that that Drupal commerce isn't trying to be Opinionated it's not trying to get into your way It really wants to to fit into where you need it to be and not try to stick its hands where it doesn't belong I mean even to the extent that we have projects that that that use Maybe this may be over some heads But use an entity controller that can load product data from a remote website entirely So like their Drupal site doesn't even store their product information Whenever a product is loaded it actually is making a remote, you know Webservice requests to load the product and then you know use it throughout the rest of the page requests They get there's there's a really high level of flexibility here that no other e-commerce system is affording anybody today And you know more examples, but blah we're kind of out of time and I'd love to hear from the audience Well, you know and a couple of examples where this is important We won Drupal commerce customers here in Europe and UK so royal mail in the UK and Eurostar I think are two great examples. The reason we won is our ability to fit in They had they all have big big environments big infrastructures lots of systems and they didn't need another one They just needed Drupal commerce to come in and handle transactions and And do that as seamlessly as possible and we were able to show them that and and they're driving huge numbers of transactions and volume Really big proprietary numbers Yeah, I mean and the the numbers that the you know the biggest most commercial proprietary e-commerce platforms are talking about we're doing that with Drupal commerce so Coming to the our last slide here really key takeaways just trying to sum it all up for everybody here Again starting with how people are buying. I always just look at how I buy You know and this pretty much represents how I buy things and You know having a Content-driven commerce system at the center makes a lot of sense when you think how important it is for content In in making a decision really influencing what you buy That digital journey Around the experience and the connections the social connections are really strong influencers and something that Drupal is uniquely qualified To do better than anyone else Knowing because Drupal is providing all of the Content community commerce functionality in a single seamless system. That means we know everything about the user We know how they're interacting with content and people and what they're buying and we can use that to target and personalize Have the NSA backdoor module, right? What? You had to bring the NSA into this presentation They should really get on like a marketing solution. I think Yeah, and finally Commerce should exist everywhere not just at the end Should exist anywhere where it makes sense and where the customer is ready to buy So with that Thank you for your attention. Hopefully it was informative and we have some time I think we have 15 minutes for questions if anyone wants to ask a question Or even not questions if you'd like to come to the microphone and brag I'd actually love to hear from people that You know our pitching Drupal commerce either as say an invisible back-end Such as maybe a native mobile app that's driven by a commerce site that nobody ever actually uses or is there anybody that actually is Developing or has implemented merchandising solutions and how did you strategize that? How did you sell that anybody has any any insight and that'd be great examples ideas things? You'd love us to focus on more Takes one. All right. Hey, we got two. All right first one in the in the way back there There's a mic here in the middle. If you're not bashful Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, it's good that you're talking about, you know, they can do everything and you go to a client So you tell me what it needs to do, but I'm working for quite a large law firm and They've been out of inroads into them from people like squizz etc. Because they've kind of told them what they should be doing so in terms of commerce guys If you've got any documentation or use cases where you've actually you can go to them and say, you know We can do anything, but a lot of people actually want to be told very specific stuff They want to So you're it's more about focusing on a particular vertical or industry Yes, it's more, you know, it's great that you can go and say, you know, we can do anything you want But sometimes people want to be told the solution. No, that's exactly right like productizing Drupal commerce or productizing a consulting Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that's one of the challenges In the Drupal world, you know, Akwi has been spending a lot of time trying to put together demos really engaging demos so that people can See how Drupal solves their problem. Not can do everything And that and that's a risk for us, you know, the infinite flexibility creates complexity that scares customers It's a bottom line. I think, you know, the best way that we're trying to deal with it is true customer examples in case studies I don't know. I mean, that's what that's what customers want to see. They want to see like customers and what they've done Well, I may actually interject there probably an even better way that we're sort of productizing commerce is through commerce kickstart So so the idea that we have this distribution of Drupal commerce called commerce kickstart in there two versions I'm talking specifically about version two that basically implements a reference store That has very simple merchandising fasted at search Shipping a few payment options and done and so so that really kind of caters to that sort of lower in physical product sales merchant And and really does give a very concrete set of functionality to them And so like we sort of floated the idea of additional distributions that could be developed to sort of be that proof Con proof of concept, but but they do take a lot of work to maintain so it's like some maybe maybe something even lower five and that maybe it's just a Fact sheet or something of what a distribution would look like could be really interesting But like in the case of commerce kickstart there are actually sites in our showcase if you go to Drupal commerce org slash showcase That's very obvious that they are just commerce kickstart to with a few different colors and then launch They even keep our gaudy blue is like the highlight color on the front page But but it's it's served really well to sort of cater to that that lower-end mom-and-pop shop family farmer, etc So to really help them wrap their head around what it is that commerce can do for them. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up So, you know kickstart coupled with case studies if you come to our booth at the show here Or at the conference here. You'll see a wall of I think 32 Sites that are all built on Drupal commerce So we're really trying to showcase customer success and and we reach out to a lot of our partners a lot of Drupal commerce Partners to get that information and we're providing attribution to everybody There was a question back there Me yeah, I mean, I would say within commerce guys. We don't have and and the question was Just for the recording here. The question was basically, you know We're talking about content commerce and community and we can build communities Using Drupal we can build e-commerce using Drupal and we can create also a CMS using Drupal But most of the content perhaps isn't happening inside of Drupal or people don't know how to actually structure and organize their content to Publish it across other platforms and elsewhere So I think I think the sort of big-bucket categories content strategy and You know, how do we actually help people do that? And I'd say within commerce guys. We don't have like a content strategy Practice I guess like the clear leader in the Drupal space is probably lullabop because they're about the only ones that I see Talking about it Yeah, yeah, I mean and that's not really the area of our focus But I think it could certainly be the area of focus for for agencies and partners that serving the market clearly in the magento community, there were a lot of integrators magento integrators that build stores not for the Making money on the project, but making money afterwards serving that customer and really helping them from a marketing standpoint How do you merchandise? How do you? You know create content. How do you create a rich brand? Experience which is all about content and and design and brands. So it's a really important area It's not an area that we focus on as technologists But I think at least what I saw in the magento world. It was a huge opportunity for Partner, you know agencies integrators who not only wanted to help build a site, but now Maintain a long-term relationship with that customer from a marketing standpoint Yeah, I think I would say our content strategy strategy is to Partner with people that actually know the field better than we do and so like on this recent pitch that I've mentioned a few times We actually took a partner with us to be the the drivers of the project with commerce guys supplying the commerce functionality but leaning on Duo consulting out of Chicago to actually Supply the content strategy expertise and long-term, you know nurturing and support in that regard So it's kind of a non-answer answer But if you are a content strategist yourself We may actually be interested in partnering instead. There's opportunity. Yeah Yeah And good product images which are really hard to get out of your customers question Yeah, actually back to more of the commerce platform, you know, I Think all of us speak to selling points of Drupal With our clients, but can you just comment on some of your experiences? As far as shortcomings or challenges that you experience so that as we're helping our clients navigate through the process of standing up either a new commerce model for them or migrating What we can do to to help educate and Ease those kinds of transitions. Are you saying challenges in the Migration process or just any general development? If you've seen any trends or shortcomings with with Drupal specifically that we can be aware of to to help plan our development process with our clients So not no state. Not everything is great with Drupal. What are the what are the things to watch out for? Yeah, kind of You want to start with that one? Or is everything great? It's really hard to estimate Yeah, I think you know, I think what we've run into more often is is the complexity, you know the infinite Flexibility and openness which people want Customers want they come to you and and they see something out of the box and they say well my business doesn't work exactly like that Can you make it work like this? And of course we can So they're kind of waffling between that flexibility and out of the box features and we get hung up with that a lot I Think you know Drupal looks more Drupal commerce looks more complex than most of our competitors out of the box They probably tell a more connected story you know, we know that Adobe and site core tell a really great story around CMS and And you know, it's just a story again Drupal We know can can do much better, but it's telling that story that I think trips us up Sometimes yeah, maybe I'll offer to like really high-level things one one is the tension between ready and done Which is how do you actually convince your customer to launch with the less than ideal? You know version of what they imagine they might have and I think I was talking with Scott this morning about a slide that has sort of The traditional idea that the commerce sort of platform is the most important part of your business And so we have to have a hundred different ways to create coupons and 20 different ways to apply a discount and a hundred different facets For this that and the other and and really like They don't they couldn't even tell you right off the top of their head If any of those types of special offers and coupons and configurations are are actually giving them You know driving any sales to their business whatsoever And so I mean I've had this challenge personally with with a freelance client a few years ago Just trying to say like hey, let's just launch something like yes We can endlessly tool this because hey, it's Drupal and I can just add another field and I can just do this and Make a new rule in a new view But but really you just need to launch because you're ready even if it isn't done and we can we can add more functionality later But then the obviously like it's it's not even an elephant in the room right because everybody is talking about it It's just the idea that the user interface If you have a non-technical merchant the user interface of bouncing between different entity forms and configuring fields and views And this and all this stuff you have to be able to hide that complexity from most merchants And that's going that's going to be additional time that you aren't expecting I think because as a Drupal shop we know how to estimate what it takes to build it But are we used to estimating what it takes to build it and then what it takes to simplify the UI And I don't think that we are within commerce kickstart. We've tried to do this somewhat By sort of collapsing the dichotomy between a product type versus a no type into one form With the inline entity form module and some other views and the commerce back office module But even that's not complete and it won't work for every merchant You know we tried to create a simpler rules user interface so that merchants didn't have to learn about data selectors and Entity has field conditions and all this other stuff, but again, it's still not really there So so really you have time like to what level is the merchant actually going to be driving this website and how much Will you have to simplify and I think that's that's going to represent added cost on top of a Drupal site bill that maybe doesn't exist in a Platform that's really tailored specifically to Ecommerce merchant driven user interfaces There's certainly others that that that are around me and it from a migration standpoint. I think the Drupal has great tools So I like that that typically is probably a lower cost part of any project that we do but Really more around really the coupons and discounting interface is really probably the biggest spin that a lot of our larger projects have been Been making Ryan. We're out of time my my answer on that is that we suffer greatest from lack of awareness You know you talk to people about Drupal They've got existing investment in Drupal and why not serve their commerce needs with Drupal And they look at you like what Drupal can do that. They just don't know and that's why we were Really glad to see our friends at Acquia really come out strong Going after commerce and we're teamed up with them and and that's going to help all of us We're here to try to help everyone Drive this message to your customers. So don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're glad to help. Thanks everyone