Shopping Cart Network for Facebook

The assembled web becomes reality thanks to Payvment. The startup company Payvment offers online shopping cart technologies and makes use of PayPal’s new platform to implement the transaction. With Payvment’s Facebook app, anyone can directly open up an e-commerce storefront on Facebook.

Payvment’s shopping cart is also integrated with any other shop using its application. So if you put a shirt from store “x” in your cart and also placed a shirt from store “y” in the cart, both would show up on either retail site. Basically, Payvment creates a unified shopping cart across Facebook for buyers.

Payvment offers their shopping cart technology as a free web service. The only incurred costs are the PayPal fees. Unfortunately the Payvment technology is only for use in the US.

Drupal + Alfresco = Flexibility

Drupal plus Alfresco delivers flexibility in terms of cost, user interface, and thanks to both platform's support for the steadily progressing Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS), interoperability as well.

A recent implementation of a hybrid Drupal-Alfresco intranet for Activision (the gaming company) has been done by Optaros. The project used Drupal for the presentation layer, allowing the developers to leverage the 4000+ existing modules.

A PHP solution on the front end has the advantage of quick development, while the robust Alfesco repository handles file protocols, and things like the workflow engine. Updating content can be handled in a number of ways, through an API or webDAV, for instance.

Read more soon...

10 guiding principles for the Assembled Web

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project.

2. Success on the web is no longer . . . about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive.

3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what . . . the Internet says it is.

4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects.

5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined.

6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero.

7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists.

8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous.

9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly.

10. Small incremental releases are essential.

Optaros Switzerland and Magento

Optaros is the first Magento worldwide partner active in Switzerland!

With offices located in Germany, Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich), the United Kingdom and the United States, Optaros offers retailers access to the best in open source for their ecommerce planning (http://www.optaros.com/campaigns/2009-social-ecommerce-planning-guide) needs. This enterprise partnership enables Optaros to provide assembled ecommerce solutions (http://www.optaros.com/solutions/ecommerce-solutions) to its clients using the Magento Enterprise Edition eCommerce platform.

The partnership announcement by Magento.

OCentric and Blogs

Blogs allow to drive organic search traffic since keywords and page titles can be easily optimized for product names for search. Unfortunately most Brands are not using blogs to drive traffic, and if they are they are not treating each blog permalink page as a landing page that should drive to conversions.

OCentric allows creation of search engine optimized (SEO) blogs with product detail information of the associated product on the same page.

OCentric is an eCommerce solution provided by Optaros Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Bern Zurich)

Alfresco and Drupal for your Intranet - Webinar

Optaros and Alfresco will present a Webinar on September 15 presenting how you can transform your intranet by integrating Drupal and Alfresco.

Your intranet will become a corporate commmunication tool as well as an engaging community platform, and a rock-solid document repository.

Optaros content management experts Chris Fuller and Jeff Potts will discuss how a game publisher was able to save time and money by leveraging open source for their intranet.



You’ll learn valuable insights that will help you take your Enterprise collaboration to the next level.

Register here

eCommerce on the Cloud

Doing some cloud hosting an eCommerce solution seams a very interesting solution to cope with traffic peaks like you might have during Christmas season.
Optaros has done some performance testing Magento (Open Source Ecommerce Solution) in the Amazon EC2.

The optimal cloud environment setup for our tests was:

• 1 Load balancer – HAProxy on 1 small EC2 instance
• 1 Database – MySQL on 1 small EC2 instance. We have MySQL replication running, but we did not seem to need it as the database was not the bottleneck.
• 2 - 4 Magento servers – Medium version of High CPU On-Demand Instances which are 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each). Number of servers is the only variable in the test results.

The Test Results:

- Home page test

• 2 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool for Magento 125 Threads, 25 loops – 5157ms mean response time serving 23.7 req/s
• 4 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool 500 Threads, 25 loops – 8672ms mean response time serving 47.5 req/s

- Add To Cart test

• 1 Medium version of High CPU Machine in pool 60 Threads, 2 loops – 5069ms mean response time serving 6 req/s
• 2 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool 80 Threads, 10 loops – 2206ms mean response time serving 14.1 req/s

Some General Findings:

• Both homepage and add to cart scenarios scale roughly linearly.
• The Add To Cart performed 40% slower than the highly cached homepage test scenario.
• Serving Magento PHP files is primarily a CPU bound task, thus a high CPU machine is more effective than a standard large instance. (4 High CPU machines outperform 4 standard large machines at half the cost)
• Upgrading the hardware for the MySQL, memcache, and load balancer machines did not help performance numbers at this level of load.
• A single XL machine was able to serve 37.1 req per second when Jmeter was also placed on a XL instance -- there definitely seems to be solid IO advantages to using an instance rated “high IO”.
• The actual usable level of CPU and memory on a small instance is very limited and should probably never be used for production.
• Magento could probably be optimized further to gain additional performance including using a memory filesystem, further gzip/deflate, css/js minimization, etc.

Yes it seems that Magento can scale on Amazon EC2. Of course some additional questions have to be addresses as PCI compliance and data confidentiality.

If you are interested by this subject you should contact kflieger@optaros.com (Switzerland eCommerce expert and Magento Partner)