MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR WEBSITE

CRO & The Magento API

Date: April 18th 2016Prepared by: Andy Redfern, Technical Director

James Chapman, Bus Dev Director

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT VENTURE STREAM:

- WHO WE ARE

- WHAT WE DO

- WHO WE DO IT FOR

A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION:

SOME MORE ABOUT MAGENTO API

WHAT WILL WE COVER?

VENTURE STREAM:ABOUT US

VENTURE STREAM: ABOUT US

Vic MorganFounder & MD

Marty HayesDigital Director

Andy RobinsonCreative Director

James Chapman Development Director

LEADERSHIP TEAM

Andy RedfernTechnical Director

VENTURE STREAM: ABOUT US

EXPERTISE

DIGITAL MARKETING•Search Engine Optimisation

•Paid Search Management

•Conversion Rate Optimisation

•Email Marketing

•Affiliate Marketing

•Social Media Marketing

•Content Production & Management

INNOVATION & DESIGN•Ecommerce Website & Application Design & Development

•Supplier Configuration

•Proof of Concept & MVP Consulting

•User Experience Design

•Prototyping & Testing

•Market & Customer Research

STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP•Full Outsourcing of Ecommerce Development

•Full outsourcing of Digital Marketing & Business Management

•Venture Partnerships

•Board Leadership

•Management, Development & Support

•Business & Financial Planning & Budgeting

VENTURE STREAM: ABOUT US

OUR CLIENTS

VENTURE STREAM:ConversionRateOptimisation

VENTURE STREAM

Conversion Rate OptimisationA conversion rate of 4% might be good for a particular sector but what about the 96% who didn’t buy? What tools are available for Magento that can make life easier for the customer and client (and developer!)?

VENTURE STREAM

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.

Generally on an ecommerce site it is about turning as many visitors as possible into customers.

VENTURE STREAM

Understanding the customer journey• Easy to believe that a typical customer journey starts

with the home page, navigates with category pages to a product, adds to basket and checks out.

• For one of our clients in multi-channel retail we see:– 13% of customers landing on the home page– 44% landing on a category page– 41% landing on a brand or product page

• So we need to avoid the old adage:– If you want to go there (checkout success!) I wouldn’t start

from here (the product page!)

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Four Tools to make your Magento conversion rate increase

• Related and Recommended products - Nosto• Address validation - PCA Predict• Independent reviews – Feefo, Ekomi, Google

Certified Shops• Abandoned Basket Emails – Nosto and Magemonkey

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Related and Recommended productsYou set these manually in static blocks via upload or through the product admin screen…life is too short…

We love Nosto!• Finnish Company• Last week won Shooting Star award at Magento

Imagine• Relatively simple Magento extension• Great web app for managing the campaign

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How it works• JS on every page sends details of site activity• Product feed provides comprehensive product

information• JS on Checkout and login pages provides funnel

details• Nosto learns about your customers and begins

making recommendations as it learns what works and what doesn’t

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Nosto AdminLive stats

Detailed statsin Web App

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Front End example

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Nosto install and setup• Create two accounts – test and live – make sure they

are connected via the extension to each site• Learning process takes a few hours depending on

visitor levels• Front end widgets can be dropped in on almost any

page – will need lots of CSS styling to make it match your template

• Charges start at 4% of sales generated falling to 2.5%

• More info: http://www.nosto.com/

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Address Validation – PCA Predict• Used to be Postcode Anywhere• Performs an address look up• Works with standard and most single page checkouts• Recently enhanced:– World wide address

lookup support– IP checking for current country

• Simple to install extension although sometimes needs a few styling tweaks

• There are cheaper alternatives but country level data is the best

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PCA Predict• Real world example – one client seen bad addresses

fall by 90%• Another client seen international order errors fall by

75%• Pricing – max 10p per look up – higher volume, lower

price

• More info: http://www.pcapredict.com

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Independent reviews

• Google loves independent reviews• Customers love independent reviews• In time clients get to love independent reviews• We have implemented several schemes:– Feefo– Ekomi– Google Certified Shops

• All have free extensions apartfrom Feefo

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Independent reviews• Google Certified Shop is free• Ekomi starts at £100 a month• Feefo starts at £250 a month

• More details:http://www.feefo.comhttp://www.ekomi.co.uk/uk/https://www.google.co.uk/certifiedshops/

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Abandoned Basket Emails – Nosto and Magemonkey

• Allow abandoned basket emails to be sent to customers – an hour later for example

• Magemonkey free and offers a simple email to encourage customers back– Offers auto-login link– Allow multiple timed emails to be sent with different

subjects and templates– Uses Mandrill to improve deliverability

• Nosto charges 4% of revenue generated– Email includes basket and recommendations based on your

basket– Includes optional coupon\ offer code

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Abandoned Basket Emails – Nosto and Magemonkey

• Magemonkey easy to set up but does require you to create a standard Magento template

• Nosto provides a template allowing you to change colours, logo, styling and text

• More info:http://www.nosto.com/http://store.ebizmarts.com/magemonkey.html

VENTURE STREAM

CONTACT USwww.venturestream.co.ukhi@venturestream.co.uk0191 5800 696

Any Questions?

VENTURE STREAM:Using the Magento APIThe Good, the Bad and the very Ugly

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Using the Magento APIMagento has a well-defined API which should be first port of call for all developers wanting to interact with Magento systems on an arms-length basis. In practise using the Magento API aloneis rarely possible in anany time-criticalapplication.

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The Magento API• Two methods – SOAP or REST• Two versions of Magento – 1.x and 2.x• 1.x REST– OAUTH to authenticate the request– Standard set of URI endpoints– Returns XML document or JSON array

• We’ll focus on SOAP 1.x– REST is a little simpler but not as fully featured in the

functional areas it covers

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Using the Magento 1.x SOAP API• Set up the SOAP user and role in Magento Admin– System > SOAP/XML-RPC – Roles– Add a role – All or Custom permissions

– Add a user, set an API key and assign a role– And make your first request!

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Using the Magento 1.x SOAP API• Being a standards based SOAP API you can call it

from many different languages…but as Magento is written in PHP we’ll use PHP for our examples.

• A simple request:

• Returns an array of orders

$client = new SoapClient('http://www.mysite.co.uk//api/?wsdl');

$session = $client->login("username", "password");$parameters

=array(array('increment_id'=>array('gt'=>"1012762")));$result = $client->call($session,"order.list",$parameters);

var_dump ($result);

$client->endSession($session);

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Key lesson 1 – Things go wrong• Things will go wrong – this is Magento after all – so

code for failure.• Try – Catch blocks work well with SOAP

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Key lesson 1 – Things go wrong$stockItemData = array();$stockItemData['qty'] = 10;$stockItemData['is_in_stock'] = 1;$sku = "12345";

try {$result = $client->call(

$session,'product_stock.update',array(

$sku,$stockItemData

));

}

catch(Exception $e) {echo 'Message: Current item ' . $sku . ' ' . $e->getMessage() .

"\r\n";// Handle error....

}

$client->endSession($session);

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Key lesson 1 – Things go wrong• Returns:– Message: Current item 12345 Product not exists.

• Program your calls defensively. For example, for a stock feed API you need to cope with:– Credentials no longer valid– Site down– Site not resolving so request never completes– SKU no longer exists– And probably other cases I have yet to find!

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Key Lesson 2 – Things are slow• The SOAP API is no different to Magento as a whole –

it can be very slow• If you send a ridiculous request for large quantities of

data expect it to take a LONG time• So:– Speed Tip 1 - All the usual ways of making Magento faster

will make the API faster

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Key Lesson 2 – Things are slow• Speed Tip 2 – design your calls carefully– Client wanted to update stock from warehouse system

every 60mins– Client had 5,000 SKUs– Using API each stock item update was taking 1.5 seconds– It wouldn’t have finished last batch before new batch

started– Calling system held previous values and only updated

items which had changed– Number of calls fell to 100 or so per hour

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Key Lesson 2 – Things are slow• Speed Tip 3 – choose the best API method for speed– For example, if you need the email address from 50 orders– Obvious answer use - sales_order.info– Requires 50 calls to sales_order.info – slow!– Use order.list and one call will return all 50 emails from the

orders

sales_order.info

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Key Lesson 3 – Lots of things don’t work as expected

• Created a system for creating orders from a remote system– cart.create– customer.info– customer_address.list– cart_customer.set– cart_customer.addresses– cart_shipping.list– cart_shipping.method– cart_product.add

• Item out of stock whole system fails as you can’t add items that are out of stock……even though you can as admin user….

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Key lesson 4 – You can extend the API• Define your API resource in XML• Add resources, faults and an ACL• Add your methods• Start calling the API…• However, whole point of an API is that:– It uses a standard approach– You don’t need access to the originating system source

code

VENTURE STREAM

CONTACT USwww.venturestream.co.ukhi@venturestream.co.uk0191 5800 696

Any Questions?

VENTURE STREAM

CONTACT USwww.venturestream.co.ukhi@venturestream.co.uk0191 5800 696

THANK YOU