E-commerce is not just selling products
Friday, 28 May 2010When telling people about the MageBridge integration between Joomla! and Magento, many times we get asked why a webshop would need Joomla!. In many cases, a simple webshop is just about selling products, right? Well, not really. It's about giving the customer what they need.
The Year of E-commerce
The year 2010 is - at least in The Netherlands - announced the year of e-commerce. It is expected that many webshops will alter their appearance to make e-commerce a more serious business, while also a lot more webshops will appear on the Internet. This also means that the competition becomes more of an issue. So how to compete with other webshops if you're in the same line of business?
It's all about the customer: The customer decides which webshop becomes most popular, and there for the marketing strategy should concentrate on the customer, and not the products. Of course, the product is the reason why the customer visits your shop, so all information on the product should be clearly visible within the shop. But other things are just as important.
Customer service
When a webshop wins some kind of public reward, most of the time this is not due to the platform the shop is based on (MageBridge, Magento, VirtueMart, osCommerce), but on customer service: Things like response time, customer friendliness and general help are the actual reasons why customer would vote for your shop.
With MageBridge this is exactly our target area: While with Magento it is hard to setup things like FAQ, support forums or RMA-forms, this is easy with Joomla!. So Joomla! is not so much used as a pure CMS, but more as a site building tool. Joomla! is used to easily add more stuff to your shop, Magento is used to get your core business right.
Marketing
Besides paying attention to customer service (which makes your existing customers happy), there's also of course marketing to deal with. Again MageBridge adds the capabilities of Joomla! to your Magento shop - blogs, social media, fancy modules, advertizing. It's all existing in Joomla!, while in Magento it would require custom work.
On top of that Joomla! allows you to build your own community. While existing tools like Community Builder and JomSocial allow you to build customer groups in a fairly static way, we believe that the upcoming Anahita Social Engine (which is still in development) will revolutionize not only the way Joomla! deals with communities, but also the way that you can interact with your customers:
Social shopping
We already envision something like social shopping, where your customer becomes part of the buzz within the shop. The interaction between you and your customer will not only be more direct, but customers can also engage each other (just like with reviews but in a much more direct manor).
Stay tuned
While 2010 might be the year of e-commerce, it is most certainly also the year in which we will bring you MageBridge as a full set of professional e-commerce solutions in Joomla!. This not includes setting up a simple shop (which MageBridge is able to do already for over 1 year now), but also more specific tasks like membership-sites and newsletter subscriptions. We will certainly pay attention to the principle of social shopping - that's what e-commerce should be really about.