Ecommerce system ideas

January 2, 2008

So Magento has the hot buzz in the PHP community right now as the next big ecommerce system.  I’ve not done much with it beyond poke around in the code.  My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.  Biggest drawback I see right now, in general, is speed, but there are some pipeline processing decisions that didn’t make much sense either.  Those may be changed, as it’s still a beta product, so nothing is quite set in stone yet.

While chatting this evening about Magento and ecommerce in general, we started trying to think of ways to somehow tie ecommerce systems in with the power of, for lack of a better term, the ‘blogosphere’.  I’m not crazy about the term, but I mean more than just ‘blogs’ as journal entries.  With the advent of trackbacks, pinging services and other automated systems, publishing via blogs has the ability to get your content automatically spread around to a number of search indexing systems *very* quickly.  I occasionally have done a Google search (not a blog search, just a regular web search) on a topic I blogged about just one hour earlier and it can be found at the top of the Google results.  Putting content into a parseable RSS format, and coupling that with trackback and ping processing, gives you an easy pipeline in to many search indexes.

So, given that, how can ecommerce systems use the current ecosystem to their advantage?  Two ideas evolved during our discussion earlier this evening, and I’ll outline them here briefly.

Publish a store blog feed of user feedback

There can be multiple ways this works, but simply generating RSS feeds of customer feedback on products (perhaps even leaving in BAD feedback!) would be a simple way of helping get the word out about your site.  By way of keeping the reviews flowing, automatically sending reminder followups to customers 1 week after their purchase would be a nice touch.  Offering 5% off their next purchase to fill out the review would likely help keep reviews coming in.  Ping the blog aggregator services regularly to get the feed out, but also let users subscribe to the feed.  “The feed” could be broken up multiple ways - a feed of all feedback, all product reviews, only reviews of certain products, etc.  I’m actually a little surprised that Amazon doesn’t already offer per-item RSS feeds, so I can watch the item for new reviews.

Accept incoming trackbacks from external blog reviews on product pages

My limited understanding of the whole trackback process is that a blog engine will send a specific HTTP request to a ‘trackback’ link to let that original link know the new blog entry is ‘backtracking’ to it.  This might be a little harder to do, but I don’t think it’d be impossible.  Any blog could link to a product page, and that product page would then hold links to externally-hosted product reviews.  Given that the data is in an easily parseable format, the external reviews could potentially even be included directly in the product page, if a reuse-friendly blog content license was used.  The obvious reason people might not want to allow this is because of potentially negative reviews.  However, I think the overall benefits would still favor allowing this sort of thing.  Long term, you’d be encouraging more inbound links, which is nearly always a good thing, no?

These were the first two ideas that came up, and we may chat more tonight about how to implement one or both of these in Magento.  Are there already similar features in other ecommerce systems I’m simply not aware of?   Wouldn’t surprise me, but at the same time, I try to keep an ear to the ground in this field, and I don’t recall seeing this sort of functionality.

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Personal, Software, Web