GET IN TOUCH
Articles
ABOUT US

Open Letter to Facebook: No-Brainer PPC Advertising Improvement (Recent Status Change Targeting)

Christian Bodine on March 14, 2012

Theres something important missing in Facebook PPC targeting!

There’s something important missing in Facebook PPC targeting!

Hi, Facebook.

First.  I love so many of the things you do.  In fact, I wanted to talk to you about one of them today:  Your PPC advertising platform.  Except, instead of gushing about how awesome it is (which I believe), I wanted to offer instead an idea on how to make it much better for marketers, more relevant for users… and of course, more profitable for you!  It’s simple.  Allow me to target people who have recently changed their status in some way.  My clients would be willing to pay much more for this kind of targeting because it would be far more likely to result in sales.  People change their purchasing habits and brand loyalties during significant changes in their lives, and you just happen to know when people are going through such changes.

Here are a few examples of how awesome that would be:

  • Imagine how much more valuable it would be to bridal products companies (*cough* TheKnot.com *cough*) if they could target only women who had changed their status to “Engaged” in the last 30 days, or in the last 10 days?  If they’re getting married tomorrow, it’s much less likely they need bridal products, but if I know my clients’ ads will only be seen by women that are just engaged, it’s worth so much more to my client, the user gets sponsored content that is highly relevant to them, I win because my client wins, and you win because we’ll pay you more for it!  Win-win-win-win!
  • Along the lines of relationship:  A dating site would be willing to pay big bucks to target only people who had changed their relationship status from a *in-a-relationship* status to a “Single” status 30-90 days ago (because less than 30 days is too soon … … or is it?).
  • Local advertisers would be willing to pay far more to advertise to people who had just moved to their area because it’s easy pickings until new inhabitants build brand loyalties in a particular area.
  • Sports equipment retailers would pay more to advertise to people who recently added an interest in a particular sport because those people would be more likely to need to gear up!  You know, the serial sports enthusiasts who like tennis this year, buy all the best equipment, and then join an ice hockey league next year and do it all over again.  They’re decidedly not very good at any one sport, but they sure do buy a lot of gear!  Let my clients target them!

I could go on, dear Facebook… but I don’t want to excite you any more than I have already.  It wouldn’t be good for our professional relationship.  You see, I feel like I know you pretty well.  I know you need/want to be more profitable.  And I hope you want to constantly serve your users and your advertisers better.  With this idea, you can do all three through the three R’s:  Riches (for you), Relevance (for your users), and ROI (for your advertisers).  I also know you appreciate alliteration.  And good sense.  And I just gave you both.  Oh yeah!

With Lots of Love,

Kurt Theobald, Fearless Leader of the Classy Llama Herd

<END OPEN LETTER>

Llama Plug:  NEED FACEBOOK PPC HELP?  Contact Classy Llama to discuss your objectives.  (Obviously, if we’re giving advice to Facebook, we’ve gotta be pretty good at it, right?  Right.)

Classy Llama Christmas 2011

Christian Bodine on December 17, 2011

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the office,

No keyboard was silent, not even a mouse.

Our team members were working with detail and care,

In hopes that their projects online would appear…

This year at Classy Llama Studios, we decided to make an extra creative effort in sending our clients a token of our appreciation for this Christmas holiday. Through the help of various team members and our creative team, we skipped buying a generic Christmas card and created something a little more personal. Our goal was to create something with a little more of “us” in the card. Well, after a few logistical hiccups, a fun-filled photo shoot, and some broken Christmas lights, the card was finished. We hope all that received the cards were left with some good holiday cheer. From all of us here at CLS…Have a very, merry… Classy Christmas!

Staying Safe During the Online Christmas Shopping Season

Christian Bodine on December 6, 2011

With Christmas fast-approaching, most of the llamas and their families are heading to online stores to find gifts. You already know the reasons for wanting to shop online: awesome prices, free shipping, wider selection, and not paying sales tax. Possibly most importantly: the only way to do all of your shopping in pajamas!

Here at Classy Llama, we know eCommerce. Working with and building sites all day long gives us a pretty keen eye whenever we go to a site. We know what quality looks like. On the flip side of that, we also can tell when something isn’t right.

This past weekend when my wife plopped her laptop down beside me and asked me the question “Should I order from this site?” It prompted me to show her how I validate the occasional site that I go to that looks sketchy. This post aims to answer that question “How do I know if I can trust this site?”

Four Signs of a Funky eCommerce Site

  1. Design & Content
  2. SSL
  3. Site Verification
  4. BBB / Online Search

Design

One of the first indicators you should look for (and the first thing you’ll see) is the design and the content of the site. Sites that are scam sites don’t normally tend to expend much effort on the aesthetics of their site. While not all sites are ugly or contain any of these signs, these can be a big clue that the site you are on is not what it seems to be. This is not entirely comprehensive, but it can definitely point you in the right direction.

Consistently Bad English & Grammar

Do they use proper English? What about grammar? Sites that don’t pay attention to these very simple things are probably not paying attention to things like shipping your order or keeping your credit card information to themselves.

  • “Discount Off 57%”
  • “includes returning and exchanging goods that you are not happy”
  • “company establish in 2002, and have large business”

Reviews That Don’t Add Up

Just because a site shows that a product has 5-stars doesn’t mean that those 5-stars are reviews. If you click on a product and don’t see reviews, chances are that those stars are just there to make you think those products have reviews.

Funny Site Statistics

On one particular site, I refreshed the page a couple of times and the “guest counter” would change every time the page refreshed. Not like a regular site, where the number might change slowly. This one changed wildly. I’ll go a step further and say that, most likely, if the store you are on has a “who’s online” or “guest counter” it is probably fake.

Contact Information

Never, ever buy from a store that does not have contact information. If you can’t get a phone number, address, or some other piece of information that ties them to a specific place, chances are that they don’t exist!

SSL

SSL or Security Sockets Layer is a technology that is designed to make sure your information gets transmitted safely and securely. Never, ever buy from a site that does not use SSL. How can you tell if you are using SSL? Well, the fastest way is to look at the location: What are the first 7 or 8 characters?

http:// UNSECURE!

https:// Secure! https stands for “Security HTTP” and is what you should see after you’ve added a product to your cart, are viewing your cart, or are going anywhere through the checkout process.

If you are unfamiliar with SSL, you should take a look at Verisign’s Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.

Recently, SSL vendors have added something called Extended Validation that shows a visible green bar at the top of your browser, noting that a site has gone through an “audited, rigorous authentication method.” These will also show you who the site is.

For more information on SSL, check out the Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.

Site Verification

One thing that truly signifies a “real-deal” site are working site verification logos. The site you are buying from should have them. If that does not, that could be a big sign that this site is not being very truthful with you. What do these verification logos look like? I invite you to take a look at Freedom Paper:

What a real site looks like with verification logos

You’ll notice that there are four logos here. Now, alone, these logos don’t mean a thing. Anyone who wants to look legit can easily copy-and-paste these images and put them on their site. What you must be able to do is click on them. Try clicking on the GoDaddy.com Verified & Secured Logo.

This is what is important. You should be able to click on every one of those. Sites that go the extra mile to comply and provide verifiable links are a sure sign that your data is safe and protected on those sites.

What Do Others Say?

Finally, don’t be afraid to search the site by name. Using a major search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, look for complaints. You can also check out the Better Business Bureau or Ripoff Report to see if a site has complaints against it. Another site called Web of Trust is actually attempting to make the web safer by providing website “reputation” with a browser plugin so that you can see if a site has a good or bad reputation.

I want to note that just because a site has a complaint or two or five doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to steal your money and run away. You can’t please everyone and some people will complain just because they can. Looking at reports and reviews of a site is another tool in your toolbox.

Putting It All Together

Well, can you trust a site? Chances are that a site can meet all of the criteria here, it’s legit. I personally have been bitten by a site that met all four of these criteria. My credit card was stolen and used.

If any site you visit is missing just one of the criteria, browse cautiously. Some small stores may not have SSL because you pay via PayPal and they don’t need SSL since PayPal handles things securely. Give them a call.

However, if a site has 2 or more of these signs then I’d highly advise not purchasing from that site and finding a site that does take these things seriously.

Conclusion

I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any more please leave them in the comments below. Shop safe and Merry Christmas!

X.commerce Innovate Developers Conference Day 2 Highlights

Christian Bodine on October 14, 2011

Yesterday was all about X.commerce and the community at large, but today we focused solely on Magento.

During the first session, we got to hear from Dmitry Soroka about what the Magento 2 roadmap looks like. Magento is putting a lot of effort into making Magento 2 a real upgrade from Magento 1: making it faster, more scalable, more expandable, more flexible, and more awesome in general. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Backward Compatibility is broken – Normally developers love backward compatibility because it makes our lives easier: we don’t have to update code every time a new version comes out. However, this time around, Magento has decided to forgo it. This is actually a very good key decision. Now, they have the chance to fix some important architecture problems that would be much harder or impossible to solve while maintaining backward compatibility. This will result in extensions working better inside the system and minimize conflicts that are common in the current version of Magento.
  • Multiple DB support – Magento 2 will support Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL out of the box. In fact, Magento Enterprise 1.11 has this functionality already. Now, it will make it into the core of the community edition. For larger enterprise users, the ability to run Magento inside of their existing infrastructure can potentially save time and money by allowing Magento to speak to those databases directly instead of having to integrate with modules or other middleware.
  • Performance – They’ve already benchmarked a 20% performance increase over Magento 1. There is a lot of room to grow and it’s a big focus. It’s safe to say that Magento 2 will have a noticeable performance gain over Magento 1.
  • Developer Tools & Documentation – They’ve been able to redesign and update several core pieces of Magento as well as developer tools. Documentation is another big thing. They’ve already released documentation for Magento 2 on their Confluence Wiki and are working to make their processes, tools, and methods open & transparent. This is apparent in how they are approaching the testing for Magento 2. (See below!) This is a huge boon to us developers and will help us to continue to write quality code.
  • Theme & Design updates – It looks like they are planning on taking some of the design functionality that Magento Go offers and including it straight into Magento’s core. Making simple design modifications very accessible to store owners. They’re also making the advanced theme functionality better by removing a lot of the limitations that are placed on theme developers during the implementation process. This means that making smaller theme modifications are much easier to do and could make it worthwhile to do, for instance, seasonal designs while still keeping your primary theme untouched.

We’re excited about what Magento 2 has to offer and were elated to be able to download and begin to play with the Magento 2 code that was released today.

One of the key things that are driving the quality code coming from the core team are the tools that they use to test and validate what they are writing. We heard from Anton Makarenko (Sr. PHP Developer on the Core Team @ Magento) about the unit testing capabilities that are being added to Magento 2.

We won’t bore you with all of the technical details, but suffice it to say that they are taking great lengths to ensure that bugs don’t creep into Magento 2 during development and that the tools that they are using are going to be made available to the community for improvement and use. They’ve done a lot of the work solving the technical problems of testing Magento and are giving us the ability to do the same thing for our own extensions and code.

So when is Magento 2 coming out? Well, there is no official roadmap yet, but the word on the street is that in Q3 2012, we’ll see the first alpha release and some time in Q4 2012 will be the final release.

That about wraps it up! We had a wonderful time at the Innovate Developers Conference and look forward to coming back next year.

X.commerce Innovate Developers Conference Day 1 Recap

Christian Bodine on October 13, 2011

Good golly, what a day! So much ground was covered today. It would be really hard to talk about every single thing that happened today, but we’d like to share we you some cool & interesting highlights from the first day of the Innovate Developers Conference.

This conference is not just a Magento or a PayPal conference. We’ve got developers, vendors, and users from across the whole X.commerce sphere: eBay, PayPal, Magento, X.commerce, marketing, SEO… you name it. Truly a huge cross-section of individuals and companies. It has been amazing getting to meet with people from across the globe to share ideas and discuss all sorts of topics.

Of course, the main reason we came here is to learn about the newly released X.commerce platform and operating system.

Let us explain.

The X.commerce fabric is essentially a platform-independent intermediary that allows you to write one integration for your service/cart/application/etc and then allows you to provide that service or consume other services from anyone else who also talks to the fabric. Perhaps the easiest analogy is to languages. Right now, each cart/service/API speaks its own language. In order for your cart to “talk” to MailChimp (for instance), you must “teach” it to speak that the MailChimp “language” by writing a module for it to “translate”. With X.commerce, though, you let your service (say, MailChimp, again) to “speak” X.commerce and you teach your cart to “speak” X.commerce and the two will be able to talk to each other. Not just that, but any other cart that can “speak” X.commerce can also “speak” with MailChimp since it speaks X.commerce.

Another angle: let’s say you run a small business and you use Magento Go for your website. And, for the sake of the example, you use three services to help you: MailChimp (for E-mail), Kenshoo (for advertising), and Shopon (for social). You decide to go with Magento Enterprise. Instead of having to find 3 modules that implement each of these integrations separately, you can use the built-in X.commerce fabric that is a part of Magento Enterprise to talk to these services automatically. No extra time involved. They’ll just work. That’s the power of X.commerce.
It’s worthwhile to note that although Magento and GSI Commerce are both a part of the X.commerce Magento really stole the show! All but one of the demos of X.commerce were done on Magento Enterprise. Lots of Magento love today!

What else? We heard about Magento and X.commerce. The X.commerce team has learned a lot from the Magento team. There will be a version of the X.commerce fabric available for Magento when it becomes generally available. We heard about the growth of the industry and how eCommerce will be a 10 trillion (yes, trillion) dollar industry by 2013. Magento unveiled their revamped Magento Connect 2, which easily links Magento store owners with extensions. Magento U, Magento’s training unit, will now offer courses online. Finally, Magento 2 was announced to be released in 2012 and a certified module program (which certifies modules for Enterprise) was also talked about.

As we were leaving tonight, the X.commerce folks formed a human fabric. It went all the way from Moscone West to Moscone North. It was quite a sight!

Well, that about wraps it up for today. We’re pretty beat from all of the excitement. Check back tomorrow for more news and highlights from day 2.

Heading to the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference

Christian Bodine on October 10, 2011

On Tuesday, a few of us llamas will be heading over to San Francisco to attend to the Innovate Developer’s Conference. We’re really excited to be a part of this conference for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, we’re enthusiastic about the potential the X.commerce platforms bring to the Magento and eCommerce communities. It is a very ambitious end-to-end, multi-channel platform that aims to make the constantly changing and evolving world of eCommerce easy to access. On top of that, it’s open source! We’ll be watching this story unfold and can’t wait to see the fruit: what makes it into Magento and what features and services will be born out of this platform that can help us more effectively serve our customers and make them more successful.

Secondly, we are glad to hear that Magento’s Developer Certification will enter beta at Innovate. As you may have heard, our own David Alger was one of many on their Certification Advisory Board. We can’t wait to take the test!

Thirdly, it will be great to meet and visit with our friends from Magento and the greater Magento community. It’s not very often that we get to spend any amount of time with so many others in the eCommerce industry.

We’ll be updating our blog as time allows while at Innovate. You can also always get the latest on Classy Llama activities on our Twitter. Check us out and hit that follow button.

Magento Modules and the Community

Christian Bodine on October 6, 2011

This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community.

This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community.

Here at Classy Llama we create our own Magento modules every day and have high standards for any module that we write.  These standards include having properly commented code, adhering to Zend programming standards, and having both the code and functionality of the module reviewed before it is released.  Magento is great because, instead of having to write every module that we use, there are numerous other quality development companies whose modules we can draw from for sites that we develop.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of modules out there that are not quality.  Issues with modules that we encounter include poorly written code, SQL vulnerabilities, improper code domain separation, and improper utilization of the Magento Application functionalities.  Some of these modules do not even work.

This abundance of modules often leaves us with a challenging question. Do we recommend this module to our client? If we do, we often have to prepare our clients for the possibility of hours of development, in addition to the module cost, that may be required to make the module safe and functional.  The other option is that we have to take a loss to bring the module to the level necessary for use on our customers’ eCommerce platform.  We love our customers and so it is painful for us to have to make either of these choices when the customer is already paying for the module. Because of this, we have been asking ourselves if there is some sort of solution to the problem of poorly coded modules.

The answer we came up with is two-fold.  For now, we can buy most of our modules from the great companies who have earned our trust up to this point; these companies include AheadWorks, Unirgy, and WebShopApps. This alleviates the problem but it does not come close to eliminating it.  We know that there are other developers who write quality modules.  We simply don’t know who they are until we have worked with and reviewed their modules.  We think that Magento itself is the solution to this dilemma.

Even though Magento has had explosive growth since the release of Magento 1.0, it has only been three and a half years since its release.  Since then, Magento has gone through dramatic transitions and upgrades turning it into a much more streamlined and powerful system with numerous features and a massive community.  With eBay’s acquisition of Magento, its future looks even brighter.  Since Magento is so young, however, there are certain features and programs that they have not had or taken the time to develop.  We believe that the development of a Magento module certification would be a great step for the company and the community at large.  Magento has over 4800 modules in Magneto Connect, and we realize that reviewing every one of them would be a massive undertaking, so we think that it should be something that Magento would be best able to facilitate on a voluntary basis.  When Magento certifies a module, that module would receive special recognition and be more accessible to developers and store owners. This would take the burden of code review and repair off individual development companies or users purchasing the modules and put it back on the original developers of the module.  While this could take time to implement, we think that it is an endeavor from which the entire Magento community would benefit.

We’ve communicated this idea to Magento.  Here is a snippet of what we’ve told them: … There are many poor quality developers and modules, and the current system doesn’t provide a system of being able to determine which modules are good, and which are not.  The current Magento Connect is much like the Android Marketplace – thousands of apps, with only a portion of them being high quality.  While we would not like to see the same level of curation as the iOS Marketplace, we would like to see more attention being paid to ensuring that quality modules are promoted, and poor-quality modules are being demoted…

We sincerely hope that Magento does this, but regardless of what they do, we love the platform and will continue to support the company and the community to the best of our ability.  We believe that Magento truly is the eCommerce “Platform for Growth” and that it’s many features, programs, modules, developers, store owners, and fans make it a wonderful and enjoyable platform to work with every day.

Wiz 0.9.5: Admin & Developer Tools, Batch Output

Christian Bodine on October 4, 2011

The latest batch of Wiz updates includes some useful stuff for developers as well as some administrative features. Included in this bundle of Wizzy goodness is the ability to output any table output in csv, pipe, or tab delimited output. This makes it very easy to utilize Wiz with other commands (or potentially feed information from Wiz back into itself!)
c
Here is a complete list of the changes in 0.9.5:

  1. The internal configuration system was rewritten to look more like Magento’s own configuration system — using XML files. This isn’t really used heavily yet, but we’ve got some stuff coming in the next few months that will take full advantage of this.
  2. You can now toggle the following “developer” flags from the CLI:
    1. Allow Symlinks (For templates, 1.5.1.0+)
    2. Logging
    3. JS Merging
    4. CSS Merging
    5. Profiler
  3. You can view all of the above configuration values as well with the 
    devel-config

    command.

  4. Get a list of all registered event listeners.
  5. Get a list of all Models registered in the system and module rewrites.
  6. Scriptable output. Output tabular data in csv, pipe-delimieted, or tab-delimited formats.

If you just want to get going:
Browse on Github

Be sure to read the Readme file on Github for more information about the added commands!

The Good Stuff

Okay, so the configuration system isn’t a huge deal… but it does open up more potential for 3rd party developers to write plugins that need to store things: usernames, passwords, etc. without having to provide their own storage mechanism. Let’s get to the really exciting stuff!

Developer Configuration

$ wiz devel-config
+---------------------------------+-------+
| Path                            | Value |
+---------------------------------+-------+
| dev/debug/profiler              | No    |
| dev/js/merge_files              | No    |
| dev/css/merge_css_files         | No    |
| dev/log/active                  | No    |
| dev/debug/template_hints        | No    |
| dev/debug/template_hints_blocks | No    |
| dev/template/allow_symlink      | No    |
+---------------------------------+-------+

You can now flip off/on or view the status of each of these independently. Each of these work the same way

devel-showhints

works.

Developer Helpers

One of the things I’m curious about sometimes is to see what modules are listening to what events. Well, now with a new command, you can see that:

wiz devel-listeners

give you a list of the events and the modules and their model/method that is responding to that event.

Often times, I want to know what overrides have been performed by other modules. Now I can see a total picture of what modules provide what models:

As you can see, all of the standard models are shown, but you can also see what overrides are performed by all of the modules on the system.

Scriptable Table Output

Finally, of the coolest thing (in my opinion) is the scriptable output. Wiz has a pretty decent table output system that makes it fairly easy for your eyes. However, getting that data out of the table took me far too much time. Enter

--batch

.

The –batch argument takes the model list we show above and transforms it into:

"Model Name","PHP Class"
varien/*,Varien_*
core/*,Mage_Core_Model_*
core_resource/*,Mage_Core_Model_Resource_*
eav/*,Mage_Eav_Model_*
eav_resource/*,Mage_Eav_Model_Resource_*
page/*,Mage_Page_Model_*
install/*,Mage_Install_Model_*
install_resource/*,Mage_Install_Model_Resource_*
admin/*,Mage_Admin_Model_*

The –batch argument can take one of three arguments: csv, pipe, or tab. csv is the default (as you can see above). Pipe replaces the commas with “|”s and tabs… well, you get the idea. 😉 Now you can take your Wiz output and pipe it through grep, cut, etc. or output straight to CSV and load it up into Excel/Numbers/OpenOffice/etc.

Enjoy!

Get Wiz

Browse on Github

The Magento Developer Certification

Christian Bodine on October 3, 2011

As many of you know, Magento recently announced their Magento Developer Certification program.  As one of the few partners involved with Magento since its inception, we’re especially excited to see this long-awaited program finally being launched.

Due to our depth of knowledge and experience with the Magento platform, Magento invited us to be a part of the Magento Certification Advisory Board. We’ve been involved in the process of writing questions for the certification for the past couple of months.  I want to extend congratulations to one of our Lead Developer’s, David Alger, for representing Classy Llama on the Advisory Board.  His contribution to the development of the certification has been substantial – he even won the award for completing the most number of objectives at a one-week onsite question-writing session.

The certification is going to be beta-launched at the Innovate Conference 2011 in the middle of this month and will be announced to the public later this year.  We have four developers who will be at the event and taking the certification.

Documentation, Markdown, and Pandoc

Christian Bodine on August 30, 2011

We’ve been doing a ton of work on documentation around llamaville lately, and since many of us working here are programmer types, most of our doc systems are configured to use the Markdown markup language (link) for writing richly formatted content. This is great, with one small problem – our project management system doesn’t currently support Markdown. It uses a WYSIWYG editor or can take straight HTML input.

I strongly dislike WYSIWYG editors, as they are slow and difficult to work with in my experience, and writing HTML directly is also time-consuming and laborious. Life has been rough, until last night when I stumbled across a little gem of a program: Pandoc by John McFarlane (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).

Pandoc is a beautiful little markup converter that can convert just about any common markup language to just about any other common markup language.

What this means is that I can take HTML input, convert it to Markdown for editing, and then convert the Markdown back to HTML for upload and input. This streamlines my editing process significantly and makes my life as a documenter and scope write so much easier. In my experience so far, it has done a beautiful job with everything I’ve thrown at it, even gracefully taking some pretty ugly HTML and making beautiful, clean Markdown out of it.

Following is a sample command I use to grab HTML content from my clipboard, reformat it as Markdown, and spit it out in TextMate, my editor of choice:

# pbpaste | pandoc -f html -t markdown | mate

This would, of course, work for any format supported by Pandoc, which includes the popular Textile among other languages.

Cheers!

~Rob

P.S. I’m also evaluating a slick little Markdown editor I found called Macchiato. Check it out: http://getmacchiato.com/

Contact Us