eeCommerce Blog

Back from EECI 2009

2009-11-04T08:21:37Z

Last week at EECI 2009 I gave a 40 minute presentation/demo of eeCommerce.

Unfortunately, with only 48 hours notice to prepare, there wasn’t sufficient time to prepare some fancy slides, or to best plan what I could fit in to my available time-slot. So, over the next few days I’ll use our blog to reiterate some of the points I made, both for the benefit of those that were present, as well as for those that were not.

Something that seemed to take many people by surprise was the announcement of eeCommerce Lite for ExpressionEngine. We’d mentioned this several times before - most notably on the ExpressionEngine forums when discussing the impact of not supporting PHP4 and EllisLab module certification.

Having now confirmed that there is indeed an eeCommerce Lite version, the most questions we’ve been asked regarding it are :

1) what features does eeCommerce Lite provide?
2) what is the price of eeCommerce Lite?
3) when will eeCommerce Lite be available?

The first of those questions is quite difficult to answer, and will require it’s own dedicated blog post to describe the differences between eeCommerce Lite and eeCommerce Pro - however, the differences are mainly in the multi-channel support that eeCommerce Pro provides. eeCommerce Lite will provide ALL of the functionality of eeCommerce Pro, and should be sufficient for 80% of all customers - however, some of the advanced functionality of eeCommerce Lite requires additional 3rd party add-ons (such as tagging or wishlists). We’ll explain the rationale behind that in a blog post later this week.

The second question is easily answered, and perhaps the biggest omission from my presentation slides was pricing.

eeCommerce Pro is still priced at $2499.99, including our Mammoth Webservices for Magento. eeCommerce Lite is priced at $149.99, and requires Mammoth Webservices, which costs $399.99. You will also be able to buy both eeCommerce Lite and Mammoth Webservices as a bundle for $499.99 (saving $50).

If you wish to purchase eeCommerce Pro now, you can do so now by contacting us. There is a special pre-release rate of $1999.99 (saving $500). eeCommerce Lite will not be available until our official launch. More details on when this will be in a further blog post.

Finally, I’d also like to point you in the direction of the relaunched J Hilburn website (http://www.jhilburn.com), which has been produced by Unleaded software and was launched yesterday. It uses both Mammoth Webservices for the Flash front-end of the “Design your shirt” component, and also integrates eeCommerce Pro with ExpressionEngine into their regular website.

In the next blog post, I’ll take you through the history of eeCommerce, how it came about, why it came about, and the problems we aim to solve with eeCommerce.

PHP (UK) going to EECI

2009-10-16T08:36:39Z

As the title of this blog post suggests, myself and Greg Veit (our Sales Manager) will be attending the first European ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference in Leiden, Netherlands next week (October 22-23).

We’ll be happy to talk to anybody and everybody about eeCommerce and Mammoth Webservices, to answer any questions you may have, and to provide demonstrations. If you’d like to arrange a personal meeting/demonstration time, just drop us a mail and we’ll do our best to accommodate.

In the run-up to EECI we’ve got a few important things to share, so keep an eye on this space.

See you all at EECI!

Coming next, from our labs…

2009-10-01T08:07:36Z

Today we’re announcing the next Magento product which we’ll be offering - a returns module.

Whilst Magento has a great deal of features, one feature that has been missing for far too long is a proper returns module, so we’ve been developing our own.

Our returns module will be fully integrated into the existing Magento order management workflow (as you can see in the screens below) allowing Magento administrators to create returns/RMAs and manage the return of stock into a store. It will also be possible for customers to create their own RMAs from inside of their account management interface. Naturally, we will also provide webservices for managing RMAs and returns within our Mammoth Webservices product.

The returns module will work both with Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition.

Watch this space for more information as we progress with the returns module!

Final beta versions released!

2009-09-27T13:54:37Z

We’ve just released the final beta versions of both eeCommerce Pro and Mammoth Webservices.

This release is largely a bug-fixing release, however we have also put in a few new features; here are the highlights :

- Added pagination into eeCommerce tags (works the same as pagination for Weblog and Query modules)
- Added debug parameter for Mammoth, automatically activated when enabling debugging in eeCommerce (disables SSL-only check on services which are SSL-only when not in debug mode)
- Added order.reorder function to Mammoth, and template tags in eeCommerce
- Added _format variable to Mammoth, to return results in format other than array (at the moment, valid options are null/default and JSON, with XML coming soon)
- fixed error with category.level functionality
- fixed error with order.list and order.info reporting incorrect number of items in order for total_order_items

We’ve also added payment functionality for :
- PayPal Express
- Amazon Payments
- Google Checkout

Which means that eeCommerce Pro and Mammoth both now support ALL of the payment methods that Magento ships with.

The commercial launch date is now rapidly approaching, so we’re busily making the final improvements to both eeCommerce and Mammoth Webservices, as well as creating examples, demos and putting the documentation for both products online.

The latest versions of both Mammoth Webservices and eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine can be downloaded from our downloads page.

New beta versions released, exciting times

2009-08-26T18:29:32Z

We’ve just released another beta version of both eeCommerce Pro and Mammoth Webservices.

This is a MAJOR update to both eeCommerce and Mammoth Webservices.

These new versions now feature payment functionality for :
- Saved Credit Card
- Zero subtotal checkout
- Check / money order
- Purchase order
- Authorize.net
- PayPal Direct
- Paypal Website Payments Pro (PaypalUk Direct)

What this means is, as of right now, you can use pretty much ANY frontend technology for your Magento store.

Users of your Flash application will be able to purchase and pay for items from you Magento store without the need to leave the Flash application. The same goes for iPhone, AIR, Flex, PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl and any other technology that has the ability to consume SOAP, XML-RPC, REST or JSON-RPC webservices.

Mammoth Webservices currently offers SOAP and XML-RPC APIs that allow you to browse a product catalog, add products from the catalog into your cart, create an order and finally, to pay for that order - without the shopper ever needing to interact directly with Magento. We expect this to open up many possibilities for store owners to create unique, engaging and innovative stores with Magento running the show behind the scenes.

There are now virtually no limits to how you wish your shoppers to experience your Magento store. Whether you want a storefront based completely in Flash, or even to place widgets in your existing website to allow shoppers to add items to their baskets, this is now a reality using Mammoth Webservices.

It doesn’t end there either - it’s now super simple to integrate Magento with your CMS or CRM system - eeCommerce is just the first example of how Mammoth Webservices enables you to integrate Magento with other systems, making your Magento store truly multi-channel.

The latest version of eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine features :
- Template tags for support of new Mammoth payment methods
- tidied up settings pages for the module and extensions
- module and extensions can now use the LG-Addon updater extension (http://leevigraham.com/cms-customisation/expressionengine/lg-addon-updater/)
- several bug fixes

Please visit the downloads page in order to download the latest beta versions of both Mammoth Webservices and eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine.

Our open beta program will soon be coming to an end, at which time you’ll be able to obtain a 30 day evaluation license for either (or both) products, or buy a commercial, non-expiring license from our store.

In the next (and final) beta version of Mammoth Webservices :
- REST API
- JSON-RPC API
- payment functionality for :
- Paypal Express
- Amazon
- Google Checkout

Additionally, in the next (and final) beta version of eeCommerce, we’ll have available beta versions of both eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine and eeCommerce Lite for ExpressionEngine, as well as some example templates, and some final improvements to various template tags.

Finally, later this week we shall be making some changes to our website… so stay tuned and check back often.

The latest versions of both Mammoth Webservices and eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine can be downloaded from our downloads page.

Third open beta release

2009-08-03T09:28:16Z

Yesterday we made our 3rd release in our open beta.

I wanted to take this opportunity to explain exactly what the open beta is all about.

The public beta is your chance to give us your opinion and feedback - to help us change or improve on anything you can think of to make eeCommerce or Mammoth webservices better.

In particular, if you’d like to see more API methods, or if there is a certain variable that you’d like to see returned with a specific API function that currently isn’t - let us know. We’ve already tried to anticipate that as much as possible, and have made what we feel are intelligent decisions to make the API as usable and intuitive as possible - for instance, instead of returning a boolean or an object ID upon a successful object creation or modification, we return you the whole object - because we all know that 9 times out of 10 the very next thing you’re going to want to do is display the newly changed object back to the user. Doing it this way means you don’t have to make that subsequent request, making things more efficient and speedy.

Got any cool ideas like that? we’d love to hear them - we’ll do our best to squeeze them into eeCommerce or Mammoth Webservices before the first commercial release.

In the meantime, the latest versions of both Mammoth Webservices and eeCommerce Pro for ExpressionEngine can be found on our downloads page.