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On mid-October 2011, the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference was organized by the eBay Ltd. in the Moscone Center, San Francisco. This year’s conference is all about the launch of the new E-Commerce platform: X.commerce, which brings together a whole set of commerce products and technologies from eBay, PayPal and Magento. Read more »

The Challenge

The Etam Group is a French clothing retailer company active in Europe and in China with a total yearly turnover of 1 134.5 million Euros in 2010. During the past few years, the business of Etam has greatly progressed in China. Counting more than 3000 points of sale solely in China, presenting 6 major brands and with a strong investment in the company’s image, Etam has become one of the most reckoned companies focusing in the popular, young and fashionable clothing and apparels in Chinese market. Etam has established its E-Commerce platform in 2006, and hopes to build today a new official website, hoping to enter into the new era in the Chinese E-Commerce market with a brand new look.

After several communications, Etam appoints BysoftChina to build this new E-Commerce platform. Read more »

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator, also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy, which is designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. And today, we have tried Varnish on a Magento default sample shop, to see how well Varnish helps on the loading speed, compared to the bare Magento install.

1          Varnish Features for Magento

1.1         Enable full page caching using Varnish.

For a sample Magento website, Varnish is enabled to cache most of the pages, like Home Page, and other Page Categories.

1.2         Varnish servers are configurable in Admin, under System / Configuration / General – Varnish Options

You can specify which Varnish server Magento website is using. If just use one server for hosting Magento website, we can install varnish on the same server and input the blank as 127.0.0.1:80 which is by default.

1.3         Automatically clears (only) cached pages when products, categories and CMS pages are saved.

For example, if you add a new product or update the parameters of the products, when you click the save button in the admin page, the website data which stored in Varnish will be automatically purged, so that you won’t read the old data in the Varnish Cache.

In the figure below, I modified the price of HTC Touch Diamond, when I click ‘Save’, the Data in the Varnish Cache is purged, so you can see the price of the product is up-to-date. Read more »

The Challenge

KAISER + KRAFT is one of the leading suppliers of office, workshop and warehouse equipment in the world with 44 subsidiaries in 27 countries throughout Europe, North America and Asia. KAISER + KRAFT China and KAISER + KRAFT Japan entrusted BysoftChina, a Magento Professional Partner, to deploy a new eCommerce system that supports their business goals in Asia-Pacific. This project required servers in Hong Kong, China Mainland and Japan, all of which demand a rigorous level of data synchronization and data security.

With multiple servers and multiple instances of Enterprise, KAISER + KRAFT takes full advantage of the Magento Enterprise content staging feature.

The Solution

BysoftChina introduced the idea of applying three separate Magento Enterprise systems into each server with data synchronization among the different servers using the Magento API. A backend tool allows the administrator to automatically synchronize product pricing and inventory data with the information on KAISER + KRAFT’s AS400 ERP system. With multiple servers and multiple instances of Enterprise, KAISER + KRAFT takes full advantage of the Magento Enterprise content staging feature. KAISER + KRAFT China and KAISER + KRAFT Japan are able to share a common backend with different administrators who are able to manage data on the Chinese and Japanese websites.

Managing Thousands & Thousands of Products

BysoftChina developed a complete and reliable data import module which saved significantly on data entry. With so many products (and sub-categories of products), Bysoft developed a grouped product structure for KAISER + KRAFT that allows the administrators to quickly and easily create and manage products at all levels. Bysoft and Magento made it easy for users to find any product among thousands of choices with intelligent search functionality and a multi-option filter in the product category page that helps direct users to requested product pages. Products are clearly displayed in tables that make it very intuitive for consumers to understand the product choices. The administrator can easily define which property to use in the filter and the order to display the products on the frontend.

Bysoft and Magento made it easy for users to find any product among thousands of choices with intelligent search functionality and a multi-option filter.

Bysoft designed the KAISER + KRAFT websites so that their completely localized online stores match the color scheme of their popular print catalogs, making adoption of the online stores easy and seamless for even the most loyal of catalog customers. Additional functional such as the ability to input a six digit product code to directly add the product into the shopping cart makes the shopping and purchasing process easier for consumers.

“We are happy that we chose BysoftChina as our partner because of their detailed planning, high quality standards and outstanding service. We are very pleased that Bysoft used Magento because we now have localized online stores with all of the functionality we need and backend integration that makes our system administrators happy,” said Liu Yang, Chief Marketing Office, KAISER + KRAFT China. With such a large product catalog, performance is critical to help ensure consumer satisfaction. Bysoft implemented the full-page caching and Solr search capabilities of Magento along with Layered Navigation Pro from Aitoc for the product list page.

“The flexibility of Magento Enterprise was a very large benefit for this implementation,” said Cyril Drouin, CEO of BysoftChina. “KAISER + KRAFT has around 100 attributes for each attribute set. This could have been very problematic, but not with Magento. The multistore capabilities of Magento allowed us to code once and implement twice (for China and Japan), saving time and money.”

Although a very complex implementation, Bysoft was able to launch both the China and Japan sites within a four month time frame. KAISER + KRAFT were pleased with the speed and quality of the implementation as well as the user friendly frontend and enriched backend features.

To download the full PDF version of this Case Study
Please click Here.

BysoftChina is now Zend solution partner. It also means Bysoftchina’s PHP is better and better.
PHP is a widely-used programming language especially suited for web development in a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Today, many famous world-class websites are built on a PHP and LAMP platform: Facebook, Kaixin Wang, Youtube, Tudou, Yahoo, Sohu, Wikipedia, etc.

Zend PHP is a professional company. Because of their authority in international technology, Zend founder of the company and his groups are the core of leadership in the PHP and open source groups. It also has played a powerful role in promoting the rapid development of PHP.

BysoftChina is proud to become the only Zend solution partner in China. This partnership recognized our expertise in the PHP field: half of Zend PHP certified engineer numbers in China is coming from BysoftChina. We strongly believe that PHP allows to build efficiently websites and web applications.

Currently, BysoftChina takes pride in announcing that its PHP talents dispatch service is available, and provides PHP certified engineers for onsite projects in Clients’ office premises. You could outsource the complete development of your product to BysoftChina. BysoftChina undertakes the entire gamut of responsibilities – product planning, execution, deployment and support.

Currently, Chinese Internet users are actively engaging in social media. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are blocked in China, but their Chinese equivalents are expanding. By some measures, usage of Chinese social media is some of the most intense in the world.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that Chinese Internet users are online for an average of 2.7 hours per day, considerably more than other developing countries and more on par with usage patterns in Japan and the United States. Numerous factors help drive Chinese, more than other populations, to engage in social media. These include rural-to-urban migration that has separated families, the loneliness of the one-child generation, and a distrust of information from government-controlled media.

Chinese netizens actively engage in discussions that could directly affect companies. A recent study by OgilvyOne in China found that 55 percent of China’s netizens had initiated or participated in online discussions about companies. Understanding social media is no longer a luxury for companies, operating in China—it is an imperative. Domestic social media platforms differ in various ways from Western platforms. Companies should learn how Chinese consumers use social media and take advantage of the platforms to conduct consumer research, launch products, manage public relations crises, and more.

What should companies do about social media in China?

At first, understand local netizens. Monitor the channels they’re using. What are their motivations for using social media? How to they interact with each other across these channels? What drives them to participate and spread messages and etc.? Based on these informations, we can start our social media marketing.

Secondly, be visible on the right channels. We cannot simply jump on the social media bandwagon. Which one is the best for us? Blog? Forum? Or Social networking? We must choose them based on ourselves. We must understand the netizens’ kinds and their interest in the channel. Then, we can broadcast our brand to them and also we will get their spread.

Thirdly, update the content timely. Support some useful and compelling contents to the netizens. And then, we can keep our current audiences and get more and more audiences.

Lastly, gain and maintain trust. Spread our contents to the people who need those messages. Try to add legitimate value to netizens’ online experiences. . Most importantly, don’t try to deceive netizens – it will only lead to backlash and reputational damage.
China’s social media landscape is constantly growing, innovating, evolving. Companies must study how to use it.

1. Baidu and Google are companies from different countries. Baidu is the largest search engine company in China while Google is an American company and is the largest search engine company in the world. Of course, the number of Google users is the highest in the world. But in China, the supremacy of Baidu is unshakable.

2. The different target audiences. Baidu’s main target audience is China, whereas Google’s target audience is the whole world. This is very obvious on Baidu advertising and Google Adwords. For Baidu advertising, we can choose the China provinces as the promotion area for every campaign, but we cannot choose any specific foreign country. But on Google Adwords, we can choose any countries as our promotion area. This well reflects that the focus of Baidu is Chinese market, while Google focuses on the entire world.

3. Language difference. Most of the information or content on Baidu is in Chinese. Google aims to provide service to the entire world and provides translation of its services into other languages for those who cannot read English.

4. Different advertising costs. Compared with Google’s keyword per click costs, Baidu’s one is lower. In the Baidu advertising dashboard, we can choose daily, weekly or monthly budget. But for Google, we just can choose daily budget.

5. Different extensional services. Baidu supports many extensional services for adapting to Chinese users’ habits, such as Baidu Baike, Baidu tieba, Baidu Zhidao and so on. All of these services are Baidu’s special products. Google’s extensional services usually work for the customers in the whole world, not only for Chinese people.

6. Different SEO. Google and Baidu SEO are very different for either keyword ranking algorithm, or website content or external links. Even if your Baidu SEO is pretty good, that does not mean that the Google SEO is also good.

To summarize, if the company’s target audience is Chinese people, Baidu is necessary; if the target audience is foreigners, Google is better. However for most of the companies in China, a mix of both is the best choice.

BysoftChina has just won the SME Excellency Award 2010 awarded each year by the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This award is given to a French SME for its highly successful presence in China for many years. The selection of the winner is done according to various criteria such as: the market approach, business results and finally the prospects for growth.

It is for BysoftChina an important recognition of work achieved by its teams since the last five years as well in the approach of the Chinese market with a differentiated marketing positioning as the quality and expertise of the services provided.

BysoftChina is the only company in China certified with all leading Open Source Web technologies (Magento, eZ Publish, Drupal, PHP) and has the largest number of certified engineers on PHP technology, among its employees.

Our ambition for the next years is to offer our customers more comprehensive services around our four offers:

• The implementation of platform and e-commerce site
• The creation of inter/intra/extranet portal
• The technology consulting around the PHP technology
• The establishment of foreign brands and companies on the Chinese Web

BysoftChina has three offices (Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan) and one hundred employees in all web business: Consulting, Web Design, Technology, and E-Marketing.

In the 21st century, Chinese economy is developing rapidly whereas e-commerce is growing quietly on the historical scale. Chinese e-commerce trading volume in 2009 amounted to 3.85 trillion RMB, while in 2010, is exceeded 4 trillion RMB.  (http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90860/7260847.html )

At this stage, Chinese e-commerce is still at the initial stage and many aspects are still not perfect. Even many merchants are not still fully aware of the importance of e-commerce. The data provided by iResearch Consulting Group shows that from 2008 to 2010, the Chinese buyer’s market size of B2C e-commerce in annual 75% of the speed in growth. We can be sure that the next decade will be the decade of rapid development of e-commerce. We can foresee that, according to the following observations:

1. The traditional business model is restricted to an area, whereas e-commerce is not concerned by area restriction. As long as web can be found, the e-commerce is able to exist. As we know, the web is everywhere.

2. Ecommerce reduces the cost. Indeed, the transaction costs and intermediate links are reduced, therefore the transaction is possible between manufacturers and consumers Of course, this will greatly reduce the cost sales for the enterprises.

3. Less advertising costs. E-commerce advertising is carried on the web, from the multi-channel approach to the full range of coverage. Compared to traditional advertising, e-commerce requires less advertising costs.

4. Easy e-commerce. The future world is a network world. Merchants who want to have a foothold in this world can do it very simply, actually, they only need their own website. Then they can start a full range of marketing to promote their website and products.

In short, e-commerce has become a trend in contemporary business. The sooner you start e-commerce the more successful you will be.

The tags in Magento  is basically a description of the keyword. They can be assigned to the product through the login customer. Tags help clients to organize and remember the products that they have viewed , provide fast navigation options in your shop and optimize search engine optimization process.

The front product page of each product has an ‘Add Your Tags’ button.

When customers enter a word and click Add Tags, the tag will be sent to the Pending Tags queue (if they have not logged in, they will first login or create an account before they can submit tag). If they add many words, each word will be used as a single tag into the queue. Unless the words are included in single quotation marks, in this case, they would be classified as a tag. If you prefer, you can enable customers to get new tags reminder through RSS.

To access the Pending Tags queue, browse Catalog> Tags> Pending Tags, you can click on Edit in the Action column to edit. Select Approved to remove the Tag in this list and displayed in the foreground. Select Not Approved to remove the Tag in this list and will not appear in the foreground. You can also edit the tag’s name. Click Save Tag to Save when you finish.

If you do not need to change the tag’s name, you can batch updates to the audit Tag in order to save time. In the Tag list, select the comments you want to update. In the top of the list, you can select all tags or select all visible tags (tags in current page list). Or you can simply select the check box for each Tag option. You can see the number of options above the list, and to keep it updated. When you choose all tags that you want to modify, you may select your preferred action in the Action drop-down menu.
• Delete – This will delete all the selected Tag.
• Change Status – Select this option, the Status drop-down menu will appear on the right and you can choose Approved, Pending, or Disable. Click the Submit button and the status will be updated.

In Pending Tags queue, you can view all the products lists that the tag was applied to them, find the tag in the list, and select View Products in the Action column. For each product, you can see the frequency of the tag that applies to the product. By clicking the product you will be redirected to the product background page of this product. In Pending Tags queue, you can also view the customer list of the tag that applied to the product to find your needed tag, and select View Customers of Action column. For each customer, you can see customers using this Tag’s Store View and the products, and product SKU. Click customers, and you will redirect yourself to the customer’s background account page.

Once the mark has been approved, it will be displayed in the foreground. When adding to a new product or other customers, it no longer needs to be reviewed. It will automatically appear in the foreground, above the Add Your Tags area, and show the number of times this tag is applied to the product in parentheses.

Click the tag, you will see all products with this tag. In addition, hot tags will appear in the site’s left column, which lists the most common tag cloud.

Although Approved and Disabled Tags are not showed in the Pending Tags queue, they can still be edited. Simply go to Catalog> Tags> All Tags, you can modify them as the same in Pending Tags queue.

From 100magento