euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

Big-G is going social and for me this marks a big moment in the history of the Internet, on par with facebook’s launch of social-media as we know it today. It sounds very negative, to say that Google has turned it’s big guns on facebook with the launch of G+, but heck I get a kick out of saying anything good about Google, because they care about the progress of the Internet in the right direction / have enriched me and my company in such far reaching ways (aside Search, we use Apps, Gmail and Analytics).

Inspite of it’s 700 million users, Facebook should be fretting about G+, and afraid right now of being displaced as the top-social-network on the planet. Infact, the most urgent and the fastest ever corporate-reincarnation should happen soon at facebook, for following reasons:

1. The tiny 8 point fonts on fb user interfaces suck. This might have been what Mark Zuckerberg used for his famed Harvard-dorm invention, but 700 million people are getting ever bigger screens and want to read easier. Change this soon or they’ll be stuck with it for a long time.
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2. The attitude to privacy at fb’s top management needs to radically tame down. Fb might think they want to radically open up the Internet, but it’s users are not that far on the vision. We users still want, ultimate if possible, control over our information. Social media should be a media for voluntary-sharing, not forced. And users will gravitate to platforms that respect our fundamental instincts for privacy (read G+)
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3. Google is combining Search with Social, and everyone knows Google has a 70-95% (depending on the geography) market-share for search. What this really means is website-owners who want to be found over Google (and believe me this is just about eveyone) have a strategic alignment with G+. They will _join G+ very fast. And by _join, I mean they will bring their _content and _users to G+. And when that happens, we can all say “game over”. You see Facebook doesn’t offer this incentive to website owners.

Now with Facebook 2.0, they have to neutralize this defecit, which they could probably do ONLY by combining their social-data with search, as in Bing and Yahoo! Infact the upside of is could be an interesting synergy of the type 1+1=3.

And we are not even factoring in Mobile here yet. If anyone wants to continue this article on how Search, Social and Mobile will overlap to shape the way we consume online-services, feel free to continue below.

If you have product catalog that contains many articles with many variants, or variant-combinations, it may be necessary to set the parent-product as non-buyable, because only variants can be purchased.  Classical example, a t-shirt in different colors and sizes.  Unless a color and size is not selected, the product cannot be purchased!

OXID offers a configuration-setting for this purpose which would allow the shop-merchant to set up products with variants as non-purchases.  This setting is applicable shop-wide, and can be found under Master Settings > Core Settings > System > Variants > “Parent” Products can be purchased.

For more on OXID Variants, please also see Setting up Product Variants in OXID.

Variants contains different type of articles. Many products often require the same variants to be set up.

It would be very time-consuming to set up these variants for each product in OXID eshop.  For example if we take shoes as an article, we can assign different variants for this product based on the size and color of a shoe.

Defining the variants in OXID /admin

• Select Administer Products -> Products.
• Select the product for which you want to set up Variants.
• Select the Variants tab.
• All Selection Lists that have been set up in eShop are displayed on the left.
• Select the Color | Size Selection List.

Click the arrow ==>

The Variants will be set up automatically for each entry in the selection list.

Now, you only have to activate the variant, enter any other prices and enter the stock inventory.

In this way, you can quickly set up variants. If you have a few products with the same variants, this method will save you a lot of time.

Variant Dimensions

For example “Color” and “Size” are known as Variant-Dimensions

You can specify variant-dimensions for a set of variants using selection lists:

• In Name of Selection, you can specify a name for the dimension between the various variants, e.g. Color or Size.

Configuring Variants

• Each Variant can get it’s own Product-Number
  • If you do not enter a product number, the product number of the parent product will be used, and a suffix-counter added.
• Prices of Variants can be configured individually
• Variant order can be sorted, in order to influence the order of listing variants.  On the front-end, variants are listed in ascending order.
• Individual stock values can be maintained for specific variants.

Example for Variants

Different sizes:

The following example describes step by step how to set up variants for a product. Three variants will be set up: For ex. T-shirt sizes S, M and L etc.. All sizes cost $ 39.99. A total of 10 items in size S are in stock, and 25 items each in sizes M and L.

• Select Administer Products -> Products
• Select the product for which you want to set up variants.
• Select the Variants tab.
• In Name of Selection, enter Size.
• Click Save Selection.
• Next, the S variant will be set up. Make the following settings:
• In Selection, enter S.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 0.
  • In Stock, enter 10. (Depends on the stock availability)
• Click New Variant.  The variant is saved and displayed.
• In Selection, enter M.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 1.
  • In Stock, enter 25. (Depends on the stock availability)
• Click New Variant. The variant is saved and displayed.
• In Selection, enter L.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 2.
  • In Stock, enter 25. . (Depends on the stock availability)

Click New Variant. The variant is saved and displayed.

All 3 variants are set up, but are not yet active:

Select the Active check box for all 3 variants.  Click Save Variants. The variants are now set up!

Although Facebook has more than 750 million active users, customers are not very satisfied with it’s services. According to a recent customer satisfaction poll, the reason for this dissatisfaction lies in the complexity of the Facebook interface and the range of users. People of different ages and backgrounds are using Facebook and when it ads new features, there is a lack of explanation and help. It is not very intuitive to use and the privacy policies are a mess.

This gap is an open door for Google+. Google Inc. claims the highest satisfaction score among the online service providers measured in the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report. Facebook on the other hand scored the lowest among the approximately 80 providers rated. I’m excitet how Facebook and Google+ will develop the following months!

A few days ago, PayPal introduced a new feature for Android Phones, that enables users to simply hold their smartphones together and wait for a buzz initiating a money transfer between the two users.

The system works currently only with Samsung’s Nexus S phones that contain Near Field Communication chips.  Near Field Communication is a wireless technology that enables devices to exchange information – including encrypted payment data – over a short distance. It can enable a consumer to pay for goods in a store by waving a smartphone with an NFC chip near an NFC-enabled terminal.

To use the new person-to-person payment service, one PayPal user sends a request for a payment to another PayPal user from within a PayPal widget on their smartphone. I’m curious when I can go to the next grocery store and pay with my phone like this!