In our last episode, Ben Marks and Robert Rand took a deep dive into eCommerce platform Total Cost of Ownership. That conversation leads directly into this episode, in which Ben and Robert discuss Open Source vs. Closed Source eCommerce. 

If you're tired of sales teams pitching what's great about their eCommerce platforms and simply want to learn the actual pros and cons to look out for, this episode is for you!

Guest: Ben Marks, Shopware.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

Open Source vs Closed Source eCommerce Platforms

Sometimes eCommerce orders fail to go through.
 
Whether caused by problems stemming from the shopper's credit or debit card, payment gateways, fraud filters, or even issues with checkout pages themselves, it happens.
 
In a physical store, you'd work with the shopper to help them complete their transaction. 

When it comes to eCommerce, however,  shoppers are likely to abandon their carts. 

That left us asking, "Can you get them back?"

Guest: GQ Fu, LTVplus.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

If eCommerce Shoppers Experience Checkout Problems Can You Win Them Back?

As an eCommerce merchant, you want to focus on your business plan. At the same time, there's a fear of missing out on the successes your competitors are having. The last thing you want is to overlook marketing strategies that are leading consumers to other web stores instead of yours.

However, some data may be hard to come by, and there's just so much time you can put into researching your competitors. 

This led us to ask if there was a better way to learn about the digital advertising campaigns of your eCommerce competitors.

Guest: John Readman, AskBOSCO.io
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails

eCommerce merchant FOMO - Where are your competitor's ad budgets going?

If there's an outage at a modern cloud provider like AWS we have the technology to notice the issue and failover to one of their other data centers.

However, it's not so easy when a content delivery network (CDN) is having issues. By their very nature, these networks are distributed across servers in data centers all over the world. This makes tracking and addressing outages and other problems much more challenging.

CDNs can also be tied in with a variety of security solutions, from web application firewalls (WAF) and SSL certificates to DDoS mitigation and bot protection. They can be configured for performance optimization too, optimizing images and website coding.

So what happens if you try to fail over to another CDN?  Will your site security and performance take a hit? If you have an eCommerce site, will it still be PCI compliant?

We tackled these questions, and more! Tune in to learn about CDN failover solutions that can work with any major CDN, like  Akamai, AWS Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Fastly, and Google Cloud CDN.

Guest: Subbu Varadarajan, Zycada.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

If Your CDN Goes Down, Does Your Site Have To?

The first episodes of our podcast were focused on Magento. That was over 3 years ago.

We've gone on to publish over 90 episodes that speak to eCommerce professionals and digital marketers. Many episodes have focused on topics that are specifically important to the Magento ecosystem. However, in this 95th episode, we've gone back to our roots to take a deeper look at the state of Magento and the community that powers it.

Guest: Maier Bianchi, Bemeir.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

***Important Note:
In this episode, Robert mentioned that in 2021 many Magento extension developers lost access to Adobe Commerce dev licenses. We've since heard from Adobe that they're actively working to address this issue. However, we decided to leave it in the episode because it's part of a bigger conversation about extensions, and it's also a great example of the Magento community speaking up, and the Adobe team listening.


Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-continue-support-magento-adobe-commerce-2022-maier-bianchi/

https://jetrails.com/blog/critical-magento-2-security-vulnerability-cve-2022-24086/

The Future of Magento: 2022 and Beyond

Managing orders and inventory sounds easy until you're managing multiple sales channels and vendors, supply chain issues, cost fluctuations, and other common challenges.

For this episode, we invited an industry veteran with almost 20 years of industry experience to discuss the ins and outs of keeping your sales channels accurate and orders flowing.

Guest: Kostis Mamassis of https://Megaventory.com
Host: Robert Rand of https://JetRails.com

Related Articles: 

https://jetrails.com/blog/6-reasons-magento-2-merchants-use-inventory-and-order-management-software/

https://blog.megaventory.com/2022/04/how-to-face-the-challenges-of-ecommerce-inventory-and-order-management/

Centralizing Ecommerce Inventory and Orders

Conventional wisdom is that your eCommerce brand needs to keep pumping out content. Blog articles, social media posts, viral videos - your team wants it all. 

In this episode, we take the time to discuss if this is indeed a working strategy and what it takes to generate the desired increases in online sales.

Guest: Andrew Maff, BlueTuskr.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

Is Content Marketing Crucial for eCommerce, or Oversaturated?

From cryptocurrencies to subscriptions, to buy now pay later solutions, to fraud prevention technology... the eCommerce payments space is constantly evolving.

Most online stores want backup payment gateways in case one fails. Large enterprise needs to offer shoppers in different regions of the world local payment methods. All the while, finance teams are stuck waiting on development backlogs and struggling to test and measure new payment options. 

If you dig in a bit deeper, you learn that few merchants are promoting the payment gateways and processors that best align with what an individual shopper is purchasing.

In this episode, we looked at the emerging field of payment orchestration which promises to make it easy for finance teams to take back control of eCommerce payment processing in order to increase sales and profits.

Guest: John Lunn, https://Gr4vy.com
Host: Robert Rand, https://JetRails.com

Why eCommerce Payment Orchestration Will Make Your CFO Smile

There hasn't been an in-person Magento event in the USA since 2019... that's about to change! 

If you're thinking about attending or planning to attend Meet Magento New York 2022, you're in luck! This episode will fill you in about the pre-party, after-party, and everything in between!

To get tickets or learn about sponsoring the event, visit https://meetmagentonyc.com

If you've already registered, get a head start on networking at https://next.brella.io/events/MeetMagentoNewYork22

Guest: Marsha Naidoo, KrishTechnolabs.com
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

MMNYC 2022 - The Return of Magento Events To The USA

Kalen Jordan has spent the last decade working on projects like Magetalk, MageMail, Sweet Tooth Rewards, and Commerce Hero. He's a serial entrepreneur and is once again making a bet on the Magento ecosystem with MageChat, a Magento group built around a managed Slack community. So, we chatted with Kalen about what's driving this project forward, what people are getting out of it, and what's on the horizon for MageChat and the wider Magento Community.

Guest: Kalen Jordan, MageChat
Host: Robert Rand, JetRails

If you want to stay connected with many of the top minds in the Magento ecosystem, check out https://www.magechat.club/ for yourself.

Why weren't we invited to MageChat until now?

Magento is more than an eCommerce software platform. It's an ecosystem that's driven by a passionate open-source community. That's why some of the most active Magento experts got together to create https://mage-os.org/, a new non-profit focused on a strong future for Magento and those that rely on it.

Learn about why this new non-profit was formed, what makes it different from other Magento organizations, and the goals being set out by its board.

Guests:

> Vinai Kopp - Mage-OS Board President + Technical Director at Hyvä Themes

> Alessandro Ronchi - Mage-OS Board Treasurer + COO at Bitbull

> John Hughes - Mage-OS Board Member + Head of Magento at YouWe

> Maciej Kalkowski - Mage-OS Board Member + CEO at Centuria

> Laura Folco - Mage-OS Business Control Committee Member + Magento Development Consultant


Host: 

> Robert Rand - Director of Partnerships & Alliances at JetRails


Additional Resources:

Learn more about the Mage-OS board members, and access links to their LinkedIn profiles at: https://mage-os.org/blog/mage-os-update-2022-week-36-mage-os-assoc-announcement

Mage-OS - A New Magento Non-Profit For a New Era

Hosted by Robert Rand, The JetRails Podcast presents interviews with industry leaders, visionaries, and veterans with insights and expertise into websites, eCommerce, and digital marketing.  Learn tips, recommendations, and items of interest as we help you stay ahead of the curve.

Open Source vs Closed Source eCommerce Platforms

The JetRails Podcast

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