Global Nerdy

You might have heard that Shopify took on 20 new people recently – that’s the result of acquiring Select Start Studios, a.k.a. “S3”, an award-winning mobile company. You’ve probably already guessed the reason: to stay ahead of the curve of ecommerce’s evolution.

With the explosion of mobile phones fuelled by the Apple and Android ecosystems couple with the explosion of online shopping fuelled by Shopify and the Esteemed Competition, ecommerce is rapidly morphing into mcommerce. This explosion is outpacing its predecessors: just as the adoption of web technologies outpaced the adoption of desktop tech, mobile adoption is outpacing web adoption. And just as the desktop and then the web changed the way we work and play, mobile is doing the same: only at a greater scale and with greater speed.

Mashable recently posted an article titled 5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce, which makes some observations of the current mobile landscape and attempts to find what they mean for the future of ecommerce. We’re thinking about all these issues as we grow the Shopify platform, and as developers, designers and shopowners, so should you.

The “5 paradoxes” mentioned in the article are:

1. Customers spend more time on their mobile devices than desktops. Of note are tablet users and especially iPad users, who generally have a higher level of education and income than general internet users.
2. Mobile shoppers are more focused. This is especially true of search – where 70% of desktop search tasks are done in about a week, 70% of mobile search tasks are done in an hour!
3. Click-through rates are higher on mobile than on desktop. Smartphones and tablets are showing higher click-through rates for search advertising than desktops.
4. Mobile shopping peaks at night. Smartphone and tablet use peaks at night, which suggests that the living room couch is often your showroom.
5. The mobile web is important. In most cases, it’s better by far for an online shop to concentrate on their mobile web presence rather than building an app for their customers to use.

The article goes into each point in greater depth; be sure to read it to get all the details.

Mobile is increasingly important to ecommerce, and it’s probably increasingly important to you. Keep an eye on this blog: we’ll be talking more and more about mobile commerce – what’s happening, what it means to you and how to take advantage of it, from the development, design and merchant angles.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

SmartBlog on Restaurants is really aimed at the restaurant industry, but the advice it offers in its article Managing your reputation online is a never ending story applies to online shops as well. Online reviews and social media are said to be surpassing search for reviews, and more and more people are consulting their phones when making purchases. Your online reputation is an asset, and the article offers these five tips to maintain it:

1. The best defense is a good offense. If you’re on the defensive, actively go and find out what the problem is.
2. Don’t beat around the bush. Seek feedback as soon as possible so you can address any problems quickly.
3. Pay attention to the grapevine. Listen for when customers talk about you.
4. Extend your hospitality outside your dining room. Or in the case of ecommerce, outside your shop. You’re already online; use it to communicate with your customers!
5. “But you don’t have to take my word for it…” Quote your customers, especially when they talk about you online but off your site. Those quotes are more “real”.

There’s more in the full article – go read it!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

It’s not too late to register for the ConFoo conference, which takes place in Montreal from next Wednesday, February 29th to Friday, March 2nd. ConFoo’s the big “web techno conference” covering a wide array of software development topics:

• Accessibility
• Cloud Computing
• CMS
• Data Persistence
• Front End
• Java
• JavaScript
• Mobile
• .NET
• PHP
• Project Management / Agile
• Python
• Ruby
• Scaling / Performance
• Security
• Social Networking
• Startups
• Systems Administration
• Testing / QA
• Web Services

Shopify will be there, as we’re giving two presentations.

Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant

My coworker David Underwood, Developer Advocate, will be giving the Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant presentation on Friday, March 2nd from 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.. Here’s the abstract:

Your Ruby/Rails application is up and running, you’ve got users, and better still, they’re ready to pay to for the fruits of your genius. Okay, genius: how do they pay? The answer is ActiveMerchant, the de facto standard for handling payments in Ruby. ActiveMerchant gives you a single, simple API that supports many payment gateways and lets you authorize a payment and capture the money, all with only a screenful’s worth of code. In this session, we’ll walk you through a simple payment, work up to a full Rails-based shopping cart with payment authorization and capture and show you what the industry standards are and the security precautions you should take.

Ruby as She is Spoke

Your Truly, Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist, will be giving the Ruby as She is Spoke presentation on Thursday, March 1st from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m.. Here’s the abstract:

Speak you Ruby surely like native? Have you a grip on using the rectified idioms for coding in the language? But seriously: like human languages, programming languages are also about clear communication, and the best way to speak a language is to understand it idioms. In this session, we’ll look at Ruby turns of phrase and other patterns that the best-written Ruby code uses to communicate clearly and that best take advantage of the Ruby language.

Montreal!

ConFoo wraps up on Friday, leaving the weekend free to explore a fun city with great food, shopping and stuff to do until the very wee hours. It’s a great excuse to pick up some new knowledge, make contacts in the industry and have a little weekend trip all in one!

Don’t miss this conference – register for ConFoo today!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Bill C-30 is a pending Canadian bill that gives police and other appointed special investigators to get information from “internet companies” (the bill’s a bit vague on the definition) to give them information about you – name, IP address and other identifying information – without a warrant. On its own, its terms don’t give “The Man” free access to who you are and what you do online, but the resulting law will require Canadian ISPs to build in facilities to allow for “eavesdropping” that’s not unlike what they do in China. Once that capability is built in, the genie will be out of the bottle; or more accurately, the governmental genie will be in all our bottles. As Ivor Tossell puts it in the Globe and Mail, “You can’t bring oil barrels full of honey to the forest and then act surprised when bears show up.”

The video above is from the Canadian television show Rick Mercer Report. One of the regular features of the show is “Rick’s Rant”, in which he does a short polemic on something topical as he walks through Toronto’s “Graffiti Alley” just off Queen Street West. This one does a great job of explaining why Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who introduced the bill, is wrong when he said that critics of the bill could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers” (which will someday be used as a classic example of that old high school debating trick, association fallacy).

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Photo courtesy of Elijah Manor.

Considerably less true for Internet Explorer 9 (a.k.a. “IE who-gives-a-crap”), but the damage has been done, especially if W3Counter’s browser usage trend stats are accurate:

Click to see at full size.

That’s why I wrote way back when I worked there: “Any fool can evangelize Apple or Google. It takes a rock star, ninja and Jedi master all rolled into one to be an evangelist for Microsoft.”

Click the picture to see it at full size.

Funny because it’s true.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.