The JetRails Podcast

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

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.

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

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

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

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/

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/

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

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

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

According to Cloudflare, Tiktok became The #1 most visited domain in 2021, surpassing even Google.com. Are you advertising to consumers through Tiktok yet? Have you been comparing it to other platforms, like Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and Reddit? Are you still primarily focused on Google Ads or Facebook/Instagram Ads? Are you relying on influencers or affiliates to help fuel your growth? In this episode, we get an insider look at which platforms and strategies are driving eCommerce advertising success, and why. Guests: - Ned Gallop, LevitateFoundry.com - Miles Bodie, LevitateFoundry.com Host: - Robert Rand, JetRails.com

Most eCommerce merchants start off advertising through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, but those are pretty saturated networks. In this episode, we talk about opportunities to make direct media buys with audio and video streaming services, podcasts, and other highly-targeted platforms. If you've wondered where else you could or should be advertising your online store, this episode will help you understand how you can pay less to market to your audience while catching the right consumers at the right time and place. Guest: Adam Casole-Buchanan, BriefBid.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com Companies Adam mentioned in this episode include: - Cluep - Vengo - iHeart Radio - Spotify - Brave - OceanHero

As the holiday shopping season continues, hopefully, you're enjoying a nice code freeze along with some great weather. What better time to cozy up with a mug of hot cocoa and a podcast episode all about the next frontier of site speed optimization! Caching static site elements with a CDN is already commonplace - it's crucial to your site's overall performance. However, you can now take edge caching a step further. Instead of calling "home" to your main hosting servers for dynamic content like product/sale prices, or even personalized content experiences, you can cache dynamic site elements at the edge. We dive into this, and more, in this episode about next-gen Edge technology that can improve your bottom line. Guest: Subbu Varadarajan, Zycada.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com Special Note: Zycada is currently offering an extended free trial for active JetRails users. Contact your dedicated account manager at JetRails for more info.

On just about every episode of our podcast, our guests describe different ways for merchants to improve an eCommerce store's bottom line. Few tell us that they can come anywhere close to generating a 5x increase in eCommerce sales, which makes this episode especially intriguing. While we may be biased about businesses that have "Jet" in their name, we still asked this guest tough questions about live chat. This episode delves into best practices for staffing, dealing with upset shoppers, avoiding chat-operator burnout, and more! Guest: Mike Christie, JetSpring.com Host: Robert Rand JetRails.com

eCommerce stores are in the data business. Data helps with everything from forecasting sales and stocking products, to understanding profit margins on items and optimizing the online shopping experience. In this episode, Nick shares his wisdom from his years at Etsy and Jet, and from his role as CEO of DAS42. Learn about common data analysis challenges that your business should watch out for and best practices that you should be benefiting from. Guest: Nick Amabile, DAS42.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com

Marketing to eCommerce shoppers is similar to attracting consumers to brick and mortar stores, but it's not the same thing. When someone visits a physical store, they're exhibiting a stronger intent to make a purchase. Online shoppers are often earlier in the researching process. That means that treating every ad click like it's going to convert into a sale can be a costly mistake. In this episode, Robert and Brendan discuss how to properly balance your marketing to (1) attract new shoppers, (2) educate them, and (3) ultimately help them decide to make a purchase. They go farther by sharing insights on balancing campaigns across different advertising platforms, like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube... and dealing with the challenge of optimizing marketing spends based on which platforms and campaigns are actually delivering the best results - including return on ad spend (ROAS). Guest: Brendan Hughes, Optily.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com Additional Resources: Get a free copy of Brendan's book "Accelerate eCommerce Growth, A Proven Framework to Scaling Your eCommerce Business with Digital Advertising": https://www.optily.com/accelerate-ecommerce-growth-with-digital-advertising/ For a limited time, take advantage of a free consultation from Optily, and a special discount offer for fans of The JetRails Podcast: https://www.optily.com/your-expert-companion-in-digital-ads-jr/ Looking for a quicker read on eCommerce funnels? Check out https://jetrails.com/blog/ecommerce-funnels/

Some businesses have complex order fulfillment systems. Others rely on succinct solutions to problems like splitting orders. Why split orders? Maybe you'll be fulfilling an order from multiple stores or warehouses. Maybe you want to split an order between in-stock items, and back-ordered items. Perhaps items need to be shipped separately or uniquely, such as oversized items. This may all sound obvious, but just because it's logical, doesn't make it simple. Not all eCommerce businesses have the same needs or requirements. This is a great example of how Magento Extensions can greatly improve business efficiencies and customer satisfaction, without dependencies on 3rd party SaaS solutions. Guest: Rajneesh Vyas, SunArcTechnologies.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com Resources mentioned in this episode: https://marketplace.magento.com/partner/sunarctech

Every year, more eCommerce businesses are bought and sold. At the same time, many owners find themselves unable to find the right buyer in order to achieve their goals. In this episode, we discussed what you can do in order to set your eCommerce business up for an eventual successful acquisition. We also discussed common mistakes, pitfalls, and oversights that even seasoned entrepreneurs can miss fall prey to. Guest: Joe Valley, Quiet Light Brokerage Author of The Exitpreneur's Playbook: How to sell your online business for top dollar by reverse engineering your pathway to success. https://exitpreneur.io/playbook/ Host: Robert Rand, JetRails

Apple's iOS15 is going to severely limit the amount of data marketers receive regarding if emails are opened by their recipients. Digital marketers need to be prepared for this shift in data availability. More importantly, they'll need to consider which metrics to look at in order to best optimize campaigns, including campaigns for eCommerce merchants that rely on e-mail to keep shoppers engaged with their brands. Guest: Jon Pruitt, Omnisend.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com Resources mentioned in this episode: https://opensaredead.com/ https://lp.wizarddigital.com/corewebvitalsebook

Consumers open their text messages. Their e-mails... maybe... maybe not. This leads eCommerce merchants toward a crossroads. Treat SMS like the 3rd rail, or embrace it while making sure to treat this communication channel with the respect that shoppers demand. Most of us get text messages or push notifications from major brands regarding our order/delivery status, along with other valuable info. What if you added dimensionality to SMS, allowing shoppers to respond to your texts and get answers, delivering conversational commerce experiences? Catch the episode to learn what the future of eCommerce communications looks like. Guest: Rev Reddy, VoyageSMS.com Host: Robert Rand, JetRails.com