GraphQL is hot these days! More and more GraphQL APIs appear and especially in the Javascript / NodeJS scene, GraphQL is extremely popular. As progressive web applications using GraphQL are also on the rise (not only in the e-commerce area), we compare how GraphQL and the JSON REST API standard fits for e-commerce applications based on our experience in these areas:
The most important changes in the Aimeos 2019.07 release are:
Every online shop needs to send e-mails and so the Aimeos e-commerce framework does. They are still the best option to confirm the order and tell customers about changes in the delivery and payment status. Nevertheless, even nowadays, creating appealing e-mails for different devices is hard stuff! Software seem to be from year 2000 when comparing support for HTML5 and CSS in e-mail clients.
Most of the time, support is limited for security reasons which is a good thing because compared to web sites you have to visit actively, everyone can send you e-mails. But often, simple features aren’t implemented since more than ten years or are buggy and therefore unusable. Outlook falls into the later category and it seems that Microsoft wants to punish us forever!
The term e-commerce framework is related to software frameworks for e-commerce applications. They offer an environment for building e-commerce applications quickly.
E-Commerce frameworks are flexible enough to adapt them to your specific requirements. As result, they are suitable for building virtually all kinds of online shops and e-commerce related (web) applications like the Aimeos e-commerce framework does.
Der Term E-Commerce Framework bezieht sich auf Software-Frameworks für E-Commerce Applikationen. Sie ermöglichen es in relativ kurzer Zeit komplette E-Commerce Applikationen zu bauen.
E-Commerce Frameworks sind flexibel genug um sie an kundenspezifische Anforderungen anzupassen. Dadurch können sie als Basis für praktisch alle Arten von Onlineshops und E-Commerce bezogene (Web-)Applikationen dienen, wie beispielsweise das Aimeos E-Commerce Framework.
The stable 2019.04 release contains some major improvements:
Aimeos has recently proven to be capable of handling one billion articles and more in an online shop using the #gigacommerce extension. This is far more than the number of articles at the Amazon market place which is currently estimated by around 562 million items. But the sheer numbers doesn’t say anything about the performance so how fast can Aimeos delivery content when users browsing the shop pages?
Read more #gigacommerce – Aimeos shop performance with 1 billion items
The new beta version contains a lot of improvements and focuses on:
Does an online shop with 1 billion items work on a standard cloud server? And that even with the demand for very low response times? We investigated this question during the #gigacommerce project.
The #gigacommerce setup contains 1 billion articles, which are combined into 10 million products. Each item contains attributes, images, prices and text like in any online store. The basis is a Symfony, Laravel and TYPO3 installation with the Aimeos E-Commerce extension, which access an ElasticSearch server.
All three frontends have been extensively tested to find out where the limits are. The Aimeos components showed that they scale almost infinitely, with response times of around 100 milliseconds. Interestingly, the only absolute limit in the tests was not the available hardware, but the network bandwidth, which was used up at over 600 PI/second. This makes it particularly interesting for peak load situations and TV advertising.
Read more #gigacommerce – Scalable online shops with 1 billion items and more
Content commerce, the fusion of editorial content and e-commerce, is a growing area gaining more and more importance for businesses.
We have been on the first European Content Commerce Summit in Leipzig (Germany) for two days spotting the latest trends and and held a session about Aimeos as solution for integrating content and e-commerce to interested participants.
The offered sessions had a wide range of topics, from the very interesting talk from Danny Nauth about the secrets of successful content based on the experience of neural marketing, over content along the customer journey by Kai Wermer and the importance of the right content for SEO by Markus Hoevener to tops and flops in content commerce projects by Hannes Richter from Projecter.
Roman Zenner had some bad luck with the beamer but used that problem as a smart excuse for having no presentation at all 😉
To sum up: A really cool event for everyone interested in all aspects of content and e-commerce!
