Inform(procrastin)ation

2010/01/24 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Random Ramblings 

‘Tis a wonderfully informational, digitally connected world out there, no doubt. The joys of accessing one’s computer and see what the tech world has got to offer and how the various social media are buzzing with business. Being involved in a major ecommerce project now, keeping myself busy with programming on the one hand and supervising the project on the other (which is, at any rate, somewhat of a no-go as I was informed last night), these things however don’t really seem to matter that much.

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The power of the landline?

2010/01/17 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Random Ramblings 

Yet again finding myself in a situation where my phone and internet provider has managed to kill my landline phone connection, I began to think about how important the latter really is for my day-to-day business dealings. read more

Nexus One: Google goes eCommerce

2010/01/06 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Google, Mobile Commerce 

There has been a lot of speculation about Google’s upcoming mobile phone, last night it was officially presented: the Google phone is real and can be ordered directly from their website. As interesting as I find this new gadget and would like to play with it once it comes to Europe, what’s even more remarkable about Google’s latest move is the fact that they enter the business of retailing physical goods.

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Magento Beginner’s Guide

2009/12/23 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Magento, Reviews 

A while ago, Packt Publishing asked me to write a review of their Magento Beginner’s Guide written by William Rice, and finally I’ve found the time to have a go at it and write a couple of lines about the 300 page eBook version (there’s also a paperback version for sale). read more

About eCommerce SEO

2009/12/18 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: SEO, eCommerce 

Over at Searchengineland I came across a longer article that is well worth a read. It is talking about what to concentrate on when trying to optimise a webstore for search engines. The author identifies the product detail page as the pivot of each optimisation strategy and also talks about how budget invested into on-site search is money well-spent.

Google reinventing itself: Implications for eCommerce?

2009/12/09 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Google, eCommerce 

In the past few days, Google has made some interesting announcements, the most interesting of which in my opinion are real-time search and the personalised search results. I was wondering whether these changes have any implications on eCommerce and would like to share these thoughts here.

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Google Analytics gets annotation feature

2009/12/08 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Web Analytics 

These days, Google’s popular analytics suite gets some flak here in Germany because of data protection concerns, some even claim it to be illegal. And while German courts are discussing whether IP addresses can or cannot be counted as personalised data, Google Analytics got a new feature. As is explained in the embedded video, business users are now able to add annotations to the Analytics graphs in order to keep track of notable developments in the site visits.

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(via Mashable)

About an eCommerce roadtrip

2009/11/29 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Conferences, Magento, Random Ramblings 

There seems to be a new secret capital of everything Magento-related in Germany, and that – lo and behold – is Hannover. So, when I got to know about an event called Conventioncamp and heard that it took place in Hannover, I knew I had to be there. Which, in hindsight, was not one of my worst decisions. The event was themed „The Future of the Internet“ and was dedicated to social media, ecommerce and online-marketing.

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Major eTailers: Ready for the iPhone?

2009/11/20 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Mobile Commerce 

Recently I was wondering how major webstores present themselves on Apple’s iPhone. After a quick look-around I found a Top10 list of retailers in the States and had a look at how their webstores can be browsed via a mobile device. (Of course, this is not a well-founded, scientifically correct procedure – the list might still be arbitrary and I simply haven’t got any other mobile device than an iPhone, but I hope to at least get an idea of how major etailers present themselves in the mobile space.)

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The OS debate: Does it really matter?

2009/11/18 by Roman Zenner
Posted in: Magento, Random Ramblings 

A sure sign of an Open Source project’s coming of age is when advocates of commercial software start a debate in the course of which spreading FUD is only one strategy. On the other side, OS champions almost religiously defend the open approach to software development. More, depending on how you look at it, it’s either David vs. Goliath or  Dinosaurs vs. Star Trek. A recent example of this was the panel at Meet Magento in Frankfurt (see this short summary of the event). During the past couple of days I thought a lot about the motives involved and I would like to take a couple of minutes to talk about if this type of OS vs. commercial software controversy does not miss the point. For the sake of the argument, let’s pretend for a while the open/closed paradigm did not exist.
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