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January 2021 Kadro eCommerce Insights Newsletter
- By Chris Cowles
- Feb 5, 2021
The team at Kadro received some exciting news this month from Clutch, the internationally-renowned B2B rating and review platform. Kadro was named one of North Carolina’s top e-commerce developers for 2020. Clutch praised Kadro's e-commerce strategy, consulting, design, and development expertise! According to Clutch and their research, amongst all providers in North Carolina, Kadro is consistently one of the best!
Website: www.seadek.com TO READ THE FULL STORY VISIT THE SEADEK PORTFOLIO PAGE ON THE KADRO WEBSITE AND TAKE A LOOK AT THEIR CURRENT WEBSITE.
Technology Partner of the MonthBraintree provides the global commerce tools people need to build businesses, accept payments, and enable commerce for their users. Braintree permits the use of many payment methods including alternative payment methods such as PayPal, Venmo, ApplePay and GooglePay. With Braintree and Magento 2, merchants get comprehensive payment options to allow customers to pay via their preferred method, the potential for more mobile revenue via a fast, simple checkout process, robust fraud protection & PCI compliance, and expansive global reach via a network of more than 300 million active consumers (Paypal 2020 Q2 data).
Turbo Boost Your Magento Website with Site Analysis & Optimization Services (SAOS) from Kadro
Site running slow? Inconsistent performance? Need a partner who has the expertise to improve your website's performance? We can audit your website environment and propose solutions to your site’s functionality and performance woes.
Say hello to Allison Holadia, Customer Support Specialist at KadroThe famed football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “It takes months to find a customer… second to lose one.” This statement has been validated by volumes of survey data over the years and I suppose a bit of common business sense as well. It’s surely true that customers quit doing business with a company due to bad experiences and thus businesses must approach every support interaction as an opportunity to delight or displease. Good customer support starts with the human touch, often boosted by a dose of technology. It's reinforced by the understanding that customer support/service is the cornerstone of the business and the foundation of the customer experience. It is with this brief preface that we introduce Allison Holadia, Kadro’s Customer Support Specialist. Like many at Kadro, Allison has been with the company for quite a few years now. She started in 2007 after leaving the eCommerce Department at a long-time Kadro customer (the first customer actually), REEDS Jewelers. Given her familiarity with Kadro and its services, Allison was a natural fit. Also like others in the company, Allison wears many hats. No literally, she has lots of hats and wears them. But she also “wears lots of hats” when it comes to her role at Kadro. Knowing the customer and their website(s) reinforces the support process… Allison has been an integral part of many new website launches and upgrades over the years. Regardless of the project size, Allison considered each to be a major project. "It’s exciting to be part of a new website project from start to finish," mentioned Allison. A current project Allison is participating in is the new Hungry Harvest project. She is the QA lead on this website, so she’s responsible for all aspects of testing. Being part of the QA testing team allows Allison to get to know the new website in great detail. This familiarity spills over to other types of website projects like upgrades which typically include the addition of new features and functionality. When support issues come up, it really helps to have this hands-on familiarity with both the customer and their website which adds context and relevance to the support request or issue. Great people meeting an array of business and technological support challenges… Kadro really is a place full of great people. The staff exhibits a true team attitude which makes working at the company a very positive experience. Everyone is always willing to help and teach others when needed. And no day is ever the same. For Allison, each day’s course is charted by the variety of support issues and new website feature requests received. These make each day unique providing her and other team members with a new sets of challenges to meet and more interesting projects to undertake. She can go the distance… in the long run… (and swim and cycling) Outside the office, Allison’s hobby and favorite interest (other than her 2 kids of course) is training and competing in triathlons. She has competed in multiple sprint triathlons, as well as many half and full marathons. She has competed in three half Ironman’s (70.3 miles) and finished her first full Ironman last year (140.6 miles). For those not familiar with what an Ironman competition is, it’s an endurance multi-sport race consisting of swimming, cycling, and running over various distances. But 140.6 miles? Really? Now that’s impressive! With the physical and mental demands of competing in endurance events, it’s not surprising that Allison spends a great deal of her spare time participating in swimming, biking and running training. Should you have the occasion to be on the phone or emailing support at Kadro, you’ll likely have the opportunity to communicate with Allison. If you do, take a minute to ask how her training and competing is coming along. Magento 2.4 - packed with great enhancements to make the customer experience even betterMagento is a powerful, flexible, reliable and popular commerce platform used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. And the latest version of Magento adds to this legacy with great new features for both B2C and B2B eCommerce and omni-channel merchants. Here a peek at just a few.
There's so much more. Contact a Kadro representative to learn more about Magento 2.4 and how it can help make your vision for selling online a reality!
Recent Blog Posts* Retail reimagined: New shoppers, new habits, big opportunity * BOPIS – Spicy Filipino dish or eCommerce business strategy? * What is one of the biggest challenges to running a successful eCommerce store? * Your eCommerce Store Customers Want This! Coming Soon!More informative blog posts! Stay tuned for future announcements. |
Kadro conducted a thorough discovery session with the Weekends Only team to identify and prioritize each of the on-going issues and challenges they faced with operating their new eCommerce site. That resulted in multiple development and build cycles to address the open issues and to achieve stability for their online business.
Website: www.weekendsonly.com
Subsequent to the site stabilization phase of this project, Kadro developed many more features and functionality for Weekends Only.
With consistent sales growth experienced over the years, Weekends Only is proud to hold a place in Furniture Today’s list of Top 100 U.S. Furniture Stores.
TO READ THE FULL STORY VISIT THE WEEKENDS ONLY PORTFOLIO PAGE ON THE KADRO WEBSITE.
Daniel’s Kadro story began in 2004, a mere three years after the company’s founding. He has the distinction of being the first student accepted into the company as part of Kadro’s participation in the Cooperative Education Program at NC State University. The University-sponsored Cooperative Education program permits students to work multiple work-terms in a relevant field to their major to gain first-hand experience in the workforce. Kadro still participates in this meaningful program (see our co-op web page) to this day and routinely retains a number of Computer Science co-op students on rotation during each of the Spring, Summer and Fall school terms. Needless to say, Daniel completed his studies at NC State and earned a BS degree in Computer Science.
Reflecting back to those days in the Co-Op Program, Daniel shared his feelings about the experience. “I've enjoyed watching that program grow from 1 student per semester to the 17 we had this summer. And yes Kadro does hire former co-ops, at least 5 in the last year in fact.
Skip forward 16 years and you’ll still find Daniel in the offices of Kadro (well less so at the moment due to COVID restrictions), but now as Vice President of Operations. Along the way he’s held a number of positions like Software Engineer and Director of Engineering. One could say that he is a living testament to what hard work, perseverance, dedication and smarts can do to help propel a career from student to executive. Keep this in mind you NC State students thinking about participating in the Cooperative Education Program. It can be a great stepping stone to future long-term career success.
WHAT DOES A VP OF OPERATIONS DO AT KADRO?
Wear many hats! Basically this means doing whatever is needed to complete customer eCommerce projects in a timely and efficient manner. The role most definitely extends beyond what would classically be considered operations.
For the last several months, Daniel was focused on delivering petedge.com You can read more about that project in the July 2020 edition of Kadro eCommerce Insights newsletter and also check out the work on their Portfolio page on the Kadro website.
On a broader scale, Daniel continues to help manage a variety of projects, deliverables and resources. He has championed software engineering best practices and code reuse, architected an array of software solutions and helped to improve customer website performance. And he piloted the development of Kadro’s Marketplace Manager product offering.
Given his many years in the company and expertise in software engineering, it's not very surprising that Daniel is also an integral part of the company's interview and hiring process. As we said, he wears many hats.
WHAT DOES DANIEL FIND PARTICULARLY REWARDING ABOUT HIS TIME AT KADRO?
The variety of technical and business challenges the company gets to solve for its customers and of course the many talented people that work here. They are a dedicated team of developers with a passion for problem solving in what most describe as a relaxed, fun environment. “It’s great to have seen Kadro grow from around 10 people to the current 60,” Daniel remarked.
WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE WORLD OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SINCE THE EARLY DAYS?
The programming languages and technologies have certainly changed a number of times. Yet at the end of the day, our success is all about helping solve customer’s challenges with whatever tools and technologies are at our disposal.
BEYOND THE OFFICE
Daniel “wears a number of hats” outside the office as well. He’s a big Formula 1 racing fan (me too!), enjoys watching the NFL and gets in a few rounds of golf as time permits. And when he’s not doing all of that, you may find him out walking with his wife, kids and puppy, a 6 month old sheepadoodle named Finn.
More informative blog posts! Stay tuned for future announcements.
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Uno Alla Volta means "one at a time." It’s a meaningful way to describe the products and collectibles designed and handcrafted by artisans throughout the world that are available for purchase on the Uno Alla Volta eCommerce marketplace. The artisans making the products sold by Uno Alla Volta use techniques and technologies that are both old and new – some passed down through the generations, others more modern and newly developed.
The Uno Alla Volta vision is “to bring the human connection into every interaction with every customer, artisan, co-worker, and supplier – thereby enriching their lives. By so doing, we enrich each of our own lives as well.” This vision manifests itself in the Uno Alla Volta storefront, a place that provides handcrafted fashion and designer accessories, home decor, kitchen, decorative glass, and pottery sold to consumers across the globe.
The Uno Alla Volta story is one filled with the essence of craftsmanship and the joy of human spirit. Learn more about it at About Uno Alla Volta https://www.unoallavolta.com/about-us.
Back in early 2019, Uno Alla Volta was facing a number of business and technical challenges. The initial implementation of their Magento Commerce website by a previous partner did not meet the company’s expectations. The website had ongoing performance and reliability issues which negatively impacted their eCommerce business.
Uno Alla Volta hired Kadro to assess and improve their eCommerce solution on Magento Commerce. The project direction and goals became clear quite quickly. Reorient the site's implementation to a Magento-standard approach, stabilize the website’s implementation and in so doing return the company’s eCommerce business to a path of growth that supports their customer base.
So the team at Kadro got to work and within a few short months was ready to implement a revised and stabilized Uno Alla Volta website. Looking back from today, one can say that the project goals were achieved. The site is now more stable, updates for minor and major Magento upgrades are less costly, the site's content is easier to manage, and the site search experience is greatly improved.
Gorgias provides helpdesk solutions for eCommerce helping merchants transform their customer service from a cost center into a profit generator. With Gorgias, online merchants can provide enhanced, personalized, customer experiences based on data from their Magento eCommerce platform. The system provides the ability to create rules-based automated responses to repetitive customer questions which saves valuable support agent time. And the system uses advanced machine learning to detect the intents and sentiments of customer messages which helps merchants set priorities and categorize tickets based on what they're about. Learn more by visiting the Gorgias website.
Quality assurance, perhaps not the most glamorous sounding occupation, yet none is more essential to the success of software development and implementation projects. After all, it is quality assurance professionals that ensure a company meets their clients' expectations by making certain software builds, in this case Commerce websites, are thoroughly tested from top to bottom and are in-line with the company’s quality standards, customer’s requirements and overall project deliverables.
Enter Karen Abrams, Kadro’s Software Quality Assurance Engineer
Karen is both a company and industry veteran having worked at Kadro for over 12 years and before that for many years at other well-known technology companies. As such, Karen has worked on just about every project that has come through the door at Kadro - testing almost all of them. Aristotle reportedly once said, “Quality is not an act. It is a habit.” Karen is in the habit of ensuring quality in the websites Kadro engineers for its clients. That’s why she is in charge of QA for the entire company. Of her role she states “I never thought about a QA job, but it's perfect for me.”
What does it take to be a successful quality assurance engineer?
How does Karen match up against these success criteria?
Pretty well we’d say! After all, academically she was her high school’s valedictorian and she followed that up rather nicely with what we’ll call triple success at the collegiate level by earning a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University. Why triple success? She did it with a triple major in electrical engineering, computer science and math. Now that’s impressive! Always one to keep the acquisition of knowledge at the forefront, Karen is also a Adobe Certified Expert - Magento Commerce Business Practitioner which obviously comes in handy given her involvement in all those Magento website projects for Kadro customers. May need a bigger business card though to fit that one in.
Change will do you good
Karen has seen her share of change over the years as Kadro matured from a company located in a small office off Old Wake Forest Drive in Raleigh, with barely 10 people, a handful of projects, and a ping pong table (a useful outlet for finding inspiration and channeling frustration) to what she describes as the present first-class office space on Corporate Center Drive where the company is headquartered now. It’s a company that has grown to a staff of over 60 people (all U.S. based) and more projects than she’d care to count.
When asked about what she likes about Kadro, Karen mentioned a few things. First on the list, the respectful environment. “Anytime I say something, it's taken seriously and acted on quickly (unlike with children or the ex)”. Ah, she has a sense of humor as well. Other things she particularly likes, “My smart, dedicated, hard-working coworkers and being able to work from home occasionally (pre-Covid era) and full-time now.”
Outside of the office, Karen pursues her long-time interest in Genealogy, a subject that continues to gain widespread attention, and she keeps up-to-date on the world of finance by listening to financial podcasts on a daily basis, plus she’s an avid reader - historical fiction about women is a favorite.
Your eCommerce Store Customers Want This!
More informative blog posts and an eBook! Stay tuned for future announcements.
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I have heard the noise from other system integrators;
I must admit it, I do not get it. The single greatest achievement for Magento 2 Commerce is the introduction of the cloud infrastructure. I am serious. Yes, the code architecture is vastly improved and the growth in content management is fantastic. Magento 2 is across the board a vast improvement over Magento 1. Yet, none of it compares to Magento Commerce Cloud.
So why all the push back?
Why are some resisting?
Why would anyone not recommend Commerce Cloud versus self-hosted?
Yes there are times a customer has unique requirements that requires on-premise hosting. Other times customers want their own IT staff to manage their servers. Those customers will never use Commerce Cloud. Everyone else should be using Commerce Cloud.
When the choice is up to us on what to recommend to a customer, we choose Commerce Cloud every time. No question. All we have to do is look at our Magento customer base and document the hosting related issues we have encountered in the last two years to understand anything besides Cloud is simply not the best choice.
Hosting and environment problems stink. There is always urgency. There is always finger pointing. No-one is happy. Customers push back on those large bills to address hosting emergencies. Anyone who has been responsible for an e-commerce site has experienced this pain. Here's the proof in the proverbial pudding:
15% of Magento clients are not on Commerce Cloud. They represent 90% of the hosting issues we have to deal with!
The problems are numerous and span the entire hosting spectrum. Here are just a few:
Some hosting providers don't understand Magento at all and others have "experts". Unfortunately, those experts are rarely involved until you have gone through multiple tiers of support and a problem remains unresolved. Our customers still call us first when there is a problem. They may be paying for hosting company support, but they rely on us because we are more responsive and are capable of determining if the issue is hosting or application related. For us, the hosting companies simply don't provide much value. We spend much of our time explaining to the providers why what they are suggesting doesn't even make sense (they almost always want to upgrade hardware/software before they really understand what the root cause of the issue is).
Before you think that my system engineering team just stinks, a number of these issues are from inherited projects from other system integrators that are clearly not following Magento's best practices. That tells me one of the very things that Commerce Cloud was created to address over Magento 1 is still happening in Magento 2. Outside of the Commerce Cloud, Magento SIs are still getting it wrong.
Commerce Cloud is of course not perfect. No hosting is. We have experienced a few issues and had some miscommunications. Yet we are on the same team, Kadro and Magento, working together for our joint customer and have worked it out every single time. When Magento published that they had no system downtime during the holiday season, that should have been a wake up call for the doubters. I know we experienced NO system issues during the holidays from any of our clients on Magento Cloud, NONE!. It was amazing. To be honest I was in a bit of disbelief ... but how wonderful. This is the future and the future is now.
Why is Magento Commerce Cloud the right solution for you? Here a few reasons why we believe Magento Commerce Cloud is the right solution for hosting your Magento solution.
Magento's reputation is on the line, they know it and act accordingly. Magento has demonstrated to us that they are committed to ensuring that customers' sites perform well. The commitment extends well beyond the initial configuration. Magento monitors your system to:
Something we have never experienced before. Magento Commerce Cloud won't allow you to deploy your site to an undersized environment. Magento Commerce Cloud won't configure an environment that is not sufficient. Your key site metrics (peak page views, transactions, concurrent users, concurrent admin users, etc.) are factored into the resources you will need to have a performant system. Hosting companies ask you want you want, Magento Commerce Cloud educates you what you need.
Unlike any other hosting provider, the Commerce Cloud team know and understand the complete Magento environment infrastructure. They are experts in configuring Magento. They know and have implemented Magento best practices. Your site will not be a snowflake, it will follow the proven server architecture to achieve the best performance for your site.
Each Commerce Cloud setup includes a production and a staging environment. The staging environment runs the same services and software that the production environment does. This allows site changes to be fully vetted before pushing to production.
Getting access to the servers is simple. No special VPN clients required. Add a user through the web portal and assign them a role. Developers and support staff need only an SSH key and they can be accessing environments in minutes.
In addition to have a staging environment that mirrors production for quality assurance and user acceptance testing, Magento provides a docker setup so that your development team can also develop in the same environment as the code will eventually be deployed in, eliminating unfound errors during deployment because of mismatched environments.
Magento Commerce Cloud makes it very simple to copy an upper environment down into a lower environment or to spin up a new environment based on an existing one. Want to do some testing with the latest production data, no problem. Want to give a 3rd-party developer access to their own environment to track down an issue with their code or service, no problem.
Part of the Magento Commerce Cloud package is a set number of days that Magento will upsize your environment during peak usage periods. You can even have Magento auto-upsize your environment when they determine that resources are being maxed out. Whether it be for the holiday season at the end of the calendar year, on specific catalog drops throughout the year, or the end of the government's fiscal year, your environment can be increased to handle the server load you know is coming.
Magento Commerce Cloud bundles in a rich suite of services to help ensure your site reaches its optimal performance. Fastly manages your SSL certificates, your web application firewall, and your CDN. New Relic provides in-depth performance analysis of the entire application stack. Blackfire allows you to debug site issues directly on production without negatively impacting your running site.
Magento Commerce Cloud makes pushing new builds to a server environment easy. A simple GIT push installs new code and initiates a complete rebuild of the environment.
Sites on Magento Commerce Cloud follow best practices for performance and security.
Magento Commerce Cloud is fairly new. The tools and configurations available today have improved since initial launch. Magento is committed to continuing to improve what is already the best solution for customers.
As a Magento System Integrator we work with clients through the entire life cycle of their site: project inception, site build, ongoing site maintenance and so forth. Our roots have always been in software development. It is what we love. Our core team of software engineers is an elite group of e-commerce and web development experts.
When we first forayed into Magento seven years ago we didn't fully appreciate the hosting nightmare we were walking to. There seemed to be no standards on how a Magento site was hosted. We started our practice by inheriting existing Magento sites as many system integrators do. What was amazing is that every site we encountered was its own snowflake. There were so many possibilities and it seemed that everyone was trying a bit of everything without clear direction.
There were different flavors of UNIX, different branches of PHP, different web servers, different MySQL variations, different caching strategies, and on and on. We investigated a number of hosting providers that claimed to have just the right configuration for Magento sites, except we also inherited clients on those same providers that were struggling with performance and security. We also read a number of published white papers on Magento hosting providing contradictory recommendations.
We realized that we needed to figure this out for ourselves. So while hosting had always been an afterthought for our business it was now front and center. We grew a systems engineering team, hired new employees and transitioned other engineers into this effort. We documented all of our clients, and their unique configurations. We began to establish our own "solution" to hosting Magento.
We then found ourselves in the same place our clients did focussing on efforts that were not our core business. Magento merchants find system integrators because software development and maintenance is not their core business. Clients want to focus on the essence of their business, not the technology to make it happen. Here we were in a very precarious spot, a software development company now being burdened with hosting, unix environments, server management and collating a set of services/programs to run a Magento sites.
In comes the savior Magento Commerce Cloud. A solution provided by Magento to fully manage environments, security, hosting and content delivery. A true hosting solution implemented with all of the best practices, leveraging powerful integrated services and run by the people that know Magento best - Magento!.
Custom build scripts for each customer ... gone.
Server setup and maintenance ... gone.
Picking and testing the right solution set (web server, caching, CDN) ... gone.
Managing unique security requirements for clients ... gone.
Convincing clients of the importance of aligned production and staging instances ... gone.
The pain of setting up additional environments for testing ... gone.
For us, no longer did we need all of the system engineers. Our software developers that were constantly distracted by system configurations, they are back to developing.
With Magento Commerce Cloud we are back to being who we are ... software developers. The increased focus has allowed us to do more and be more for our clients. It is no coincidence the rise of Magento Commerce Cloud parallels the growth of my company.