Test test test!

Why do we (royal we) spend so much time arguing over the minute details on websites, pages, page sections and even at the level of individual images? We (again, all of us) must have spent hours in the past, to-ing and fro-ing over the meeting room table offering (forcing!) opinions based on feel and subjective judgement...sometimes even based on experience!

It takes a lot of time though. Not everyone comes up with the right answer every time. What is the right answer though? Well, logically, it's what your customers/users say is the right answer. Your customers will tell you the right answer by voting with their hard cash. Thing is, investing in change can be risky and expensive.

Bringing an end to the long meeting room wrangles, mitigating risk and justifying ROI before hand is actually easier than you might think...mostly ;-)

Moneyspyder has invested serious amounts of time tailoring our unique Rails based e-commerce platform to cater for A/B split and multivariate testing using the Google Website Optimiser coupled with our in house analytics capabilities and Google Analytics.

We have run multiple experiments using the A/B, multivariate and multivariate A/B models (yup, all different models). We have tuned the platform to enable rapid test rollout and enhanced reporting for all our clients. This is a key feature of the platform - enabling all clients on the platform to benefit from enhancements made to the core 'flexshop' product.

So, now, rather than chew over contentious details ad nauseum, we take the option that saves time and money and gets the right result every time...it's not always the result you expect but it is the answer that is given directly by your customers SO LISTEN TO THEM!!!

All together now, 'TEST TEST TEST'!

Happy testing ;-)

Moneyspyder launches a new site for Babyetc

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new site - Baby Etc - feel free to check out the details on our
Press Release.

Why EngineYard?

We get frequent questions about our hosting strategy:

• Why not host yourself?
  
• Why host in the US?
  
• What's so good about EngineYard?

Here's a really good interview with Tom (EY CTO) and Lance (EY CEO) discussing the answers to the questions above and more.

A good interview and a great indication as to why we work so closely with EngineYard.

Moneyspyder - who, what? Why are you so good?

Yes, what is the big thing about Moneyspyder?

Well...

First of all, we are using Ruby on Rails as the core of our technology offering. It's still considered new and therefore cool! Yes, cool for technical folk but the end result is certainly considered cool by our clients. I'll explain:

A core strength of Rails is its support for rapid development and an Agile approach - ho hum, that old spiel again. Yes but with a twist. We enable our clients to play to our strengths you see. We have a core set of Internet retail site components on which we can build custom specialist functionality very quickly and to a very high quality.

What's at the core then?

• Users


• Products


• Variants


• Categories


• Brands


• Baskets


• Orders


• Payments


• Fulfillment


• Promotions


• Search


• Content Management


• Split Testing


• Analytics


• Gifting

Yup, I think that just about covers what would be considered 'standard' in a web shop. (Do let me know if you think of any more.) Thing is, not all of these components are always going to be required. We can add and remove these components through quick and simple configuration. Not coding - just a config tweak and kazam! Gift wrapping is available. Less time focusing on technology integration - more time focused on client sites performing better month on month with new functionality.

Each component listed above is built as a Rails Engine - a plugin module if you like. Now Rails allows us to drop in a new component really quickly, easily and safely...oh, and we can choose the version we want to use (thanks to Piston)....it could be one of our components or a 3rd party plugin. We pick the one we are happy using and it's pinned at that version until we say otherwise. In summary, our modularity gives us speed, strength, flexibility and reliability. We like these and we know our clients like them too. They tell us. This is certainly a case of pragmatic technology choices doing the required job with little or no techy bling for the sake of techy bling.

Analytics, testing and gathering data is a core feature of the Moneyspyder philosophy. We make sure our framework captures as much data as possible so that we can say with certainty what customers are doing and when. For example, we can see when promotions work. We know the right types of promotions to setup on our clients' sites. We also know that promotional messaging is key to promotion performance. Our promotions module will let customers know how much more they have to spend to secure a 10% discount or free delivery. We call this Promotion Proximity Warning - PPW. It works - we see a clear uplift in both conversion and AOV when PPW is turned on.

Customers think searching is cool - data says so, customers say so. We make sure our search solution fits hand in glove with all our searchable components to maximise conversion on clients' sites. Products, brands, categories, static pages - all indexed and searchable. Our search is not indiscriminate though - it honours archived or pre-live entities. If your new product range is not set to go live just yet - they remain safe from appearing in search results until you say so. Search uses internal tagging to relate products, brands and categories - really handy for automatic intelligent population of related products when trawling through 1000 products and relating them really should be a job for a smart machine. We consider internal SEO to be just as important as external SEO - especially considering the 3x more likely purchase propensity of searching customer over casual browsers.

Well, that's a start. Drop us a line if you want to know more about us...

jRails

Standard Web 2.0 coolness done easily and nicely

As Rails users we are well familiar with script.aculo.us and the Web 2.0 coolness that is pretty much built in to Rails.

Standard Web 2.0 coolness done better

To be frank, our js framework of choice is actually jQuery. We prefer the lighter weight, power and general betterness.

Show stopper?

Thing is, we've found a few negative points of using both jQuery and script.acol.us together:

• Heavier pages due to more libraries




• Slightly mitigated through packing and caching




• Not working nicely together




• Having to use noconflict



• var J = jQuery.noConflict();



• A minor inconvenience really...




• Mixing frameworks is just plain messy

All is not lost

So, we've elected to use jRails. We now use only one js framework resulting in lighter, cleaner and nicer Web 2.0 apps. No changes are required to most .rjs scripts and you still get pretty much all the functionality required from script.aculo.us.

Minor gotcha

We did find a slight omission however. Where script.aculo.us Ajax calls use

loading

to prescribe Ajax loading behaviour, jQuery uses

beforeSend

This is not supported in the current

options_for_ajax

We have been in touch with Aaron and hopefully a fix will be posted...Till then, here's a patch:

options_for_ajax
.
.
.
js_options['beforeSend'] = "function(xhr) {xhr.setRequestHeader('Accept', 'text/javascript'); #{options.delete(:loading)};}"

Of course, if you're using Piston, you'll be fine.

p.s.

More news soon on Moneyspyder's newest clients and work...!

We grow!

We're really happy to announce a new weapon in our armoury: Rowan Cox has joined Moneyspyder. Rowan is essentially a Java guru but has taken to Rails like a duck to water.

Working on one of our skunk works projects (4 to roll out during Q1 '08) at the minute, most of the fruits of Rowan's labours will remain under wraps for now but Rowan will be making major contributions to our core e-commerce engine as well.

Welcome Rowan!

How Moneyspyder increased DC4UK.com's sales 3

Power is nothing without control, flexibility and reliability

Previously I have waxed lyrical about how great it was to be able to control the rate of change on DC4UK.com, to be able to measure, analyse and ultimately act on the effects of these changes. Let's discuss the platform in a bit more detail to see how this flexibility is offered and yet remains coupled to awesome power and reliability.

Platform Choice

If you've had a look at our site, you'll know that our e-commerce platform uses Ruby on Rails. We knew from the outset that the qualities we were looking for in a software platform to fit the Moneyspyder vision were serious flexibility coupled with reliability and speed. In investigating Ruby on Rails it became apparent that the Rails framework was just the right fit and Ruby is quite a nice language to use. The result of this combination is super fast development and really nice software.

Here's a longer paper on why Rails development is so fast. For me, good design (under the hood stuff, not the site visuals) happens a lot easier and therefore faster. The effects of good design are like ripples in a pond - the [good] effects expand outwards and affect all areas of the system but not in terms of any dependencies, more a case of goodness permeating everywhere by default. the same can be said of bad design but that seems to become harder to achieve in Rails...

Our architecture employs a 'base' level shop of core components (plugins in Rails parlance) - baskets, categories, variants, promotions and split tests to name but a few. We choose to employ these base components where appropriate and specialising per client where required. This means we can introduce large pieces of functionality quickly and easily. High cohesion and loose coupling is the computer science ideal situation that our software exhibits

The hosts with the most

A slight nagging doubt was hosting. We needed a partner to 'take the heat', care for the tin and wires and allow us to focus on building and continually improving class leading e-commerce sites. The thing was that Ruby on Rails was pretty new - still is. To our delight we found EngineYard. These guys rock - no argument. Renting slices is just the ticket. It's the right model for so many clients. Who wants to own tin these days? Owning servers in a farm along with the responsibilities that go with a data center is hard, expensive and probably not core to many peoples business. Focus on what you do well and you're off to a great start.

Preparing for a busy XMas sir?

EngineYard's service is just great. We like the ability to seasonally scale the size of each clients environments as demand requires. Capacity planning is facilitated again by our strong use of data. We know when the peaks are likely and scale accordingly.

Currently DC4UK.com emails customer weekly. We are seeing strong levels of response to these emails but even at peak - multiple requests per second - the two production slices are barely breathing. As and when we forecast massive peaks we can choose to scale out (add extra slices) and back (reduce slices) if required. This is a very cost effective e-commerce environment.