Shopware Responds To My Video!

hi guys welcome to this video and in today's video i'm going to be talking to justin biddle he is from shopware and he deals with some of the complaints that are raised in my previous video which i said you know maybe don't install shopware and it addresses some of the concerns that were raised initially by for example features and other things so some things he said were fair criticisms and they'll take them on board and move forward and of course with other things um so i'm going to show you that video now and if you want to enjoy more videos like this like and subscribe now got in subs was because i think there was um we wanted to have a chat with you because as a result of the well the video you posted a few weeks back i i don't know i just clarify clear the air and obviously every man is entitled to his opinions and what about as to what is right and what is wrong and you are as entitled as anyone i always like to think of myself as not entitled but you know no i mean and i mean it's entitled is the wrong word well it's the right word but it's quite often used wrongly and we are all you know we're all allowed you know it's just you know people have different views of different things um people some some people think some things are good and some other things are bad um and also you know when it comes down to it you know we all hear things we hear you know everything is kind of subjective out here if you like and i know what you're trying to do is uh an honorable thing which is to do is to try and bring some measure of objectivity to this this whole thing and that's that's great um and you know i obviously something got your goat uh around shop well someone got some friends of yours go around shopware and what we would love to do uh is ensure that um if there's if there's a if there's a if there's a real problem that we understand it and that therefore we can deal with it if there isn't a real problem that we sort of tell you you know what does exist uh you know what the situation is if you like and and how we normally respond to it and you know that then you can once again make up your own mind as to whether that's good or bad and then form your audience accordingly hopefully that was that's kind of that was my ambition today is to just literally have a chat find out what the hell's going on uh find out um uh you know you know what's what's underlying here and if we can address it great if not and [Laughter] well actually true no well i know what you mean yes of course you would but actually that's part of the secret here and and and you've said that yourself i think in some of your videos is that there's no bad platform out there it's just some platforms are better for some merchants than they are for others um and you know you know depending i have a whole methodology which i hand out to consultants and our agency partners as well which i'm happy to make available to you um which is a kind of a scorecard methodology because i think that for any selection of a platform there are 12 or 13 what i call global criteria that a merchant should take into account you know and that is total cost of ownership how big is the agency infrastructure what's the feature set how extendable is it how what what performance can it deliver relative relevant to me and a bunch of other stuff as well and different platforms rate better on different things and depending on what's the most important how that merchant rate you know weights those different criteria depends on which platforms come to the fore and we don't think we we cannot come to the fall in every situation and and part of kind of you know part of i think delivering a good service to your segment is about understanding what your segment is where you deliver a service and try and deliver a service best you can to that audience yeah absolutely like giving a i mean for example uh it wouldn't be you know that's why i thought this would be a good opportunity to get your side of things because it's only fair for me to listen to let's say one party that's you know wasn't too happy with some things they weren't happy with every uh you know with sure quite a lot of it they did like a lot of it they did have some compliments like the front end runs incredibly fast of course you're using the framework that i love you uh which i have a great endeavor for you've got a good architecture which i complimented in my first video about different marketing plans there's definitely i think you did in your second video too a second video was after that point so it's only fine i think it was into yours the truth is the truth is the second video wasn't entirely negative i mean you know obviously there was there were two things that came out one was the uh the the area of support um and the other one seemed to be around bulk up datas and stuff like that that you thought should be in the platform and i actually truth is i would agree with you um yeah and and yeah there's some questions around those things mainly yeah sure uh and i you know from the bulk up data point of view it's actually in one of the upcoming releases anyway um we'd have i would have loved it you know i've spent a lot of time talking to our partners finding out you know what's you know how we prioritize the roadmap going forward because when you bring out a new product you can't have everything out all you know at the very beginning it kind of has to evolve shopware 6 is actually quite a new product it is something that's developing and evolving all the time both uh from what we deliver in terms of functionality and from what our partners you know and and collaborators in the platform because it's an open source platform as you know uh deliver too you know and you know the strength of our you know what does they say some as you know one of our new employees guy called ben marks said he said um he said you know the funny thing about the about open source uh code coding standards and you know code is that the least exciting thing is the code it's just that's that that isn't the thing that's interesting around it the exciting thing is that is the communities and the collaboration that you you build around that network yeah absolutely and i feel like you know that was one of the main reasons why shopware took my interest was because it was based around that open principle it's got the right kind of architecture um one of my compliments towards the platform definitely is the front end and the back end are reusable and interchangeable and if something like magenta was to come along or any other platform that wants to go fully headless like you guys are then unfortunately a lot of their marketplace code and all that code is so tightly coupled with the back end that they just aren't able to do that because you'd lose all of your marketplace nearly overnight so one of my major questions is from shopware5 to shopware six how as the has there been a drastical change or is there a real step forward how have you progressed through that it's a it's a completely different platform it is they are chalk and cheese um and actually part of the problem we have at the moment um a problem you know part of the issues that that surface that can surface are around expectation that oh it was in shotware 5 surely it's going to be in chopper 6. it worked like this in shotware 5. surely it should work like that in chocolate 6. and that's not the case because actually what we've had to do is redesign a platform from the ground up to deal with what we think are going to be the challenges of e-commerce platforms going forward and that's required and and there are the reasons why we've done that for instance the shop where five had a sort of mishmash of different frameworks that were included in there uh to ins you know to to to to deal with quick coverage of pieces of functionality shortwave sex hasn't done that it's stuck very rigidly to standard symphony why because when you get into open source e-commerce platforms you inevitably get you inevitably open yourself to the possibility of complexity um and one way we can add simplicity to the whole you know keep things simple is to keep to to standards to frameworks sort of rigidly rather than customize those frameworks and that helps us it helps helps agencies train developers and it helps people adopt the platform more quickly um it helps keeps development time down um on on building extensions um it's you know so it it it it takes that simplicity because effectively the way i kind of see the e-commerce market um and i don't know you probably think that the same way is that actually a merchant when they're approaching has to make a fundamental choice between whether or not they optimize for simplicity or whether or not they optimize for flexibility yeah and the guys that go for the simplicity of guys tend to get tend to be the sas platforms obviously and they add flexibility by adding apps and apis and the complexity on the on the flexibility side that tends to be the open source community more often than not um and they add simplicity by these extensions and apps and apis as well because we can standardize things down and through things like coding standards as well so and for me that's that you know that's what the merchant has to do is have to decide where they want us they want to sit on that on that trade-off between simplicity and flexibility because i fundamentally believe it's it's virtually impossible to have well impossible-ish to have both impossible-ish well that doesn't make any sense at all but you know what any word [Laughter] anyway um so i mean let's move into the the main area i think that obviously got your goat was the area of support yeah um and and i think i mean whatever it is is you felt that it was unreasonable that even for our our what we call our free to use our open source platform um that that that people should pay for support is that is that correct no not necessarily it's um obviously support is support so it is a service in which you can charge for and that's how most open source products uh make money so definitely you know charging for support is not unheard of and you know there's nothing wrong with that this particular person that i was talking to was a part of a partnered agency um with yourselves with shopware and he was a developer working on quite a few shopware projects and he was very critical of the the whole thing he said i'm surprised you recommended shopware but i was like it's got a great architecture they've taken this risk in obviously now rebuilding to shopware six and they've done it for you know the good of e-commerce uh that's why i in my first video actually recommended it over magento but the second time was um necessarily at this point he gave me some feedback to say i'm surprised you recommended it because uh they were partnered so i imagine they're paying for the support and so forth um but if they asked any questions sort of outside of kind of certain boundaries they would get a bill um and then i believe he also said that you know with the bulk updating of products as you've addressed this issue uh it's something that you've really wanted but he said that has been in there for such a long time and i was like oh that you know they're going to put it in and it's like but it's been in there for so long um so i guess this is one of the the pitfalls of obviously moving your whole code base over to a new thing but do you think there's any way in which you could potentially improve let's say support so that it's on a tiered system or a categorized system so that you can build up your support packages in a more modular way let me just address two things there's a very big difference between support and service level yeah okay so let's separate those two things first of all shotware supports all its customers whoever it is if there is an issue you have there's an issue tracker system you put the issue tracker in it um if it's surfaced before it you know if it seems important then our developers deal with it there is also developer slack where if developers have issues that they are encountering whether or not they're a partner whether or not they are uh whether or not it's open source or whatever the implementation they can they can put in what they're seeing and and the either the community which is consistent in that channel as well oh did i go you went a little bit there could you back trace maybe 30 seconds surely seconds uh where were we um so uh the first of all there was the issue tracker which i talked about where you know you can put the you can put your issue if you've got an issue put that in there um that is dealt with by our support department so again it's not dependent upon them having a a paid installation at all um obviously it's up to us to decide how quickly we you know we produce the patch for that and it's all about prioritization is it important is it happening for multiple customers whatever it might be um but of course we support the cut that platform because whenever there's a if there's a security issue for instance of course we bring out a patch and that patch is applied for all um um uh additions or you know whether they paid or not uh and when there's updates and features that's but you know quite often that's normally supplied to all to all as well so from that point of view we are supporting on a day-to-day we're evolving it uh if we're seeing issues we're dealing with those issues if we've got security flaws we're dealing with those security flaws and and providing fixes out to our community we also as i said we have a developer slack where we have good developers sitting in that channel some of our core developers sitting in that channel um and the community which again is most of our developers find very useful in terms of actually getting slightly more immediate slightly more personalized support to particular issues that they're they're seeing there is and then there's the sort of the thorny problem of the we move to the other side of the equation of course there's documentation as well and videos and those are available to all as well so in terms of the support in terms of getting going with the platform then there's the other side in terms of what's called sla you know service leveled support i.e i'm having an issue i need a response on that issue in a certain time frame and of course it there our response to those types of requests are done prioritized on the basis of the sort of license that they have um because that is going now that is us saying the whole point of you know when someone takes a license with us with a support contract that you know it comes with as well is that they you know they have an expectation of how quickly would we would respond to any particular issue and you know that that is published as part of the license and our developers get back to them based on those things now what you've talked about was ah it was outside the bounds of our support contract so you know you know how things you probably know better than i am than i do because i'm not a developer um in fact i used to run a magento agency so i've been working with developers for some years um but uh but you'll probably know better than i do that you know obviously that developers build on the basic platform and once they've built on something the basic platform you know they're they're you know they then take on responsibility for that that part of it so yeah if if someone is saying ah the minute we got beyond the bounds of what we see as our reasonable support uh sort of areas we were we were asking for a charge and not quite sure how this worked but anyway i'll assume that that did happen uh because it's very rare that it actually does happen um uh then yes we we might well have turned around to them and said look if we're talking about this you know this development that you may have done which would some certainly something that would take it outside the bounds of our support contract then i'm afraid you know we don't support that as part of this contract we we you know we can get our developers we'll get our you know what's called our customer success team we can deploy them on there but you know they they are what for us is a very scarce resource and there's a resource that you know obviously we charge for um and for our larger customers quite often what they say is is that you know i want to take the license i want to take a package of those guys you know because i need them to help the architect the best solution the best way to deploy our shopware infrastructure in amongst what is not likely to be because this is what normally happens in amongst what is likely to be an infrastructure that consists of several platforms an erp platform some payment gateway infrastructure accounting infrastructure whatever else might be you know marketing infrastructure as well so absolutely you know those you know those guys are effectively development and e-commerce consultants that get deployed to help those types of customers with those kinds of problems um it's pretty bespoke yeah and and there's a headline chart price for that and of course if we anticipate that it's going to be you know like you know a three-day project like any agency really we we we make a bespoke price you know make a package that's appropriate to that to that to that to that uh to that customer okay so so basically if it's like uh an extensible part of the platform i guess you could help if it's on the marketplace but if it's something really bespoke on the market then it then it's then then you know the guys who built that piece of code that's their responsibility to to deal with that piece of to deal with that piece of code now what we do is we you see that thing because of course what we want to do is lessen the the the times that some poor merchant it's normally the merchant that ends up with us at the thick of it you know it's like yeah the the agency says it's their fault and they say no it's their fault and i just caught the middle saying make them make you work he please someone you know what we do have this qcen process to try and lessen the examples of you know effectively an a a an agency or a merchant uh deploying a piece of code that doesn't frankly work and of course the other side we have is a trial basis so they can without paying take that that that extension put it in make sure it works once they're happy with it they say yes i'll i'll buy that module that does that help does that does that sort of clarify things slightly yeah absolutely so it sounds like this i think the other side of this is this i don't think we're any different and this is probably what got all going slightly is that of course there are times that when we have to say look guys i'm sorry but you know you've gotta you bought this on an open source license partner or not if you need you know specific advice on how you deal with something in that particular i'm afraid that is a chargeable event i don't think we are any different to any of the other open source platforms out there that would deal with that in the same way and we certainly don't aim to be we're not we're certainly not so you know um which is a business it well it is a it's a business but it's also a community for instance so you know we see our interests in in uh a prioritizing what's important for the community and folk trying to focus on that be support trying to support we have to we have to prioritize everything so and be you know we have no we're not we're not a publicly traded company we're not we're not hugely funded we're completely organically grown um we haven't you know we don't you know we have to we have to deal with a you know with us with the budgets and the the size that we are we're not we're not we're not the size of shopify and we're not the size of adobe either so um you know we have to prioritize based on and what we think is would will work best for our community out there definitely yeah and i i have worked for a um magento platinum partner oh who's that yeah it's uh well i'll say it red box uh right okay i know them well and uh they're a great company now i know johnny well and some of my old project managers went to work there as well jonty yeah okay so we do have some some history in there okay that's great well i used to run one of his well he wouldn't see us as a competitor agency um but i did competition he would have thought he would have thought we were the minnows but he did come and poach a couple of my project managers so you know that selfish uh that was a compliment but yeah i mean i i did work with them and you know behind the scenes at some point magento you know i wasn't particularly impressed with magento i'm still not impressed with magento it just feels they can't really update without annoying a lot of customers to i'm not necessarily a fan of how things are put together on the front end and the back end like this one is it's it is a complete headless solution you've taken the risk and i think you deserve props for that but i'm going to correct you slightly actually the the the front end that you see when you install a norm where when you install straight shopware is not entirely headless it is partially decoupled i think it would be the the best way to put it oh okay um however there is a pwa project that is entirely headless and it is entirely if you want had a if you if you if you've got a sort of react front end that you want to plug in you can plug that in we've got a view uh you know if you store front of you js headless project that you can plug into shopware but the skin you load up when you load up shopware that is not a completely separate headless infrastructure that is partially decoupled and it is all called our api though so you're absolutely correct in saying that in that yeah i mean the core of your product is isolated whereas in magento that wouldn't be the case uh no because this was created as an api first you know as a sort of headless sort of native if you like platform and that's why that's that's kind of i mean magento had to do an awful lot to you know when they went from magento one to magenta two when they're not they did it as well as one would have liked is is well it's constantly in debate i think has been the fairest way to put it um but they had to do the same thing but they did that in 2000 you know between 2014 and 2016 and we did this in 2019 20. so we're just further down the road if you like and technology is further down the road and every now and then i think you have to do this and remember that it's it's it what's hard for us is is is infinitely much harder for a software proprietary software as a service platform now how you know how those guys it's very hard for them to evolve fundamentally i mean for instance you only have to look at the difficulties that say shopware and bigcommerce have in say launching sort of internationalization type facilities you know language in multiple currencies price-pointed currencies that shows you you know they've been talking about this for years it's hard to do that in a way that doesn't break everything for every customer out there which of course they fundamentally can't do because they're all on the same platform yeah i mean that's they're very closely coupled and everybody knows you know it's kind of like putting a cup down and a window falling out and you shared it i've dealt with very tightly coupled code as you can imagine many many times and it creates uh an absolute headache that's why i'm trying to teach people how to do front-end engineering the right way and parallel everything and and really consider how you're fetching and importing data and then how you display that data in a functional manner rather than keep editing you know on that on the high level i think you guys have done a pretty good job being api first i think magento 2 was a spoiled opportunity because it didn't go down the eight full api route initially and their marketplace now is is full of tons of developers time that you may annoy if you decide to go down that route uh it's possible that they won't it's not necessarily essential but uh one beauty about your architecture is i could say right a back-end developer you create a php plugin on the core on the under that layer and then i can get my front end out so we want to go and integrate that onto the back end and also onto the tell me what the end points are and we're good to go exactly that's it exactly and i'm assuming you've got like uh hooks and everything into the backend interface as well so it's it's literally it's so easy and i don't have to learn necessarily a specific api to do that because if i wanted to hook into it well it's already built in view so i'm not having to go into the core and or i extend a specific module i can just say right this button i can click that then do this or something like that um there's probably a better way to do it but you know there is obviously it's a good architecture and that's ultimately why i favored it initially then someone swayed my opinion but you know i think you're swaying my opinion backwards well i don't know it may sound unreasonable the thing that that that video really tells me is that there is an unhappy partner of ours out there somewhere which i don't know about which it is is a failure of mine and my teams um more than anything else um and so i will obviously you are you have to protect your sources as a journalist but therefore my job is to go out there and find out who that was and make sure we can sort out what the issue was in in a way that's equitable to you know to both us in terms of running a business and them in terms of you know providing services to their merchants yeah definitely yeah i mean that that's that's pretty good and it's the fact that you know uh you're willing to come on here you're willing to you know as i say information happy i mean we're happy to i mean from our our point of view you know we are yeah we're not a huge platform in the uk we're huge on the the concept but we're not a huge platform in the uk and um you know we're always you know we're always keen if you've shown some interest and uh and and looking at the platform or is to tell you to tell you what you need to know to to move forward and to that end i mean i have things like um as i say the scorecard methodologies that is my opinion and it is my opinion but allows you to adapt it um to you know what how how to determine best platforms for merchants um and also runs you know looks at some of one of the key areas that i think that people find shopware interesting for uh especially once they made the decision to go for the sort of flexibility side of the equation and that's total cost of energy you know that's you know one thing where we are um we're quite confident of that you know we we we come up quite um appealing uh to those who were you know to those who need flexibility without delving into the the cost that can be associated with sort of top-end magento development yeah i mean magento can be quite burdensome and expensive and as you said it's hard to evolve so that will naturally add to cost and then uh it it can be a bit of a beast to work with it's it's heavy i've tried to work with it it's heavy and in some cases as i said working with that particular agency um cost could go quite high sometimes quite rightly or wrongly necessarily not necessarily magento's fault um but because this system is more adaptable you're less likely to get a bit of a shock if you need to upscale and this system can can go with that and that's really the there's some core principles that really miss out in e-commerce because it's such a fast-moving industry it feels like flywheel development rather than somebody going hold on a minute you've gone a bit too fast with strain yourself let's think about this a little bit better so it's good that your company definitely has do that i would say at this point i've changed my mind about yourselves and you know the platform it does feel right it did feel right initially uh i think maybe someone's gotta be in the bonnet maybe a bit peeved but you know i can't speak for everybody or or necessarily hand it over um but you know how it is nothing is perfect um and and with there are all kinds of things i would love if that you know we were further along the road than we are right now but no we're we're moving along that road and uh personally you know i think it's uh there a good road uh to be on um i would you know because what i would love to you know what i would love to do and i would love what i would love shopware to be you know part of is to make the case for open source a bit better in the uk because i don't i don't you know i think merchants hear the sas song all day um about life can be simpler and life can be simpler and they don't hear the open source um uh song very much at the moment especially now sort of magento largely is has moved out of the mid market and we'd love to we'd love to be to be more prominent in making that case alongside hosting companies and payment gateways and technology agencies because that's the other side that's the other side of of people who get made redundant by uh the sacification of everything it's technology agencies and these technology agencies these are the sort of these are these are the innovators these these are the white heat of progress so that we need these guys to keep moving uh e-commerce forward uh you know and into interesting ways sometimes there'll be red herrings but sometimes you know you know these are the guys that are showing us sort of the next you know the next phase of e-commerce that's you know which is which makes things so exciting yeah definitely and you know speaking on that particular point there was another agency that i spoke to uh i fixed his server for him at one point um but he was like i was like well why are you recommending uh i'm i'm i'm getting into dot-net development things like that but uh i said to him why exactly well i didn't have that opinion but then you know how it is it's just the other side you know um [Music] but i i did say why are you you know why are you recommending these certain tool sets over open source tool sets who's going for more proprietary microsoft platforms azure his windows server was on its windows and he said well it because it sells well um lots of companies want to hear that especially i feel like governments and government agencies are kind of behind the curve because they always want to hear corporate names they always want to hear the creme de la creme for the proprietary world but are you prepared to listen to the open source world it's a very difficult balance but unless we get somebody who's really industry standard i mean the community edition of magento does help um but i feel like a true true open platform not one that says well we'll give you this one for free but we've got so much more over here that you've got to come on to our platform and it's proprietary um uh would be nice because i'm looking at scalability so if i was to recommend this to a customer i look at it from a technology point of view of upscaling and two will you be locked in later down the line or could you just stay remain free and open and i think companies undervalue that by a large part and you as you said you know it's cost a lot of people jobs and and time and efficiency so that's why that is what's missing it's a bit of a dinosaur industry i have to say yeah um it just is so i promised at the start this video that i was going to tell you why i changed my mind number one they care about their community i previously didn't think that but they have their own channels and they have their own support channels even for the free version not just the paid for version but the pay for version gives you more options they are a company they do need to make money and i'm not against it uh i think their support is pretty reasonable maybe what this company was asking for was a bit more this company did mention the features and they've openly admitted that they've wanted this for a long time and it hasn't come developer resources are stretched so i'm going to give them an a plus they totally changed my opinion and my mindset on this particular issue um i think they do care and i think that they do have a relatively great product i think there could be things better but they've definitely changed my mind i think you should install shopware and i definitely get a wordpress vibe when i install it so now that we have that in place what are the constructive criticisms of this platform it's fair to to give my advice on it i do consult so here's my consultancy for them for free uh personally i don't think you should be maintaining uh an old front-end technology this is just entertaining a bad idea and i'll tell you why number one all the companies that go to agencies who can afford an agency to build their website which is predominantly going to be shot where and so forth they don't want php websites they don't want the traditional application types versus the single page application type single applications are faster they're more fluid they're easier to develop in and if you do the job properly they will fly past the traditional technology two why shouldn't you encourage it because the marketplace if you're selling front end modules you're going to end up splitting your marketplace okay and this usually doesn't end up as a good thing because uh you know you really want people to focus on one technology it's when those companies come up with a million tech stacks that eventually people go i've had enough of this and you've thrown in the bin you know and it's not just tech stacks that do this it can also be marketplaces if you have a marketplace that supports a traditional php front end and an spa some people buy their own products some people get upset obviously got the 30 day free trial but the whole point is it makes life just that little bit more difficult and you'll become fractured as a result two there's no reason not to go with uh sorry three no reason not to go with spa as i said it brings all those benefits but the main benefit that it also brings is the fact that you get more programming resources naturally think about this if for example you get rid of the traditional api in php that's one less thing you maintain you could trim your code base by probably hundreds of lines if you did that and the beauty about doing it that way in php is that really you're just focusing on the graphql api or potentially the rest api and that's another criticism i'd rather see graphql as well as rest there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to have both but the thing is when you get rid of that legacy api these sort of older php styled front ends you'll get more resources to look into adapting the rest api and building the graphql api so that they can both work together and it's possible systems can use rest and graphql if you give two options that is very very impressive and graphql lets us make less requests um instead of rest rest sometimes we have to fetch something and then we have to do something else you know what i mean so my uh professional opinion would be don't fracture your marketplace keep your development time up and focus more primarily on the apis of the future and the technologies of the future if shopware 5 and shotware 6 was such a big leap for you in the back end but you're still letting people build front ends in old technologies this might not be the way to go and hopefully eventually they will go that way it definitely feels like that's the way they're gonna go but my point is if you're gonna make that leap and you've invested all this time and money into this product don't keep doing that because people will eventually get upset with you they've built all this beautiful storefront now they've got to rebuild it and react or view so that causes a big derision in in people and especially developers because developers don't want to develop they want to do a lot less development and they want to go and eat some ice cream somewhere and development's already quite a stressy business so there is my professional opinion there is why i changed my mind but there is also my supportive criticism for your future and thank you for watching this video if you want more great content go ahead and hit that like button hit that subscribe button ding dong that bell and i want to say thank you very much for watching this video

Channel: Programming With Avelx

Views: 316

Keywords: Computer Programming, Avelx, computer programming for beginners, computer programming c++, computer programming career, shopware, ecommerce platform, shopware review, shopware reviews, ecommerce, ecommerce website, ecommerce business

Id: OPz0KqG0LHU

Length: 40min 26sec (2426 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021