Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform · 2020. 10. 14. · Best Practices for...
Transcript of Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform · 2020. 10. 14. · Best Practices for...
Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce PlatformHow to Achieve a Smooth Transition When Upgrading to Magento Commerce
Rick Johnson
President and CEO of Kadro
2Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
But your journey isn’t over. As your business
changes and grows, you’ll need more from
your online storefront, including more
features, functionality, and flexibility. If you’re
running your digital business on an older or
inflexible set of technologies, it may be time to
upgrade to Magento Commerce.
Magento Commerce is more than an
eCommerce platform. It is a robust, scalable
software framework which software
developers can easily customize, making it the
perfect digital commerce solution.
However, replacing your commerce platform
can be a daunting proposition, especially when
you’re running a high-volume commerce
business. A website shutdown or lengthy
business interruption could damage customer
confidence and set your business back
months. You may be wondering how you can
transition to the advanced technology you
need to power future growth while ensuring
business continuity today.
This paper identifies the best practices
and guidelines for upgrading to Magento
Commerce without disrupting your existing
business. It includes several examples of
businesses which retained key features and
functions from their old sites — we call this
functional parity — while gaining all the
benefits of Magento Commerce.
Building a new eCommerce site from scratch, whether you’re a
startup or an existing business, is a significant challenge. You
understand the journey, you’ve lived it.
Prepare for the Future with Magento Commerce
Magento Commerce is
more than an eCommerce
platform. It is a robust,
scalable software framework
which software developers
can easily customize,
making it the perfect digital
commerce solution.
3Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Make the Business Case for Magento Commerce
These are all valid reasons for switching
to Magento Commerce. They are a
critical part of your business case if
your existing eCommerce site is poorly
implemented, missing key functionality
for today’s eCommerce shopper, or has
fallen substantially behind in usability and
performance standards.
To convince your leadership team to invest in
Magento Commerce, you must quantify these
potential benefits and if possible, show how
similar companies have achieved significant
gains. At the same time, you need a plan for
ensuring your new site will have all of the
custom features required to run your online
business.
Very often, the business case for
upgrading to Magento Commerce is
based on the promise your online
business will grow significantly,
your average conversion rates will
improve, and total cost of ownership
will decrease.
4Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Is your site falling behind
in technology, features,
standards compliance, and
user experience capabilities?
Is the prospect of moving to
a new eCommerce platform
daunting due to cost
considerations or complexity?
You need to consider total cost
of ownership of your current
eCommerce solution including
lost opportunities from not
utilizing new technology, features,
and user experiences. One best
practice to apply in this scenario
is establishing the appropriate
solution architecture to leverage
what works best on your site, and
how Magento Commerce can be
best applied to fit your overall
business plan. It doesn’t have to be
an all or nothing decision.
Too often we hear from our clients
a prior attempt to replace their
existing eCommerce system failed.
The techniques and best practices
presented in this paper are
essential to avoid a failed system
replacement.
Why Do You Need to Upgrade?If you answer yes to any of the following questions,
your business could probably benefit from switching to
Magento Commerce.
5Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Is your eCommerce site
currently a “unique snowflake”
which only a small number
of software developers
understand?
Are you worried about falling
behind your competition and
not providing the advanced
experiences your customers
expect?
Fully custom solutions are often
difficult and expensive to replace.
Often, the quality of custom
systems degrades over time. The
power of Magento Commerce
lies in its software framework.
Magento Commerce offers a
rich eco-system of experienced
developers and integrators. Best
practices around making sure
your code and architecture are
appropriate to current now and
future needs are presented below.
With advancements in AI
technology, evolving mobile
solutions like PWA, better
understanding customer brand
interactions, and different
ways new generations of online
shoppers are conducting
transactions, your business
needs to stay at the forefront of
eCommerce innovation to outpace
the competitions own capabilities.
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Has your online business
grown to a level where your
current processes are not
working as well as they
used to?
We will present several best
practices and case studies
to illustrate how clients with
antiquated back-office systems
determined what to leverage,
what to replace, and how to apply
Magento Commerce to bring new
capabilities to their customers.
7Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Each of the individual projects highlighted in this paper shared a set of common keys to success
to make sure the business and technical requirements were understood and adhered to during
development. Each key to success is presented below as a set of best practices which will help
transition your online business over to Magento Commerce.
Best Practices for a Successful Transition to Magento Commerce
Requirements Discovery
Understand Your Data
Right-Size Your Architecture
Know Where Custom Software is Needed
Plan User Acceptance Testing
8Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
When a primary objective of the project is
to maintain business functional parity, it is
essential to have a detailed understanding
of the existing site’s features, functionality,
business rules, data models, systems
architecture, and 3rd-party system
dependencies.
The first step in Kadro’s approach is to always
conduct a detailed requirements discovery
session with all stakeholders in the project.
This typically involves a detailed Q&A session
with each stakeholder and supporting
staff to make sure individual job
functions are understood.
Stakeholders should represent each
functional area of the business which will be
involved in using or interfacing with the new
site. Examples include product management,
customer management, order management,
shipping and fulfillment, content
management, marketing, sales, customer
service, merchandising, accounting, security,
information systems, marketplaces, etc.
The requirements discovery process should
focus on identifying which functionality stays
the same and what should change. Depending
on the overall budget of the project, replacing
an existing eCommerce site can present
Conduct a Detailed Requirements Discovery and Analysis Session
9Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
opportunities to make improvements to the
customer experience and the branding. It can
also include enhancing the look of the site
or adding new functionality your competitors
may not have yet.
At the business-level, specific end-user
scenarios must be thoroughly documented.
You will also need to map out the underlying
business rules that govern how different types
of data are used and managed.
At the systems level, all integration points,
data sharing protocols and methods, your
systems of record, and what systems to keep
versus those to replace, must be identified. As
part of this effort, you will need to document
your site’s key data structures for the product
catalog, customer accounts, and order
management.
During the analysis of the requirements,
it is key to identify the gaps between what
Magento Commerce provides out-of-the-
box, what can be achieved through Magento
extensions and Adobe technical partners, and
what elements will require customizations
to meet business and technical needs. This
analysis drives the scope of custom software
development effort which will be required.
If you and your developers
don’t fully understand your
requirements, you can’t
create the right solution for
your business.
10Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Most eCommerce re-platform projects fail or
end up costing too much because the site’s
data and the unique business rules governing
the data are never fully grasped by the
development team.
The requirements discovery process and
analysis will focus on making sure developers
and systems integrators have a fundamental
knowledge of the site’s key data elements,
including those for the product catalog,
customer accounts, and order management.
The underlying business rules which govern
how this data is used and managed must be
well understood.
The source of data, how it is shared or
integrated with the new site, and how said
data fits within the underlying Magento data
models is essential. Understanding how the
data fits within Magento’s various data models
is also a key driver for the scope of custom
software development effort that will be
required.
Lastly, all the processes and scripts required
to convert data to the new site need to be
identified and developed to ensure data
integrity and parity on the existing site. These
scripts are used to convert the data from the
old site to the new site and may be reused to
convert data for test phases and the final go-
live site cutover.
The bottom line, the technical team building
the new eCommerce site must understand the
data and all its nuances which make-up your
eCommerce DNA.
Ensure Your Systems Integrator Fully Understands Your Data
The bottom line, the
technical team building the
new eCommerce site must
understand the data and all
its nuances which make-up
your eCommerce DNA.
11Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
As a general rule in software development,
having more source code means more code to
maintain and support.
When developing a new eCommerce site
on Magento Commerce, you must carefully
evaluate all third-party extensions. For
example, it makes no sense to add an
extension with 500 lines of code to the
checkout versus achieving the same purpose
by implementing 10 lines of custom code.
Far too often we see eCommerce sites
bloated with extension code which can lead to
maintenance headaches down the road.
Likewise, when migrating or porting code
from an old site to a new site to achieve
functional parity, you must take care each
module is properly implemented in the new
site’s architecture and data models. You
should attempt to minimize the number of
modules you create. Each new system in
the architecture means more integration
points, points to monitor for failures, points to
optimize for performance, added QA testing,
and likely higher total cost of ownership.
Through the detailed requirements discovery
process and analysis previously mentioned, all
the external systems, APIs, and data sharing
points must be identified and well understood.
You should also have extensive knowledge of
how these systems and their interfaces will
work together with Magento Commerce.
You must also carefully evaluate any general-
purpose middleware bridge and connector
solutions you may use to integrate third-party
systems with Magento Commerce. They may
promise a faster-to-market development
life cycle, but tradeoffs may include poor
performance or other limitations to scale.
Sometimes existing systems used by the
old eCommerce site may be repurposed to
accommodate the new Magento Commerce
site. This can include taking pieces of your old
site or other legacy systems and integrating
them with Magento Commerce to establish
integration points for managing orders,
products, customers, data feeds, or other
external systems.
Right-Size the Code Base and the System Architecture
Be smart when adding extensions and middleware - more code and more components
in the architecture may lead to more headaches and higher support costs.
12Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Developing and testing custom software for
your new Magento Commerce site will be one
of the costliest and most time-consuming
aspects of your project. In Magento
Commerce, all new features you need are
added either by a third-party extension or by
creating a custom software extension. Your
site’s custom software development areas will
be determined from the following:
› The gap analysis from the
requirements discovery.
› Full understanding of the site’s data
and business rules and how these fit
within Magento core.
› Identify custom features from the
existing site and how they will be
replicated in Magento Commerce.
› How and where in Magento Commerce
will data, messaging, and functionality
from third-party systems be
integrated?
The good news is Magento Commerce
provides a robust software framework which
allows software engineers to extend the
platform specifically to each business’s needs.
For each system area requiring custom
software development efforts, it is a key best
practice to further define your business and
technical requirements, how and where the
customization will fit within the Magento
platform, and what elements of Magento will
be extended.
When third-party elements are involved,
it is important to identify if a pre-existing
extension will be used or whether custom
web service APIs or other data sharing
mechanisms will be used and how.
For areas involving messaging and state-
machine behavior with external systems, you
should use tools such as message sequence
charts to illustrate system interaction and
message flows to document the required
system behavior, timings, and dependencies.
Rigorously Identify and Define Where Custom Software is Required
Most of your project cost will be
in meeting custom requirements.
Make good decisions to get it right
and mitigate risks.
13Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
As previously noted, replacing an existing
eCommerce platform with a new one is
challenging. Some businesses find it very
difficult to know when the new site is ready
to go live. For very large systems, testing
can last a significantly long time, teams can
get frustrated, and costs rise for everyone
involved. A well-defined user acceptance
testing plan can provide clarity to all your
stakeholders, preventing a costly and
protracted testing phase.
We suggest developing your user acceptance
testing plans, test cases, and go-live criteria
long before testing is scheduled to begin.
Work closely with stakeholders – including
those involved with third-party systems which
will integrate with Magento Commerce.
Crafting a plan which works for everyone is
especially important if your existing site is
highly custom.
You should also clearly communicate pre-
deployment, deployment, and rollback plans
with all your stakeholders, rehearsing them at
least once.
To mitigate risks in replacing too much of an
existing system, consider a development and
deployment plan where significant elements
of the new eCommerce system are tested and
delivered incrementally in phases.
Carefully Plan User Acceptance Testing and Deployment to Ease Your Go-Live Stress
› Have a well-defined User
Acceptance Testing plan
› Include all stakeholders in
creating your overall test
plan
› Clearly define all
pre-deployment and
deployment tasks - and do
rehearsals.
› Consider incremental
phases to mitigate risks to
your existing systems
14Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Real-World Examples
In this section, we cover how three fast-growing businesses transitioned to Magento Commerce while
still retaining key features and functions from their custom systems. Each case study details which
capabilities were migrated to Magento Commerce.
15Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
About REEDS Jewelers
Founded in 1946, REEDS Jewelers of
Wilmington NC is a full-service omnichannel
retailer with an online presence and stores in
18 states. REEDS offers fine jewelry, designer
jewelry, and watches including David Yurman,
Michael Kors, Pandora, Alex & Ani, Tacori,
TAG Heuer, and Rolex. REEDS Jewelers has
worked with Kadro on their eCommerce
solution since 2001.
Primary Objective
Prior to adopting Magento Commerce,
REEDS.com operated on a proprietary
custom eCommerce solution built by Kadro.
Over time, as REEDS Jewelers’ eCommerce
business grew, they required a commercial
eCommerce platform to reduce their
dependency on a proprietary custom solution.
REEDS Jewelers selected Magento Commerce
to build the solution they required. Achieving
functional parity with their existing custom
solution was essential and critical to the
project’s success.
Key Features and Capabilities Migrated to Magento Commerce
› The branding and mobile responsive
web design of the existing site to be
retained and implemented in the new
Magento site’s theme. REEDS’ prior
investments in UI/UX design to be fully
leveraged for the new site.
B2C eCommerce – migration from proprietary
Java J2EE solution to Magento Commerce
Site: REEDS.com
Case Study Summary REEDS Jewelers
16Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
› REEDS Jeweler’s product catalog
data model is complex. Key features
were needed to handle multi-faceted
product attributes, fulfillment types,
brand types, dynamic product options
such as engravings, dynamic product
add-ons such as resizing and warranty
plans, and custom configurations.
› All payment methods supported from
custom site including major credit
cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Affirm,
Bitcoin, REEDS Gift Card, and REEDS
private label credit card.
› Product search and recommendations
using Reflektion site search solution.
› Order Management System for
managing the entire order workflow,
editing orders, and taking phone-
assisted orders.
› Integration with back-office IBM
AS/400 ERP system and POS system
including store-level inventory,
product pricing, and promotions, and
EDI for drop-shippers.
› Ability for sales associates in retail
stores to place online orders for
customers in-store.
› Centralized warehouse fulfillment, in-
store fulfillment, and store associate
facilitated sales/fulfillment.
› Product and content update triggers to
Akamai CDN.
› Support for product education content
and glossary terms for jewelry and
watches integrated dynamically with
product detail pages to guide the
buying decision.
Key Changes to the Site Resulting from the Magento Commerce Project
› The final system architecture
used a strategy to evolve the
order management and product
management features of their prior
custom solution into a separate
order management system (OMS)
and product integration management
(PIM) solution. The custom OMS/PIM
was then integrated with Magento
Commerce, leveraging all pre-existing
back-office integrations and achieving
functional parity with how managing
products, orders, and customers are
performed. This significantly reduced
total cost and overall project risk.
› To achieve site performance
requirements for page-load of
dynamic category pages and layered
navigation on REEDS.com, Kadro
worked with Reflektion to fully
integrate their product catalog search,
preview search, and category pages.
› A new credit card payment gateway
service was integrated to improve PCI-
compliance.
17Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
› Functional parity with the features, functionality, data, and UI/UX of the highly custom
site was achieved with the Magento Commerce implementation.
› Not all technology had to be re-written or replaced. The new system architecture
leveraged many existing components by re-engineering them into separate OMS and
PIM components.
System Architecture
The Results
18Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
About LCI
LCI is an NIB-affiliated, not-for-profit
corporation providing products and services
to the US Government. Operating under
the auspices of the AbilityOne program, LCI
has grown and diversified for over 80 years
to become one of the largest employers of
people who are blind or visually impaired in
the United States.
LCI operates multiple distribution centers,
eCommerce websites, retail stores, and
manufacturing facilities within the United
States. Through their three eCommerce
websites, they sell office supplies, office
equipment, furniture, industrial supplies,
and tactical assault gear to government and
military buyers.
Primary Objectives
› Move all LCI eCommerce sites from a
custom ASP/.Net implementation to
Magento Commerce with
Microsoft Dynamics AX.
› Upgrade the Microsoft Dynamics AX
system.
› Allow B2B customers to see all their
orders online.
› Streamline the administration of
multiple websites.
B2B eCommerce – migration from custom
ASP/.Net solution to Magento Commerce
Sites: www.buylci.com,
www.lcidistribution.com,
www.tacticalassaultgearstore.com
Case Study Summary LCI
19Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Key Features and Capabilities Migrated to Magento Commerce
› Integration with Microsoft Dynamics
AX for all product feeds, category
feeds, inventory, pricing, orders,
shipping, and fulfillment. This includes
products and categories sourced by a
third-party distributor and fulfillment
partners.
› LCI’s existing branding and graphical
design were to be maintained for
the new site. Kadro used Magento’s
built-in mobile responsive web theme,
Luma, to ensure the site leveraged
all built-in Magento templates and
achieved branding and graphic design
consistency with existing sites.
› Cancels, Returns, and Exchanges are
handled within Microsoft Dynamics AX
and required integration with Magento
Commerce for importing return
orders.
› Tiered table-based shipping rates
and carrier-based shipping rates
– depending on specific business
rules – were required for the Magento
Commerce site.
› Specific business rules for two-
tier and three-tier purchase order
flow must be applied to Magento
Commerce’s B2B workflow process.
› Some products are only available
to purchase by specific customer
groups. A single category will contain
restricted and unrestricted products.
› Customers on a subset of the websites
purchase via a contractual price
book. The rules Magento uses to give
customers the lowest price had to be
overwritten to support specific pricing
by customer group.
› Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce
pricing engine supported real-time
lookup of three-tier pricing tier (base
+ price book + contract pricing) which
needed to be converted to the two-tier
model supported by Magento (base +
customer group).
› EDI orders and phone assisted orders
processed through Microsoft Dynamics
AX are fed to Magento Commerce
so customers can have a complete
omnichannel experience for reviewing
order status and invoice history.
› Multi-site support from Magento
Commerce enables LCI to operate and
manage all three eCommerce sites
under one administrative control and
hosting environment.
20Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
System Architecture
› LCI, Kadro, and LCI’s integration
partner for Microsoft Dynamics
worked together to achieve the
objectives of the project. The risks
and challenges to the project
were significant, considering
both the eCommerce system and
supporting ERP system were
being changed in tandem.
› Leveraging Magento
Commerce’s B2B feature set
was key to meeting the project’s
requirements.
› All features and functionality that
LCI relied on with their custom
ASP/.Net sites were preserved or
replaced with functionality in their
new Magento Commerce site.
The Results
21Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
About National Wholesale
Established in 1952, National Wholesale
is a family-owned and operated business
specializing in women’s clothing and fashion
accessories. They operate a traditional mail-
order catalog and an online business.
Primary Objectives
Having migrated their eCommerce site from a
home-grown solution to Magento Commerce
1 back in 2016, National Wholesale set the
following objectives for their move to Magento
Commerce 2:
› The move to Magento Commerce 1
didn’t achieve functional parity to
their home-grown site. Therefore,
they needed to recover functionality
previously lost.
› The move from Magento Commerce
1 to Magento Commerce 2 is a
platform replacement because of the
fundamental differences between both
platforms code architecture. All prior
Magento Commerce 1 customizations,
including the IBM AS/400 back-office
integration, had to be migrated to
Magento Commerce 2.
› National Wholesale needed a fully
managed hosted solution with
Magento Commerce cloud to improve
uptime and site performance.
Key Features and Capabilities Migrated to Magento Commerce
› Reorganization of the product data
attributes allowed National Wholesale
to restore previously lost functionality
of configurable products containing
combinations of clearance and
full retail simples under a single
B2C eCommerce – migration from Magento 1
to Magento Commerce Cloud
Site: www.shopnational.com
Case Study National Wholesale
22Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
configurable style. It also permitted
users to place individual sizes within
a style/color on clearance without
selecting the entire style/color
combination.
› Replaced the existing product
integration which used a custom PIM
and third-party Magento extension to
completely replace the product catalog
daily. The original Magento Commerce
1 implementation caused daily system
downtime, excessive indexing, and was
error-prone.
› Enhanced the inventory process
to increase its frequency and send
additional relevant data which was
previously lost in the migration
to Magento Commerce 1. The old
process could not handle providing
customers with expected ship dates
on back-ordered products and was
executed infrequently as it caused a
full system re-index. The new design
delivers rapid inventory updates with
no system downtime, improving the
customer experience by providing
expected ship date information
through the cart.
› The orders feed was previously
implemented with a third-party
extension and was missing key
elements which would have required
additional customization. In lieu of
a rewrite of an extension, the order
export was custom-written to match
the previous output with the omitted
data now included.
› The pricing feed was previously
implemented with a third-party
extension and did not support
discounting down to specific
size/color/style. The extension
was replaced with a custom
implementation that accepted the
same format but correctly handled the
pricing variations.
› A new product onboarding process
was created in Magento Commerce to
eliminate errors with launching new
products while providing an overview
of products being prepared for the
website.
› National Wholesale wanted to
maintain their existing custom
connector for managing product,
inventory, pricing, orders, and
fulfillment in selling their products on
the Amazon marketplace.
› Magento Commerce customizations
were used to dramatically improve
swatch performance on category
pages while supporting quantity
discounts across varied priced simple
products under a single configurable.
› Product search and recommendations
were improved in utilizing the
Reflektion search solution.
› A new credit card payment gateway
was integrated for improved PCI-
compliant solution.
23Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
System Architecture
› The Magento Commerce implementation achieved functional parity with the features,
functionality, data, and UI/UX of the Magento 1 site, as well as bringing forward
custom features previously missed when migrating from their former custom
solution.
› All integration points with the IBM AS/400 back-office successfully implemented.
› Magento’s cloud solution is used for improved site reliability and performance.
› Shopnational.com was named top Women’s Fashion (single
brand) eCommerce website by Newsweek for the Newsweek
2020 Best Online Shops.
The Results
24Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
› Perform a detailed discovery and analysis of business and technical requirements from all
stakeholders.
› Assemble a software engineering team that fully understands your site’s requirements, the data
that represents all aspects of your site, and all the business rules needed to make it run your
business and serve your customers.
› Make sure you think through how to leverage, reuse, migrate from, or integrate with the custom
systems you already have in place.
› Rigorously identify and define the custom software required for your complete solution.
› Carefully plan user acceptance testing, criteria for cut-over, and your rehearsed deployment
plan to eliminate go-live stress and anxiety.
Remember, Magento Commerce is more than an eCommerce platform. It is a robust software
framework for building custom solutions to meet your specific needs and ensuring all the features and
functionality you need are achievable.
Learn More
To learn more about upgrading to Magento Commerce, please visit www.magento.com.
Moving a high-performing eCommerce site to a new digital commerce
platform is a considerable challenge. These best practices can help you
plan and execute a smooth transition from your existing platform to
Magento Commerce:
25Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
About Kadro
Founded in 2001 in Raleigh, N.C., Kadro is a software engineering firm that delivers B2C and B2B
eCommerce solutions on Magento Commerce. Kadro provides enterprise-class software development
and integration services to develop eCommerce sites for retailers, distributors and wholesalers across
many industries and markets. Learn more at www.kadro.com.
Follow Us on Social Media
linkedin LinkedIn kadro-solutions
twitter Twitter @kadro
instagram Instagram @kadroinc
facebook Facebook KadroSolutions
Contact
Ariel Mordetsky
Vice President of Revenue
(877) 435-3453
26Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform
About Magento Commerce
Magento Commerce, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, is the leading commerce solution for merchants
and brands across B2C and B2B industries and was recently named a leader in the 2020 Gartner
Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based
omnichannel solutions that empower merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping
experiences.
Magento is the #1 provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000, the B2B 300 and the Top 500 Guides for
Europe and Latin America. Magento is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology
partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for
extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found
at Magento.com.