Taking Drupal Commerce to Market: 2019 Roadmap

all right I think that red means I'm on

welcome to taking Drupal commerce to

market our 2019 roadmap talk I am Ryan

saramma

the CEO of commerce guys have a bit of a

history in the e-commerce space once

upon a time I was an OS commerce

contributor we have any OS commerce

users in the audience no cents in carts

and the other derivatives maybe I

stopped plugins up on their website

which is fun to go look back at it and

see how terrible they were I created a

goober carts this was around the Drupal

co-founded commerce guys with a couple

of friends from the Drupal community who

were using uber cart for their personal

and work websites that was in 2009 at

Drupal con DC we think the paperwork and

the rest is history

so I guess things were 10 years old now

T which is cool as of last month created

Drupal commerce starting in 2010 to

replace uber card on Drupal 7 and beyond

this was when feel double entities were

a big thing we take that for granted now

this was like a decade ago but it was

new then and I am an unapologetic brick

and mortar shopper I hate I hate buying

stuff on the internet why am I alone

okay I guess I'm alone for example I

bought these shoes these are this was a

size shoe that I was supposed to

purchase and this particular

manufacturer was one size off for me sir

cost me eight dollars to exchange them

that's not fun

I could have figured that out in this

door all right that's neither here nor

there now I mean February 2016 going

back three years now we actually

separated platform SH and commerce guys

I don't know if anybody knew that we had

developed this whole like hosting

platform as-a-service thing that then

became the Magento cloud called platform

that SH but we separated in 2016 so that

the core team myself Matt glom in who's

over here boi-ing Ivanovitch who's

probably joining remotely from belgrade

serbia we were refocusing our efforts on

Drupal commerce trying to think what

what could this product look like today

if we hadn't been distracted by raising

venture capital and building at hosting

product for the last five years and I

think that what's happened since then

crews or testified to what a small

dedicated team can achieve when they do

narrow their focus and we released

Drupal commerce to tow my year and five

months ago I guess is Drupal con Vienna

my first beta sites were alive in

Ireland the year before that in 2016 it

was the sport Obermeyer case that if you

seen that and now today were over 7,000

sites on Drupal 8 so this kind of tracks

with where we were on Drupal 7 with

Drupal commerce one around like 2013

time frame we we we have like pretty

great growth of the last year we're

seeing people begin to really migrate in

earnest from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and

we're not slowing down our canoe

contributions despite to doing this now

for three years we're definitely feeling

the weight of trying to take on this

massive project as a small team we've

regrown back to seven but still are a

pretty small team trying to stay focused

on contribs our time so at nine media

for example funded pricelist and wish

list development

circle web foundry

helped us push out in the Belgrave demo

acro media funds a lot of work on

migrate point-of-sale integration and so

on PayPal just sponsored the complete

PayPal checkout integration that we're

launching at Drupal con Seattle and so

thanks to folks like these you know

companies and others we are able to put

a lot of our time back into contributing

to Drupal I think we said this past year

we were the number two organization in

the whole world despite being like one

one-hundredth the size of aqua who was

number one and then a fraction of the

size of the number three and following

as well we do maintain a public road map

if you'd like to see our current efforts

are around an address book finalizing

the Commerce recurring module finalizing

the commerce shipping module and

producing the integrations for the

common carriers for shipping no I think

we also have done a lot of work lately

on price lists if anybody's interested

to see where pricing will head in the

future the priceless module funded by

nine media supports any number of price

lists for any number of SKUs and they

put it through its paces with a six

million up to 15 million SKU product

catalog and priceless exceeding 250

thousand SKUs but pretty fun to see like

all this stuff come together and so the

current roadmap is just to kind of keep

doing a lot of that and find ways to win

back more of our developer team's time

just to focus on contributor why not a

big focus for us when we think about

feature set for Drupal commerce is

headless Commerce has anybody built a

headless Commerce site already

maybe maybe not okay well let's just

define it for everybody real fast I

think headless Drupal is a familiar term

and so we probably are all familiar with

like the the decoupled Headless Horseman

kind of Drupal and logos that get thrown

around to show a drupal back-end serving

content to a JavaScript front-end so

using Drupal is a content datastore not

necessarily as the front-end of the

website so the same thing is true for

headless Commerce you're separating the

whole customer experience layers of

shopping carts product catalogs browsing

faceting filtering navigation everything

you're separating that from the actual

back-end application so the back end is

still Drupal commerce it's still the

same PHP code but the front-end can be

built in anything it can be a completely

decoupled JavaScript application we have

one customer that does that they launch

new branch sites and new markets just

using react and so they spun up a

completely separate team to focus on the

front-end while we continue to build and

maintain they're back in it also let

them serve content into a Drupal 7

front-end which is interesting right you

don't typically think about headless

Drupal serving into another Drupal

instance but the same API is the support

a full headless Commerce application can

be used by anything on the front end so

in their case it's just a little

JavaScript widget that knows how to

interact with the API and build that

cart on the Drupal 8 site and then

redirect there for checkout whenever the

time comes so it's all about separating

that whole anything related to the

customer engaging with you separating

that from the business application that

defines your data model business logic

payment and fulfillment workflows and

more headless commerce can support any

number of front-end sites or apps from a

single back-end all right this is when

you think about probably the typical

paradigm that people have in mind as

well if I if I want to serve different

brands or different markets I create a

different Drupal site for that or I spin

up a different Magento store or I

subscribe to a separate Shopify Plus

instance and people are really used to

this idea that single tenancy for all

these application

it's true across the board especially so

in the enterprise space well it

shouldn't have to be that if we're

talking about just an API that can have

any number of SKUs in it and any number

of customers and any you know I think

there's no reason that it can't just be

one back-end serving any number of

target front ends and finally headless

Commerce allows you to like scale and

evolve parts of the application stack

without replacing the whole this is

probably like the biggest reason people

don't leave Magento is because once

you're in Magento you have an awesome

ecosystem where everybody for the last

eight to ten years has integrated their

software into Magento so whenever i buy

Magento what I'm really buying is an

e-commerce application it's guaranteed

to scale more or less and connections to

all the myriad of thousands of services

out there in the world that wanted

access to Magento is customer base well

you know oftentimes Magento users need a

better front-end shopping experience

because there is no CMS in magenta and

so what can they do they can either just

pay to customize Magento like crazy and

then have to maintain this sort of

bespoke Magento front end forever or

that can stand up WordPress in front of

it or often Drupal in front of it and

Acquia as some great case studies like

Wilson comics standing up Drupal 7 at

the time or Drupal 8 in front of Magento

or another application on the back end

deep coupling allows you to evolve the

front end or the back in your marketing

automation tool or your payment system

they really like to start to separate

out is concerned so you can't evolve

each thing in its own pace without

having to just replac form because

nobody wants to be platform no

especially in the e-commerce space

nobody wants to have to re-engineer

their whole fulfillment automation

workflow but we'd like them to we think

they're compelling reasons to choose

Drupal of these other applications but

first we have to prove to them that

Drupal Commerce actually is a suitable

headless Commerce engine that they

should adopt and make the core of their

commerce platform and then build around

now going headless is how our largest

customers grew to support thousands of

visitors scaled to support tens of

thousands of orders per day and we had

one site peeking over 10k in a single

hour in response to a national

advertisement campaign you have to get

Drupal out of the front end because as

soon as you hit Drupal rendering if you

use query building form submission

you're toast

you're trying to operate at that scale

just ask some folks here this conference

about how quickly the cash forum table

can bloat

it's also how they like I said before

engage specialized teams for front-end

development so you can actually get a

react team to build your snazzy new

front-end app without them having to

know anything at all about Drupal on the

backend and and again it's also how our

largest customers are launching new

sites without having to spin up a whole

new Drupal instance you know introduce

more maintenance overhead how great

would it be for a commerce organization

with a hundred brand sites to only have

to worry about one security update I

think that would save a lot of Drupal

agencies a lot of time when those

security releases come out so I'm not

gonna talk about this anymore because I

feel like I'm taking up too much time

here in our thirty minutes but if you

want to see more about how we're

delivering headless Commerce you can go

to Matt's talk tomorrow

I think it's actually in this room yeah

in this room at 12:45 and he'll run you

through everything that we've done with

gatsby with react with json api with our

own modules to support headless Commerce

on Drupal 8 a lot of our roadmap is

focused on making this a reality

like to whatever expression you know

that that that means for you alright so

this is it's a trending but it's far

from a settled market I don't know if

we've heard about any of these companies

if I heard of any of these companies

before no some yeah who have you heard

of LastPass yeah this Wreckers hawk we

just announced their partnership with

them for headless alas I heard about

them like six years ago because like

before anybody was even waking up to

what rest was we're now in a post rest

phase but they had

I'm recorded they had an awesome

hypermedia API so if you want to see

like how - media can work like they

mailed it so anyways like these guys are

all great on spriter was introduced to

me by in Vica formerly icons Moulton I

think Greece introduced me to them a

while ago commerce tools is big in

Germany and elsewhere like these are all

companies that are just focused on

basically API servers for scalable

commerce solutions cool also traditional

SAS storefronts are moving this

directions so think about the fact that

Shopify is growing this like whole army

of agencies that specialize in that was

it liquid there liquid front-end

framework that's basically headless

Commerce just with Shopify hosted

checkout forms and frankly their

checkout forms are awesome who else is

doing this big commerce I think aqua is

also looking to partner with them you

know bring big commerce to the table

because big commerce of all the

traditional SAS Turner's has the

crappiest theme store you can imagine

like it's like Drupal levels are bad but

they're the same gig this big company so

so like people are going this direction

because that's how you improve customer

experience is how you scale is how you

adapt and react to change we believe

change is at the center of commerce and

if you can't adapt to change you're dead

in the water and so they're heading this

direction and we believe that Drupal as

a community as a project and Drupal

commerce specifically has sort of a

subset of Drupal has distinct advantages

over these competitors and I don't have

time to really dig into them in the talk

now but just think about licensing and

community community development like the

wall I showed of agencies that are all

invested in making the product better

for everybody

like you don't get that there what you

get is Shopify building an app

marketplace so that everybody wants to

nickel-and-dime you until your Shopify

plus store cost 20 grand a month that

happens I think framework flexibility

you cannot customize the backend of

traditional sass tailored

outflows look in the case studies like

Sport Overmeyer alike LivePerson these

are case studies we have on drupal.org

where you have multiple check outflows a

doesn't for a live person on a three or

four for over my 15 for live person

we're like literally like you can

customize the checkout flow on any

segment you can imagine user will be

deceivers b2b fulfilment pattern is it a

recurring subscription versus a one-off

purchase like Drupal commerce makes all

of these things possible through your

configuration through custom plugins and

and nobody comes close to the level of

flexibility that we've built into this

and this we said it's confidently having

benchmarked our competition we're also

great when it comes to

internationalization cross border

commerce there is no other e-commerce

platform in the world that beats us when

it comes to multi currency address

formatting form generation and Fallot

and validation sorry I'm not killing the

the captions here all over the world

because we basically sub licensed and

contributed back to the Android SDK to

make sure that you could get addresses

anywhere in the world localized to those

countries I thing about payment gateway

coverage multi-domain multi-store

coverage like like anything that comes

into play in cross-border commerce

multinational organizations like its

kind of they're out of the box and

modules like price lists are extending

that functionality even further that

said despite being you know technically

competent we lack the sort of commercial

support behind me right you can go to

Shopify and get support you can go to

Magento and get supported you can go to

the elastic path and get support and in

the Drupal community you'd like you're

kind of on your own if you're a

developer or if you're an agency you

have to build out your own internal

competency or be lucky enough to find us

in slack or find us in an event and have

this answer your question for you and so

our goal really throughout the rest of

this year is to do what it takes to be

able to make Drupal competitive with

these other folks and sort of reposition

ourselves commerce guys as an actual

software vendor

of the commerce modules as opposed to

just kind of like maybe an agency maybe

a team maybe some people that sit on

their laptops at events like I'd

actually kind of reappropriation phanie

based e-commerce framework shoot who are

the other like typical open-source

projects that have support agreements

and WordPress get lab I think you know

their company but yet so so basically

we're trying to head that direction

because we know that if we want Drupal

commerce to continue to grow we have to

be able to meet these needs that

customers that scale Drupal commerce

have and so like we can go and make like

the best technical presentation of

Drupal commerce in the world to an

organization that's ready to spin on it

but if they don't know if there's like a

uptime guarantees on this battery other

hosting platforms they just can't adopt

it not they don't want to not think

wouldn't if they could they just can't

if there aren't delivery partners a

network of people that are skilled and

competent to implement the software for

them and if we aren't catching up at

least on the integration standpoint and

so we're trying to solve all of this and

just make our company more sustainable

by pursuing a product roadmap because

frankly you lose a lot of sleep being

the number two contributor to Drupal as

a seven person team and we cannot do it

forever and my beard is actually getting

gray hairs which okay that's not a big

deal for maybe most of them in the room

there was news for me over the last

couple of years and so the question is

how can we possibly get there because we

don't have the gazillions of dollars

that these companies do we don't have

the armies of Engineers we have a boy on

we have whip a boyish Ivanovich Magento

has like twenty boy yawns that maintain

their core framework or they have 1.6

billion Adobe dollars right behind them

I just it's it's staggering the

of investment these other projects have

and yet we're not out of the picture I

mean we're not competitive we are taking

deals from them but but like Drupal

Commerce has to grow into it and so

we'll get there one step at a time and

then I'll reformat the slides

after this presentation does that look

great in the browser so the first step

and what we're soft lunching here at mid

camp is Santara tool box and the idea is

that like sorry I kind of skipped a step

here my explanation we know where we

want to be so so I'm gonna reverse

engineer now like what are the things we

do along the way to get to the point

where we have like an actual competitive

product the first thing is just being

able to offer support and deliver

updates right you can't have anything

sassy without orchestration around it

without support it in or support

infrastructure and so that's what

Santoro toolbox is I mean it's a

collection of products and tools that

basically make running a Drupal commerce

site easier for agencies more secure and

dependable for merchants hopefully

priced at $99 a month so that any agency

would actually save money selling it for

their customers that I'm happy to talk

about that after the fact but the basic

idea is that there's an updated system

that actually delivers updates when

security releases come out and then

there's a quality monitor that

proactively identifies problems in a

code base so that you can fix them we're

doing this now we're detecting problems

in our own fan bases and fixing them as

a result and then what we launched

Drupal con Nashville as lean commerce

reports were to rebranding to be Sentaro

in sites it's a sales and analytics

dashboard built right into the backend

of Drupal but not dependent on Drupal we

use a no sequel storage back-end and

then just make it all pretty from our

chance to see what's going on in their

store and then finally bundling in their

offers from those integrated technology

partners because that's again part of

what people choose a platform for us who

is your ecosystem and so I'm able to say

now a valera is going to offer you know

a 60 day free trial for Sentara tool box

users to see what sales tax automation

looks like in the backend of Drupal

commerce and that's great like right and

we had to get a Valera to the table we

had to show them that there actually was

something here worth invest

and we had to show PayPal there was

something here worth investing in before

they would come and join us to help

promote and Drupal and Drupal commerce

as a platform so the toolbox is like our

vehicle for tying that all together so

toolbox already provides update

assistance

I think Matt just updated all of our

client sites based on yesterday's

security release which is cool

it already monitors killed quality and

you may have actually used our quality

monitor without knowing it

whenever address tweeted out about

Matt's work on PHP Stan that's all part

of the quality monitoring so not only

can we check to see as your code full of

deprecated code or is it conforming to

Drupal's coding standards we now are

encoding in there problems that we find

in our client sites so what was the

recent example where we were able to

write a pattern for somebody was a

response in a hook and not outside of

the normal response slicer okay and I

don't know what response you're talking

about but we did we were able to create

a pattern that can I guess create a part

of quality monitor to detect when

somebody is like running these

operations out of order or out of

context and causing problems so like we

know if we see a problem once we'll see

it again so we're now encoding those

problems into the quality monitor so we

can just raise those as problems

whenever you know it detects them on

your side and then finally we're also

already bill during incites this this

was live client data I scrubbed it and

then kind of fudging the numbers a

little bit but the basic idea is that

it's it's sales reports conversion rate

graphs funnel optimizations you can see

per channel per campaign how is my site

performing all working and fun to see

live because it means yeah it's cool to

see laughs anyways I'm not going to

belabor the point if you want to check

it out Matt and I are both here and

happy to demo that and talk more about

it but the idea is that like this really

is part about finding sustainable

business model for us as a company

without necessarily costing anybody more

money this is where partners make a lot

of sense like PayPal for example willing

to invest in Drupal commerce because

they know they'll make money on

transaction fees doesn't cost a merchant

anymore for PayPal to pay us to go and

integrate their module and everybody

wins since we're trying to find those

four

like mutually beneficial ways that we

can help people succeed with Drupal

commerce and bring some predictability

and maybe less stress to our business at

the same time next up of course is

building out the support infrastructure

so we've integrated Zendesk into the

tool box and made our core team

available for support in there and what

we found out is that we can actually tie

support tickets to issues on drupal.org

so often what happens if somebody pings

us in slack and says hey this isn't

working and we say oh that's because

this issue hasn't been solved yet and

it's like a six month old issue we've

commented on a few times but never

actually found the time to resolve it

and we don't have any way to actually

track like how many times has that issue

come up the best we can do right now is

look at the follower count on the issue

on drupal.org so what this allows us to

do is correlate issues in Zendesk two

items on drupal.org and then just run a

report and see okay 15 people reported

support requests related to this issue

and that'll be the next one that Boyan

focuses on I mean blind is basically

full-time just maintaining Drupal

commerce and between the rest of its

name we have another full-time person so

a day per week from everybody else and

ideally we'll continue to scale the team

over this year to just put more people

on contribute evelopment and maybe if we

have more of Lisa's time to document

things but I love the fact that SanDisk

allows us to do that I wasn't sure we

would be able to but the big thing for

us is being able to kind of mutual eyes

everybody's efforts toward resolving

bugs that are impacting more people

otherwise we get rabbit hold on a bug

that takes us like two weeks to resolve

and affects two people and that doesn't

feel great so anyways the goal is you

know launch a support program that can

unblock any developer in 15 minutes or

less because we've often seen the things

you're experiencing the next step along

the way will be to launched into our

cloud at Drupal con Amsterdam this will

look like you know something like the

Magento cloud or the Senseo cloud where

you just take an existing platform

as-a-service

white-label it and make it optimized for

Drupal commerce hosting and development

we already have commerce kickstart com

tooled up as this WYSIWYG for building a

composer file I don't have anybody's

seen that or play with it

the idea is that you can kind of like

click and turn on the modules you want

and your composer dot JSON file and then

it will spit out what you need to go and

build the site so the idea is to connect

that to cloud so that instead of just

starting from a vanilla Drupal 8 install

you actually can just pre configure the

modules you want and pre-configured our

demo content if you wanted the Belgrade

theme if you want it and then just

deploy that into the cloud environment

and I mean frankly it works as is

because platform dot sh and others are

really friendly to composer based

workflows but there's definitely a lot

of work to do between here and Amsterdam

so more gray hairs before were able to

launch that and then finally this is

purely about contribs and complete our

REST API support so it's not just about

browsing a product catalog or

implementing facets on a JavaScript

front-end because you're connected into

Search API or something it's not just

about that it's also about everything in

the backend that you need to say fulfill

an order with multiple shipments through

multiple carriers and show tracking

numbers in the app on the front end

right because there's a lot that happens

behind the scenes in e-commerce and have

a full head of this commerce solution

you have to be able to expose that data

to the front end as well so Boyan has

been working primarily on this and then

matt has been supporting him as much as

humanly possible in between client

engagements if you want to see that I

think this demo at kickstart com have

the decoupled flyout right now it does

ok yeah so if you go to demo commerce

kickstart com it's the Belgrave demo and

then the commerce cart API and commerce

cart fly out modules that show basically

just a it doesn't actually it said it a

full JavaScript Add to Cart form flies

in the shopping cart lets you update the

card all via javascript and then proceed

to the checkout form since it's part of

progressively decoupling Drupal by

default for the sake of scalability

customizability and so on and will

continue to tool that up so that you

know what's there on Drupal out of work

will be fully capable and and

competitive with the likes of elastic

path whoo

have an awesome hypermedia API you

should check out because hypermedia is

great so these are the steps along the

way I mean at the end of the day like

we'll tie that all together into Santara

Enterprise but but the gist of it is

like everything is still just Drupal

commerce open-source modules but it's

commerce guys shifting to a company more

like other open-source product vendors

to work better alongside agencies in a

non-competitive manner but also to just

develop a revenue model that makes our

lives a little less crazy and delivers

tremendous overwhelming value to

merchants I mean even just incites

automatic updates and the offers alone

coming in from our technology partners

to make this possible like we'll make it

almost net neutral to any merchant that

adopts it and certainly true for ours so

if you have any questions definitely

email me or grab me while I'm here

because we want to hear feedback like is

this a crazy idea why are you even

trying to do this does this mean you're

trying to dual license things like

Magento no the GPL doesn't allow that

but happy to talk about any of the above

because we really see this as the future

of our business and we see it as the way

that we continue to unblock barriers to

Drupal commerce is growth I read about

this in the blog recently like the way

that Drupal is growing and the way that

Drupal commerce will grow is by becoming

more competitive with these other

platforms who are technically capable

but also providing kind of a robust

commercial support offering as well so I

think that may bring us to time yeah

we're one minute shy so I'm going to not

take questions from here but I will go

out immediately outside these doors and

if you do anybody wants to check I'll be

available for the rest of the week thank

you

[Applause]