Adding features does not mean adding value

Features and value are two different things and sadly, it can be slightly confusing.

Building a new feature doesn’t necessarily mean more value to the end-user and feature overload can even lead to users’ confusion, which we all want to avoid.

By not associating “features” with “value”, it’s easier to make decisions about what to and what not to build.

All in all, the challenge really is into figuring out what will add value as I think it’s really easy to fall into the “let’s build this cool feature (even though the users don’t really care about it)” trap and waste precious time.

Figuring out what will add value can be fairly complex and I’m not sure it’s something that can be guessed that easily. For this reason, one approach is often to release a lot of “beta” features and eventually kill the features that do not work. By doing this, you avoid supporting useless features and don’t spend months fine tuning features that’ll never be used.

This is only one method among many others and is out of scope anyway for this post. I really just wanted to make the point that adding features doesn’t necessarily mean adding value, figuring out what will add value and what features to build is another problem.

What do you think?

I’ve been evaluating a lot of e-commerce solutions lately for a particular project I’m working on and I’m really disappointed by the open source offering in general: most e-commerce solutions out there are just heavy and/or a total mess to customize.

Because we’re talking open source here, most platforms are built using php. I wouldn’t say that the reason they ended up this way (messy) is because they were built using php, but for me it was a great opportunity to look for other e-commerce solutions built using newer programming languages like Ruby and Python.

This quest for e-commerce solutions built with new technologies and best practices in mind led me to a couple of very promising platforms built with Ruby on Rails or Python Django.

I’m not going to review the solutions in this post as my goal is only to raise the awareness about the simple fact that if you’re not satisfied with the current classic php platforms like OSCommerce, X-Cart or Magento, there are some decent alternatives.

Let’s have a look.

Spree shopping cart

I have to admit that so far, Spree is my favorite solution. It’s built using the popular Web framework Ruby on Rails and it’s very lightweight and clean. One could argue that it’s lightweight because it’s still missing a lot of features most php carts have, but it’s actually pretty complete for such a young product. You can have a quick look at the features list here.

Among the features, you will find localization, extensible design, use of css frameworks, custom tax and shipping rules, advanced product categories, SEO friendly, one page checkout and many others.

Another great thing with this solution is the community. Like any open source project, one of the most important aspect is the community support and also plugins built by this community. No problems for Spree, it delivers. There’s an active discussion board and also an extension repository with around 40 extensions ready for download and installation.

Visit the project’s website or have a look at the demo, it’s worth a look.

I haven’t tested spree yet in a production environment, but so far I’m impressed by what I see in my development environment.

Substruct

Substruct is another interesting alternative based on Ruby on Rails, but it is not as complete as Spree shopping cart. The project is hosted on Google Code and while that’s absolutely fine with me, the problem is that the project doesn’t have its own central website (with extensions, basic information, support, etc.) like Spree. It’s not as mature as Spree is.

If you have a quick look at the demo admin section, you’ll also find out that there are a lot of features missing and that it might be a problem to build a decent e-commerce website with all the functionalities you would expect.

For very simple needs though, it could end up being a very lightweight and easy to maintain solution.

For more information (download, demo, support), visit the project’s Google Code page here.

Satchmo

Satchmo is the third non-php e-commerce platform I’d like to cover. Unlike the other two solutions, Satchmo is built using the popular Python Web framework, Django.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about satchmo, but it’s a little bit painful to set up for the first time as you need quite a lot of dependencies. Usually I wouldn’t bother too much about that aspect as once your initial setup is all set, you’re good to go, but it could end up being a problem.

The problem here is that because of all the required dependencies, I would be worried about deploying this in a production environement on a traditional shared hosting. Feel free to have a look at the impressive requirements list.

The requirements might be impressive and the whole thing not that polished, but the feature list is pretty interesting. Among the features, there are some you won’t find in a lot of e-commerce platforms like support for downloadable and subscription products, support for rating and comments, related products suggestions and many more. Feel free to have a look at the features list for more information.

Conclusion

As mentionned earlier, this post was definitely not a review of every e-commerce solution out there: it’s more of a reminder that there might be some pretty good solutions that aren’t built using php.

I love php, but the code base of e-commerce platforms using php usually end up being really messy. In fact, it’s not just the case for e-commerce platforms.

Newer programming languages like Ruby and Python offer a lot of advantages over php and it’s definitely worth considering these newer languages for your next projects, being e-commerce or not.

Thanks to @kinaze on twitter for discovering (or letting me know about) that one.

The Yahoo Developer Network have released a short guide on the best practices for speeding up your website. It is divided in seven categories and contains 34 great tips to make your pages load faster and improve user experience.

There are some good tips in the guide and every web developer (or website owner) should have a look at it.

Here’s the guide: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

I got that one from Problogger today and I think it’s worth sharing. It’s a talk Kevin Rose gave at fowa (future of web apps) in which he’s sharing some tips on taking your site/web app from one to a million users. You know, kinda useful.

If you don’t know who Kevin Rose is, he’s the founder of the popular site Digg.

Honestly, it’s not rocket science, but I really liked the part where he talked about hacking the press, getting some coverage from big news networks (WallStreet journal, TechCrunch, etc.), using events to demo your product and getting influencers to talk about you.

Whether you build web apps, websites or blogs, there are surely some useful tips you can get from this talk.

Enjoy.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.