eBay have been getting a lot of hype for the past month or so over their X.commerce platform, a lot of announcements have been made at the Innovate 2011 conference in San Francisco this week, but what does it really mean to the Magento store owner?
I was lucky enough to meet up with Magento at the London ecommerce expo this week so naturally I had a few questions for them.
What’s the X.commerce Ecosystem?
You may have heard the term ecosystem being used in combination with X.commerce, this phrase has been coined to describe the end-to-end capabilities of eBay’s marketplace, PayPal as a payment provider and Magento as a shopping cart, not to mention inclusion of Milo (app for searching local stores in real time), RedLaser (bar code scanning application for mobile comparison shopping) and Zong (payment system for the Android platform).
The ecosystem is designed to connect developers and merchants by offering a complete collection of ecommerce capabilities. X.commerce provides the foundation to develop the technologies for today’s world of social, mobile, local and digital-driven commerce, offering ecosystem developers need to create new solutions such as shopping carts, payment services, stock management, multi-channel commerce and SEO.
In short, X.commerce is a platform that enables communication between other platforms or functionality plug-ins that address some aspect of the commerce marketplace. At the moment, that amounts to not a lot, but in the future there should be no limits to what developers may build via these ‘capabilities’.
X-fabric binds together the ecosystem
The X.commerce ‘fabric’ is at the centre of interaction, it’s a messaging infrastructure allowing different platforms or functionality to communicate and interact with each other. X.commerce call these platforms ‘capabilities’, communication is always through the fabric rather than from capability to capability.
How does this affect Magento users?
Well at the moment it’s not going to alter things a great deal for Magento users right now, and I can see it gives us more reason to use the Magento platform, as it’s role is crucial within the X.commerce ecosystem.
As ecosystem developers start working on building X.commerce capabilities, we will begin to see some interesting things happening. It’s at this point that we will be able to see Magento users capitalise over the benefits of the ecosystem.
Other news this week: Magento have just launched a new version of Magento connect, which is already the world’s largest vertical e-commerce platform marketplace, now includes support for MagentoGo, (Magento’s SaaS shopping cart system). On top of all of this Fisheye this month have been recognised by Magento for our outstanding design capabilities on the Magento Platform and have made us official ‘MagentoGo Design Partners’ more news about that shortly.
