The first commercial transaction on the Internet occurred between students at MIT and Stanford… for a bit of marijuana! eCommerce has come a long way since then, facilitated in no small part by open source PHP projects. osCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Drupal Commerce, PHP SaaS carts power much of eCommerce today. This session provides a brief retrospective of a decade of PHP eCommerce projects, where we are now, and a look to the future of eCommerce with PHP.

1. eCommerce and Open Source
Pot, PHP, and Unlimited Potential
@benmarks / #phpnz15

2. Who am I?
Ben Marks // @benmarks
Evangelist @ Magento

3. Who am I?
● A late bloomer
● Autodidact
● Autoracing & ColdFusion
● eCommerce & PHP
● Autoracing & PHP
● eCommerce & PHP

4. Why do I care?
● My Career
● My Friends' Careers
● Future careers
● eCommerce market is growing
I want to get a sense of where we are headed by looking at
where we've come from.

5. eCommerce Begins
Prehistory

6. eCommerce Begins: Prehistory
Communication facilitates transactions.
Naturally, the first transaction is...

7. eCommerce Begins: Prehistory

8. eCommerce Begins: Prehistory
Closed systems, large organizations
Initial problem: how to translate virtual shopping to
consumers of the time?

9. eCommerce Begins: Prehistory
1983: Viewtron

10. eCommerce Begins: Prehistory
1984: CompuServe's "Electronic Mall"

11. eCommerce Begins
Early WWW

12. eCommerce Begins: Early WWW
● 1990-1991: Tim Berners-Lee, WorldWideWeb, HTML
● 1994: Netscape 1.0 & SSL

13. eCommerce Begins: Early WWW
● May 1995: NSF removes restriction of commerce on
the Internet
● Three months later, Netscape's IPO peaked at $75/
share.
● June 6, 1995: PHP 1.0

14. eCommerce Begins: Early WWW
● 1995: Amazon sells its first book
● 1997: Amazon goes public
● 1995: eBay (née AuctionWeb) sells its first broken
laser pointer.
● 1998: eBay goes public

15. PHP eCommerce
Emergence

16. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Shift from ISP-dominated marketplaces:
Power to the vendors
Power to the people

17. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: (Other languages & platforms!)
"First e-commerce project 1999, back when Intershop still
was written in Perl ... (not Java). I created a few cartridges
for it (today they would be called modules or plugins)."
- -Vinai Kopp (@VinaiKopp), netzarbeiter.com

18. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: PHP
"We put up a store with some apple equipment for resell,
[eventually bringing in some Malaysian kids with stolen
credit cards]."
- Mathew Beane (@aepod)

19. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: TEP/osCommerce
● Started by Harald Ponce de Leon in March 2000
● Ubiquitous 2.2 came in February 2003
● Many forks: Zen Cart, CREloaded

20. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: WP e-Commerce
"WP e-Commerce has existed since 2006, I've been a lead
developer for it since 2010. It has been downloaded roughly
2.8 million times and, depending what source you pick, runs
approximately 3% of all e-commerce sites on the web"
- Justin Sainton (@JS_Zao)

21. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: Übercart (2007)

22. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early players: Übercart (2007)
"[In 2005] we were using osCommerce to power the store
and had a small marketing site in Drupal 4.6... Ultimately
we decided to bet big on Drupal"
- Ryan Szrama (@ryanszrama), Drupal Commerce

23. PHP eCommerce: Emergence
Early PHP eCommerce is about the convergence between
catalog and content, with openness driving innovation.

24. PHP eCommerce
Adolescence

25. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Rise of the Platforms: CREloaded (2004)

26. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Rise of SaaS Platforms: Volusion (2004)

27. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Drupal Commerce
● Remember Ryan? After Übercart, Ryan founded
Commerce Guys and Drupal Commerce / Commerce
Guys.
● Currently/formerly powering 60k+ shops (via BuiltWith)

28. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Side Note: AdWords ('00) & Analytics ('05)

29. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Magento (2007)
● Varien, Inc. ZF-based* answer to the mess of
osCommerce
● Build a platform, then build an eCommerce app

30. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Magento (2007)
● Feature-rich, robust (if difficult) code
● Rapid adoption & growth into enterprise space led to
acquisition by eBay in 2011

31. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Rise of the SaaS Platforms: Part Deux!

32. PHP eCommerce: Adolescence
Rise of the eCommerce App Store
MagentoConnect
WooCommerce

33. PHP eCommerce
Maturity

34. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Where are we now?
U.S.: $395.28, 12.4%
China: $181.62, 65.1%
Japan: $118.59, -7.2%
U.K.: $99.19, 13.7%
Germany: $53.00, 12.8%
France: $36.99, 11.0%
Australia: $26.77, 6.0%
Canada: $24.25, 14.2%
Spain: $21.57, 16.2%
Italy: $19.80, 22.6%
eMarketer's 2013 projections, inc. % growth over 2012

35. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Where are we now?
$1 Trillion in eCommerce sales of goods & services
worldwide in 2013, according to eMarketer.

36. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
More choices than ever

37. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Population
● More & more people (consumers) coming online:
● 1995: 16M
● 2001: 458M
● 2006: 1B
● 2013: 2.7B
● 2014: 3B
● Emerging markets, esp. Asia/Pac, Africa

38. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Mobile

39. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Mobile
● Mobile access by consumers
● Mobile savvy by merchants (RWD sites)
● Mobile mentality

40. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Mobile
Mobile access by consumers:
● 91% of all people on earth have a mobile phone
● 56% of people own a smart phone
● 50% of mobile phone users, use mobile as their
primary Internet source
● 80% of time on mobile is spent inside apps
● 72% of tablet owners purchase online from their
tablets each week

41. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Mobile
Mobile savvy by merchants (RWD sites)
Merchants are going where consumers are
and they need platforms which allow this

42. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
Factors: Enterprise
● Enterprises are learning to use OSS
● PHP is becoming more and more robust
● Enterprise demands are bringing sophistication of
frameworks "up"

43. PHP eCommerce: Maturity
"Enterprise" Problems
● Big data: arbitrary expansion, need to dive
● Testability
● Deployments
● Integrations

44. PHP eCommerce
Future

45. PHP eCommerce: Future
Solving "Enterprise" Problems:
● Big data: NoSQL, Analytics SaaS
● Testability: Framework architecture
● Deployments: git, virtualization (HHVM), Composer
● Integrations: Service-oriented architecture, FIG

46. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?
"I can't imagine ever doing a web project outside of Drupal,
I'm in it for the long haul. Drupal won't be leaving PHP any
time soon, if ever, and we're only just now unleashing the
power of Symfony2 and the other PHP libraries we've added
as dependencies for Drupal 8."
-Ryan Szrama

47. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?
"Things will have more interoperability -- packages will be
available that can be installed to both Magento and Sylius
(for example)."
- Chris Jones (@leeked)

48. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?
"I think we’re in a very good state right now, especially as
the companies began to change their mind about PHP and
also consider it for “Enterprise” solutions, which was a
problem for a very long time."
- Tobias Zander (@airbone42)

49. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?
"Projects like HHVM … are pushing the boundaries of what
currently is possible, but that is happening all the time in
some way or another"
- Vinai Kopp

50. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?
"Magento 2."
- Me

51. PHP eCommerce: Future
So, what about Magento 2?
● Composer-based; SemVer
● Complete, configurable DI
● Full test coverage
● Plugin architecture & AOP for customization
● GA = Q4 2015

52. PHP eCommerce: Future
● Your thoughts?

53. PHP eCommerce: Future
ben.marks@magento.com // @benmarks