I’ve had a chance to visit Magento Meetup 14 at March 15, 2016. This is my 4th meetup and I mentioned it attracts more and more Magento community members each time. Ben Marks decided to join us here in Dublin this time to answer Magento 2 questions.

Location

At the previous Meetup event Stephen announced new location. It was new Monsoon Consulting office located at the 1 Terminus Mills, Clonskeagh, Dublin 6. From Dublin city center you may find 2 buses #11 and #145 towards the office.

Pic 1. Stephen’s kick off speach before going to pub

Topics

Beer was great. I did couple of… Oh, sorry, wrong section. This time there were 3 topics for discussion. All were great and fun. Especially when we saw Ben’s presentation with only one Q&A slide 🙂

Pic 2. Magento Community

Streamlining Delivery to Meet Customers Expectations

Liam Kehoe from Scurri.com shared great approach for delivery and customer expectations. The new www.scurri.co.uk service elables Merchants to have single API for shipping carriers. Basically the service is designed in the way that simplifies and automate Delivery Management for a warehouse.

Scurri team also provides Magento integration. All order data (shipping, billing addresses, customer) is transfered via API to Scurri system. A cosy dashboard allows you to see number of orders with errors, ready to ship order and ready to print orders.

Pic 3. Liam is speaking about Scurri

Once order is ready to print, all carrier labels might be generated. Company works as a SAAS (Software as a Service) model, so Merchant may scale together with Scurri.

The service may be used for Irish Merchants as well. The AnPost integration is in progress, so follow these guys for news. As for now, there are 25 carrier integrations.

The only con with the integration is that Merchant still should have its own shipping rates for Magento Checkout.

The Business of Magento 2

Ben Marks, Magento Evangelist from USA came with “The Business of Magento 2” slides. Actually, everyone was happy to ask Magento related questions.

Pic 4. Ben Marks and custom stickers set

“We are open for your contributions, feedback, pull requests, documentation changes” said Ben.

There were lots of questions for Ben. Primarily related to Magento 1 support. As for now Magento is going to be supported for next 3 years after Magento 2.0 GA release. It seems like Web agencies and Merchants aren’t 100% sure that 3 years will be enough to upgrade everyone to Magento 2. Finger crossed.

Pic 5. Ben Marks answers questions

Last question is: Will Magento Community be ready for Magento 2 Quarterly Feature releases? How this is going to affect Merchants who expect to get updates 3-4 times a year?

Ecommerce in Ireland in 2015

Last topic was presented by David Campbell, Retail Excellence Ireland and Gerard Keohane from Studio Forty9. Gerard shared results of one interesting project. He went through 2014-2015 Retail Excellence Ireland’s 2015 Ecommerce Survey.

Pic 6. Gerard is showing Retail Excellence Ireland report

Gerard kindly shared his Presentation.

It is interesting that 3 topics are enough before running to the pub.

Next time I am planning to visit PHP Dublin Meetup and Docker Meetup. Stay in touch.