Musing About Flex and osCommerce - A Step Backwards or Leap Forwards?
Sunday, March 11th, 2007 11:18 am | Design & Layout, Articles, General, Development
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If you have read my previous posts about Leapfrog, you will know that I am quite keen on Flex.
Flex is a new programming language by Adobe, developed to convince the world that Flash is not just about cartoons and animation.
It’s aimed at serious developers who want to harness the ubiquitous nature of the Flash Player, installed on over 98% of internet enabled desktops in mature markets (Abobe.com, 2006), and create powerful internet applications with beautiful interfaces.
This article ponders about the idea of creating an osCommerce store in Flex.
The Adobe Flex Demo Store
To showcase the power of Flex, Adobe built a demonstration mobile phone shop.
The aim is to enhance the user shopping experience by making the site more responsive and interactive.
What I like about it
No page refreshes
By not having to refresh the browser the shopper saves time and interuptions are minimised.
UI effects
The filter effects are great. Set your budget and the products rearrange themselves. The user can see at a glance how many products they are eliminating.
It’s intuitive
The whole design makes it easy for shoppers. Things generally work as you would expect them to.
Simple user regisistration & checkout
One of the big plus points for this design is the checkout. No longer must a shopper wade through 4 or 5 HTML pages before they can buy. No longer is their form data deleted from input fields if they go back a page to correct an error (and we all know this leads to shopping basket abandonment).
What I dislike about it
One of the major gripes people have about Flash and Flex is to do with search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engine spiders visiting your site to index it only find the one page, and cannot get access to the content embedded within the SWF file.
This means that your products will not be indexed in the search engines, decreasing the potential number of visits to your store.
This is a BIG sticking point for me. The majority of traffic comes from search engines so to only have the single index page listed could seriously jeopardise the number of shoppers actually visiting your store.
And if you have no hits, it doesn’t matter how good your store looks. You’re not going to sell anything.
Can osCommerce to ported to Flex?
This question has been on my mind for a while now. I’ve been looking around and have not yet seen an osCommerce store ported to Flash, let alone Flex.
Yes some osCommerce stores have the odd Flash banner or navigation menus, but I’m talking about doing it all. Checkout, shopping cart, product details, the lot.
To answer this question, let’s look at it from two different perspectives; technical and commercial.
The technical perspective
Although the project would be complex, I believe osCommerce could be ported to Flex.
Flex would query the existing osCommerce database via Remoting or XML (via a PHP script), and the data would be returned. It would then be displayed within the Flex application as appropriate.
It would take several months to get the UI design perfected and maybe a couple more to sort out integration with the osCommerce database.
But, it is definately possible.
The commercial perspective
So the project is technically possible. But is it viable from a COMMERCIAL perspective. Would it increase the number of sales? Would it make us store owners more money?
In short, I don’t know.
I think users would grow to love the usability and store features, encouraging them to come back and order again. I would also expect lower shopping cart abandonment rates. You might also get hits due to the pure novelty aspect of your store.
But conflicting with this is the SEO problem. Products not being indexed in search engines will decrease your traffic, and therefore the number of sales you make.
Conclusion
Flex excels at creating internet applications, but it remains to be seen whether it is good for creating online shopping sites.
Whilst the technology is there to make a project like a Flex osCommerce store, the issue of search engine accessibility casts a shadow over the whole idea.
Therefore, I would recommend a Flex osCommerce store only in the two following situations.
- You have a limited product range. If you only sell one product then gateway pages can be created to intice people into your store, before redirecting them to the Flex store.
- You don’t rely on search engines to get traffic. Maybe you advertising offline in magazines or on TV. Maybe you advertise on hundreds of sites. In this case the SEO issue is not a problem, because you are already getting the traffic you need.
Finally, another option would be to leave the traditional osCommerce catalog in HTML, but write the administration side in Flex.
This could speed up common admin tasks, such as processing orders or searching for customer details. Since the admin does not been to be indexed in search engines (in fact, it’s preferable it isn’t for securtiy reasons), creating it in Flex could be a step forward.
One last thought
If you think Flex is a new technology that no-one in the real world is ever going to use, you might be suprised by what eBay is up to.
That’s right. eBay has been demoing a Flex application built with Adobe Apollo that allows you to access auctions from the desktop. Have a look at the video.
If it’s good enough for eBay, it’s good enough for me.
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For months now I have been asking myself the same questions. I have to say that I have never come across Leapfrog when searching the contributions. I have constantly searched for new “flex” contributions, but lazily passed by Leapfrog because “flex” wasn’t in the title. There are many contributions for OsCommerce, and each have a part to play; this contribution is the first attempt I have seen to revolutionize the way we can utilize OsCommerce in the future.
As far as search engine compatability, why don’t we just keep the frontend & backend of OsCommerce. By default, you could send users capable of viewing the flex application to the Flex storefront. Spiders and non flash users would only be able to view the PHP storefront so they could still have the ability to purchace, & perform administrative functions. This could be accomplished a number of ways.
The only real problem is that at that stage, it’s no longer able to be released as a contribution because many other OsCommerce contributions would not be supported by the flex frontend. This is true for both the frontend of the website and the backend, so what can flex offer us now? Components just like Leapfrog that allow customers and administrators to get more out of the site than ever before possible.
If there are any other flex oscontributions, please post them on your site. I am going to start working on one of my own as soon as I can think of something that might actually hold a candle to this one.
Months without a reply to this post - we need to get the word out & inspire more potential flex contributors.
Nathan | May 31st, 2007 at 12:00 am
I just recently stumbled over Flex (mainly because I started reading about Actionscript 3.0). The exact same question came up for me - would it be possible to port osCommerce to a Flex application.
In a first thought i actually mused that it would not be such a huge problem to design a (better) user interface, but was more concerned about the data binding.
I would even go as far as saying it would probably be a commercially interesting project for the developers - basing the new online store on a osCommerce database, but building a new frontend and administration could well be a possiblity to sell the final product.
Maybe there are some other developers out there who would be interested in setting up such a project? Let me know and I´ll be around too.
Armin | August 14th, 2007 at 2:21 pm