Sales: Call 877.832.5289 (N America)Interview: Man Junk on Magento
Our team had definitely done its due diligence when analyzing other products that were both based on a fee model and open source. We wanted a product that we know had a good community behind it, a robust feature set, and was scalable. After comparing and contrasting we chose Magento!
Joe Rowett, Managing Director
- Tell us a bit about Man Junk and your company
Man Junk was founded in 2007. Just a few days ago we launched our website and first product an intimate body wash for men. In the last 1.5 years we went through 30 formulations to come up with the best natural solution that could aid all the problems associated with men's intimate hygiene. Unlike any other product Man Junk is addressing a growing demand in the personal care sector, an estimated $12 billion dollar market.
- Why did you choose Magento for the project?
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Our team had definitely done its due diligence when analyzing other products that were both based on a fee model and open source. We wanted a product that we know had a good community behind it, a robust feature set, and was scalable. After comparing and contrasting we chose Magento!
- What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?
Well since everyone on our team comes from a technology background we take "technologies" very seriously. As you figured out we are running the core Magento product built on a LAMP stack. We are also running another open source solution for our advertising and affiliate needs, OpenX. It was decided to also integrate the Google Website Optimizer for multi-variate and A/B testing on our front-pages.
- What other solutions did you consider and/or evaluate?
We considered and analyzed a number of solutions such as OSCommerce, Cube Cart, Zen Cart, but narrowed them to just a couple including Foxycart for its web2.0 look and feel and LiteCommerce because of its ease of integration which we have done before. Honestly none of the other solutions made us feel comfortable in the long term except for Magento.
- What are your future plans with Magento?
We had removed a lot of features of Magento to speed launch, but we plan to re-skin the whole Magento solution and utilize the entire application in the next 6 months as we scale our business.
- Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?
As we said above, Magento is a very robust solution for an ecommerce integration. We can't say it's been an easy task to implement, so we would recommend going with one of their preferred partners for configuration and professional services. But to say the least you're not going to find another enterprise ecommerce application with an ever so important thriving community.
- Any final words of wisdom?
Check out Man Junk's site and the Magento integration and tell us what you think! We love feedback .... oh and thank you Magento for creating a fantastic product!
1cooldar |posted August 19 2008
may I ask which prefer partner did you guys worked with on man junk?
2a2b2c2d |posted August 19 2008
I am unsure what you are asking. Partner for what aspect?
3cooldar |posted August 19 2008
the company that help you setup and launch magento
4a2b2c2d |posted August 20 2008
http://www.veloxmedia.com
5pilch from Westcountry, UK|posted August 20 2008
Hi Manjunk!
Just to let you know that I just received the following message after I was redirected to PayPal site to make a purchase.
“Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address”
Only dummy information was supplied in order to test out the site from start to finish.
Regards,
Rich.
6a2b2c2d |posted August 20 2008
Hey Rich!
Thanks for letting us know. The Paypal checkout appears to be working okay unless you enter dummy data. It appears if Paypal detects the address is not valid, then it displays that error. However, it may be a good idea for us to disable that to ensure everyone has a seamless order process.
Thanks Again!
7pilch from Westcountry, UK|posted August 20 2008
My pleasure a2b2c2d!
I wasn’t expecting a reply back from the dev’s to be honest so I’m feeling pretty good about myself that I raised this issue.
Would you reveal where exactly in PayPal a developer can monitor ‘dummy data’ on addresses?
Regards,
Rich.
8a2b2c2d |posted August 20 2008
There is no way to view dummy data being entered by customers—only completed order will show up in Paypal. The shipping address verification is a setting within Paypal which can be enabled/disabled.
9pilch from Westcountry, UK|posted August 20 2008
Ah I see, the Paypal configuration options is what I really meant anyway not the ‘viewing od dummy customer data’.
Thanks for getting back on this one! Good luck with ManJunk!
Regards,
Rich.
10J.T. |posted August 20 2008
Are you guys getting enough traffic to the homepage for split testing to become useful? I’ve played with Google Optimizer a few times but lost interest as it can take a while to accumulate enough data for things to become significant. I didn’t see all homepage variations but you may want to also include one with a hot woman urging the boys to clean up. Might have more of an impact than looking at toned geezers.
11nikefido from New Haven, CT|posted August 21 2008
So....Correct me if I’m totally wrong here...but did you guys ONLY use magento for the cart and skip every other part of Magento’s functionality? It looks like everything is a custom built solution (read:your own built web pages) until you add an item to a cart...which then gives you some pretty stock Magento-stock-theme-looking blocks inside of your own manjunk theme.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool site but in a technical matter, idk why Magento chose you guys to be in a blog post when all you are using is a few modules from Magento (I’m sure there’s some sort of deal going on behind the scenes, but that’s pretty usual business practice).
I guess my one complaint is that this site looks like it just uses a sliver of Magento’s functionality and just circumvented the rest. (Emphasis on “looks like") 0 for instance, use of very quick-loading pages that end in .php)
P.S. - Sounds like a cool idea for a product, but I bet you have to be very careful how you market that stuff!!
12a2b2c2d |posted August 21 2008
@J.T. - We are really liking the website optimizer. We found it is important to push an appropriate amount of traffic for the number of landing pages you have to get valuable feedback. Our only beef with website optimizer is that it makes our site non-w3c compliant. Google does offer a w3c compliant fix but we found a random amount of people were experiencing design flaws when using this fix.
@nikefido - The Magento software allowed us to quickly integrate & design a checkout system with exactly the features we needed, keeping our development time line right on schedule. I would not say we are only using those features as we use the robust back-end for our client and order management. The cart, checkout process, shipping calculations, customer management, order management and shipping is a majority of an eCommerce system. As our product line expands we plan to more heavily integrate into the CMS system, however, for now it has provided flexibility for us to use only the parts we need. We found that impressive from an eCommerce platform.
13nikefido from New Haven, CT|posted August 22 2008
I give my thumbs up, along with an apology for sounding very..uh..strongly opinioned
14nikefido from New Haven, CT|posted August 22 2008
is your split testing randomly choose which home page to show?
15a2b2c2d |posted August 22 2008
No worries nikefido, we understand where you were coming from.
The split testing evenly spreads traffic over each of our landing pages. The test sets a cookie to remember which version you saw so that if you refresh or return to that page, you see the same thing. It then tracks a conversion upon a successful order.
16wehoman |posted October 12 2008
A little help please:
I’m new to Magento but learning quickly what an awesome project this is! Like Rich (pilch) I too received the following message when an real customer tried to purchase a product:
“Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address”
Two days ago, I ran a transaction through on Paypal Sandbox and everything was fine....had no problems. Do I need to set The IPN preferences in my PayPal Merchant Profile? Here are the payment settings in the Magento Admin Panel for my site:
System -> Configuration -> Payment Methods -> Paypal Standard
Enabled: Yes
Title: PayPal
Payment Action: Sale
Type: IPN
New order status: Processing
Transaction Type: Aggregate