What is Augeo?
Augeo is an advanced e-commerce framework allowing serious e-commerce online shops to significantly increase sales through the custom development of advanced features and functionality designed specifically around unique requirements.
What is Augeo?
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.” It may be a bit of a cliché; however, it was exactly that kind of thinking which led us to develop our Augeo framework.
We’d spent years working with a variety of ecommerce systems; Magento, OSCommerce, Actinic, CS Cart, Zen Cart to name a few. But our clients needed something more – more capabilities, more tailored to their needs, a system which could stay with them for the duration. To grow as their business grows.
With a lot of knowledge of ecommerce systems we knew the pros and cons. We knew that each solution offered its own set of unique benefits for the customer, but, also a number of constraints which often led to compromises being made.
Off the shelf systems, as they are known, had the benefits of reduced cost and fast deployment; however, often forced the client to make decisions based on ‘what’s available?’ and not ‘What’s good for my business?’. Bespoke systems, developed for the client were often higher in cost, slow to deploy, but, gave the clients the exact functionality and solution for their needs.
We needed a third way, something which gave the customer speed, functionality, value and durability. We put our thinking caps on.
Augeo is the result of our thinking. An ecommerce framework that brings together the best of both worlds, so that you can get on with the important task of making more money online.
Who is it for?
Augeo has been developed with serious ecommerce businesses in mind.
It’s a complex task for any ecommerce owner to evaluate the range of solutions available and make a decisive move forward. To make it easier to evaluate the options and see where Augeo sits, we have produced the following table to outline the four principal tiers of ecommerce solution:
1. Self build – Combining hosted and ‘out of the box’ solutions, self-builds do not require much technical knowledge or ability. They are typically cheap to set up with the core software generally costing a few hundred pounds or dollars… more
2. Off the Shelf – These solutions include programming code systems such as Magento, OSCommerce, JoomlaShop, ZenCart and CSCart. They allow for the average web designer to customise the look of a standard online shop, selecting and implement various features made available to them via a standard system… more
3. Custom Framework – Augeo sits within this suite of systems, using closed code sets (privately developed code that is not shared with others), a custom framework allows for a greater range of sophisticated capabilities, matching a client’s specific set of needs, to be implemented… more
4. In-house Developments – Typically once an ecommerce company has reached a higher level of turnover and profitability they will make the move towards recruiting their own team of programmers… more
The pros and cons
There are lots of individual reasons for and against each type of ecommerce.
Instead of displaying a very long list of minute differences we have highlighted the main ones for both off the shelf systems and the Augeo system:
| Off the shelf | Custom Augeo Ecommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Features and functionality | Normally extensive lists of functions are available by default, or as part of a series of optional additional add on features… more | Standard functionality is built around the requirements of each individual store using private code from within our extensive code libraries… more |
| Cost | No ‘real’ programming occurs, development costs are associated with integrating a design into the back-end templates for the system… more | An Augeo system is built around a bespoke database structure… more |
| Future proofing | Once a system is active and has been running for a weeks, the site owners or administrators will often identify new routes to increase sales or improve ease of use… more | As each Augeo system is created from bespoke code structures with a development and test server available, future requirements for any kind of functionality can be catered for… more |
| Security | With any off the shelf system there are at least tens of thousands of people with access to the source code of those sites built upon the system… more | The Augeo source code is not available to any third party, making it a lot, lot, harder to hack into our sites… more |
Quality approach
Sitting behind the cool exterior of any website are literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code. A complex tangle of letters, words and syntax, it is these lines which perform all the calculations and functions driving a successful ecommerce system. However, when it comes to websites, not all code is created equal.
There are quick, cheap and dirty ways, to programme sites, which result in short term goals being met; however, these introduce limitations to the system preventing ongoing development of a site. Any new developer casting his eye over the code for the first time, sees a tangled mess of code which needs to be carefully unravelled before the most basic improvements can be made.
Good sites depend on solid programming architecture. By putting good foundations down, clearly identifying the structure on which the site is built, a site can achieve its ongoing goals without the continuous need to redevelop and rebuild a site from scratch.
Augeo not only provides good foundations and solid structures for ongoing site development, we make the process of switching development to another team, such as your own in-house team, a doddle. By commenting code accurately, any new developer introduced to the site can become quickly familiar with the existing system, improving the speed at which the site can be developed. There’s no need to unravel the mysteries of our code, we’ve included its very own instruction manual within it.
Augeo has been designed around an Object Oriented structure to allow for easier comprehension of the system by future programmers. The result improves the reliability of the system and makes it durable for future requirements. The small investment required at these earlier stages results in saving several times the number of hours that would usually be required to achieve ongoing development work.
An added benefit of this approach is that ongoing security testing and hacking prevention can occur on all Augeo systems ensuring they are inherently more secure and robust.