What Is X.Commerce (Beyond Magento)?

There are different opinions on the future of Magento under the stewardship of eBay. And it is difficult to judge whether or not eBay/Paypal will be able to generate the necessary market relevance for X.Commerce without the support of additional shop system providers. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to examine X.Commerce carefully since the team there is using this initiative to tackle the still all-too common deal breaker for e-commerce: that is, the effort-laden system integrations.

Roman Zenner of ecomPunk summarized some of his conclusions from the Innovate Developer Conference as follows:

"One result from this conference: X.commerce is not Magento. Rather, is is a kind of cloud-hosted service which allows to interconnect all kinds of different, ecommerce-related services, such as payment and logistics providers, different kinds of marketplaces – most notably eBay, of course! – and so on.

As such, the X.commerce platform is free and open to all kinds of shop systems, so in theory someone could use this technology without bringing Magento or even eBay to the table. X.commerce fabric – which is its official name – can even be downloaded and run on one’s own server. In effect, developers using this platform are independent from both Magento and eBay and in theory could go their merry ways with completely different systems."

As expected, the eBay team was not too pleased with the critical review from ecomPunk ("X.commerce & Magento: Way to go for 21st century ecommerce?").

In response, the ecomPunks had a chance to interview VP/GM of X.Commerce Matthew Mengerink. The interview is transcribed and available for viewing.

Congratulations by the way to Alex, Kai and Roman for their successful start of ecomPunk. The e-commerce industry can do well with a few more critical voices.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[Matthew Mengerink]

I think I've been misquoted! :-)

The "not too pleased" doesn't really hit the mark for me. I don't look at criticism as a bad thing. I learn from it, grow, develop something better and move forward. I don't lament critical articles. I read them, engage the author, and create something better for the ecosystem.

Otherwise, I think you captured the essence of the X.commerce Fabric well. We are looking to have commerce in the best place it can be and an open framework is critical to that journey.

Some other things in X.commerce that aren't mentioned are the X.com site itself and the future application/service store. X.com is developing into a site that is a meeting ground for Merchants and Developers. It will be critical to allow these groups to find one another, rate the services offered and innovate together. The store front will be necessary to allow people to sell their services more broadly over the Fabric to other services, merchants, or whomever is interested in consuming them.

With all of that said, Magento remains an essential part of X.commerce.

Thanks,
Matthew

[X.commerce]

It's recently launched by ebay and we can say it will be beyond the Magento as it has been enhanced by the experience of eBay's storefront.