FAQ: Technology

Question 1

What is a multistore?

Accepted Answer

Multistore allows you to run multiple stores on a single engine and a single product catalog. A channel can be a separate market, a language version, B2B sales alongside B2C, or a mobile app that uses the same data as the website.
The independence of settings is key. You can enable the same product in one channel and disable it in another, and promotional rules are designed to be separate, so a coupon or special promotion works only where it’s supposed to. Without this separation, every promotion intended for a single channel ends up requiring manual workarounds.
In practice, it is the multistore feature that provides the technical foundation for product assortments available exclusively in the app or for limited-edition products targeted at a specific market. The rest is a business decision: which product, in which channel, and for how long.

Question 2

What is a Bundle Product in Magento?

Accepted Answer

A Bundle Product is one of the product types in Magento, alongside Simple, Configurable, and Grouped products. It is used to sell a bundle: the customer sees a single product page with its own name, description, photo, and URL, while underneath it contains several separate products from the catalog.
The price and SKU of the bundle operate in two modes. “Dynamic” calculates them from the components, so the bundle’s price is the sum of the component prices, and the SKU is generated based on the products included in the bundle. “Fixed” allows you to enter your own SKU and price, independent of the catalog, and this is the mode in which you can set up a discount for the bundle.
The most common surprise concerns inventory. A Bundle Product does not have its own inventory; its availability is determined by the component with the fewest remaining units. If, in a bundle of three products, you have two units of one product, the bundle is available in quantities of two, regardless of how many of the other products are in stock. The bundle’s composition is set by the administrator, who assigns products to options and specifies the quantity of each SKU; the customer can increase the number of bundles purchased but cannot change what’s inside.

Question 3

What is an EAN code?

Accepted Answer

EAN (European Article Number) is a product number that identifies a product beyond the boundaries of a single company. The standard is managed by GS1, and the numbers are assigned, not invented, so two different products cannot have the same EAN. It is the sequence of digits under the barcode on the packaging.
It’s easy to confuse it with a SKU, and it’s important to keep these terms distinct. A SKU is your internal code; you set it yourself, and it applies only to your store and your warehouse. The EAN is common across the entire market: the same product has the same number at your store, at your competitors’, and at the manufacturer’s.
In online sales, the EAN determines whether a product can be matched to third-party databases. Marketplaces, price comparison sites, and product feeds match listings based on the EAN, so a missing EAN or an incorrectly entered number can remove the product from the sales channel where it was supposed to be sold. Bundles assembled in your own store usually do not have an EAN, because no one has manufactured such a product; only sets packaged by the manufacturer receive an EAN.

Question 4

What is an ERP system?

Accepted Answer

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a system that brings a company’s operations together in one place: inventory, orders, purchases from suppliers, purchase prices, and accounting. The online store is then one of the channels that uses this dataset, rather than a separate entity with its own version of the truth about how much of each item is in stock.
For online sales, the most important factor is what the ERP system knows about availability. When the store sells a product, the ERP system removes it from inventory; when a delivery or return comes in, the inventory is replenished. Without this synchronization, the store will sooner or later sell something it doesn’t have, and the customer will find out only after paying.
The line between their responsibilities can be confusing, because the ERP system and the store often describe the same product. The store is responsible for the presentation and what the customer sees, while the ERP system handles what the company actually has in stock and how much it cost. Problems arise when the online store handles something the ERP system cannot map - for example, when it sells bundles consisting of several products, while the ERP system only recognizes individual items. In such cases, you must decide which system will manage this information before launching your first campaign.

Question 5

What is an Order Management System (OMS)?

Accepted Answer

An Order Management System (OMS) is a system whose sole purpose is to receive orders from various channels and standardize them before they are processed further. An online store, Allegro, Amazon, and any other marketplace transmit orders in different formats, with different sets of fields and different status logic. The OMS standardizes them into a single format.
With a single sales channel, such a layer is unnecessary, because the store can communicate directly with the ERP. The need arises as the number of platforms increases: without an OMS, each integration adds its own rules to a system that was never designed for multichannel operations, and every new marketplace requires changes in the same place.
OMS is sometimes confused with two related systems, and it's important to draw a clear line between them. ERP handles the company's finances, purchasing, and accounting. WMS manages physical warehouse operations, including storage locations and order fulfillment. OMS sits between them both and ensures only that orders from every channel look the same before either of these systems sees them.

Question 6

What are recurring payments?

Accepted Answer

Recurring payments, sometimes called recurring billing, allow you to charge a customer on a regular basis, for example, monthly or with each subsequent subscription delivery. The customer provides payment information and gives consent once, and subsequent charges occur automatically, without logging into the bank or re-entering card details.
They most often work with a payment card. The card details remain with the payment processor, and the store receives a token it uses to initiate subsequent charges. Recurring payments are offered by Polish payment providers, including Przelewy24, Autopay, Tpay, and PayU, but the specifics of their service - such as variable amounts or procedures for expired cards - vary among them.
For a subscription-based store, this is a must: without recurring payments, each delivery would require the customer to pay manually, and the regularity they pay for would turn into a series of reminders. At the same time, the customer must be able to withdraw their consent, and the terms and conditions should clearly state when and for what they will be charged.

Question 7

What is payment card tokenization?

Accepted Answer

Card tokenization involves converting a payment card number into a token - a string of characters with no value outside of a specific payment system. The customer enters their card details into the operator's form; the operator stores it on its side, and the store receives only the token. The store then uses this token to authorize subsequent charges.
In an online store, tokenization enables two things: one-click payments for subsequent purchases and recurring payments for subscriptions. The secure storage where the payment processor keeps card data is sometimes called a Vault.
The most important benefit for the store is that it does not store card numbers in its own database. A token leak does not grant access to the card, and the store does not assume responsibility for storing the most sensitive payment data. When choosing a payment processor, it's worth checking how its tokens behave when a bank issues a new card to a customer.

Question 8

Why does e-commerce need a backup?

Accepted Answer

A backup — a copy of the code — is required to keep the site running. Continuity is especially important from an e-commerce point of view: every hour of store downtime can directly stop us from generating revenue. A mundane reason like physical disk damage on the server is one of the reasons regular backups are mandatory. But making backups serves many more purposes:
 the option to create alternate environments where you can comfortably develop different features in isolation and test changes without touching the live store (although Ansible auto-installers or Docker-based solutions are much better suited for that),
 daily backup cycles let us travel back in time to any point — e.g. when a hard-to-identify problem appeared on our site, or it was discovered after enough time had passed that the consequences are hard to fix,
 running the backup service to the right standards is also today one of the GDPR (RODO) requirements.
Having a backup shouldn't lull our vigilance. Just having backups doesn't mean we're properly protected against an outage. Without periodic tests that involve recovering the service via the so-called disaster recovery procedure, it may turn out that copies sitting on backup servers are worth nothing to us.
If you want to read more on how to ensure the stability of an online store, especially during Black Friday or pre-holiday shopping, do read the article on our blog.

Question 9

What is a framework?

Accepted Answer

A framework is the skeleton for building an application — a kind of template containing repeatable, ready-to-use software components. Using a framework saves the developer time needed to write the application — by reusing ready elements, they can focus more on what is specific to the application.

Question 10

What is PWA?

Accepted Answer

For e-commerce, PWA (Progressive Web App) is a store "shell" built using technologies similar to those used for mobile apps. The difference is that the code runs in the browser — the user can use the same version of the site on desktop by entering the URL in the browser bar, and also launch it via an icon on their smartphone home screen, without having to install another app.
For that reason PWA is a good compromise if we can't afford to maintain both a store and a separate mobile app. Even though the store keeps the look and functions of an app, we don't have to publish it on Google Play or the App Store. 
Thanks to PWA we can deliver a smoother experience to the user: responsiveness ensures the layout fits any device, and caching lets the store work even out of network coverage. Importantly, it is often possible to build a PWA on top of an existing online store, including on the Magento platform.

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