Skype on Board

As an early advocate of Web 2.0, nothing please me more than seeing mashups happening across the Internet on a grand scale. So when I saw an official Magento Blog post containing the words Magento and Skype, I was instantly very interested. Well, this isn’t a mashup. The bottom line is that Skype now use Magento. I’m fairly confident that Magento would also use Skype, but I’ll leave that for one of their developers to confirm as we wait holding our breath…

The Skype shop is now using Magento as its primary e-commerce platform for selling it’s telecom-related products. It appears as though they are using an in-depth structure of websites and stores to make each one applicable to the country that the person is browsing from. The design has also been nicely customised in a very simple but effective, clean style. There’s even the nice addition of a bestsellers section at the top of the categories page.

It gets even more advanced as you try to buy a product it sends you to another website, with a highly-customised JQuery checkout – all on one page only. I think stores like this are probably only suited to company’s like Skype because it’s a very one-off event that a customer would need to buy equipment like this. It’s not a place you come back to shop on a regular basis. You get what you need and leave.

All this Skype talk got me thinking about how Skype could be integrated into Magento to create a nice online help feature. I know the Skype embed buttons are available  for anyone to use, but having it integrated more seamlessly would be a nice feature imho. I’m sure Skype could have a big part to play in today’s ecommerce web design, let’s hold out for the future!