This is the battlefield in Laos. These are government troops supported and financed by the United States, fighting and losing ground to communist troops, many of them from North Vietnam, fighting in remote mountains in an obscure corner of Asia. It looks and sounds familiar. Just when the United States is gradually pulling out of Vietnam, there is a rush of concern that Laos may become another Vietnam. Not so says the administration and says why. Well, the President won't let it happen, that's why. I mean, we have learned one lesson and that is that we're not going to fight any major wars in the mainland of Asia again. We're not going to send American troops there. And we certainly are going to do it unless we have the American public in the Congress behind us. But the assurances from the secretaries of state and defense now from the President himself have not silenced congressional concern. This whole problem gets down to the fact that for the last year or so, we've been heavily de-escalating the undeclared war in Vietnam. At the same time, we've been heavily escalating not only the undeclared, but the undisclosed war in Laos. And this is the type and character of development in a democracy that I think could be very, very dangerous indeed. The concern of the Congress, the dilemma of the administration, the situation in the never-never land of Laos. These are the subjects of our broadcast tonight. Laos. America's not-so-secret war in Asia. Reported by Charles Collingwood. What, when, where, why? Piece by piece, the story of the American involvement in that war in Laos is coming out. Friday, the President reported 67,000 North Vietnamese troops now there. Yesterday, the White House said that it will issue a regular, up-to-date account of U.S. casualties in Laos. Today, American jets from Thailand and from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin continued to fly a heavy schedule of missions against the North Vietnamese and Pothet Laos, whose vanguard has now pushed to within 14 miles of the royal capital of Luang Prabang. In the administrative capital, Vien Shion, the Prime Minister, Suvana Fuma, is waiting for the delivery of the peace demands of his half-brother and antagonist, the Communist Prince Suvana Vong. After years of secrecy and silence, we are now learning a lot about Laos. Less than six months ago, when the President was first asked about Laos, he left more unsaid than he revealed. There are no American combat forces in Laos. We have been providing logistical support and some training for the neutralist government in order to avoid Laos falling under communist domination. As far as American manpower in Laos is concerned, there are none there at the present time on a combat basis. We do have aerial reconnaissance. We do have perhaps some other activities. I won't discuss those other activities at this time. That was in September. But last week, public pressure and what he called grossly inaccurate reports caused the President to discuss after all those matters in a lengthy statement. He still did not tell all. The President disclosed no precise figures on the dimensions of American air power being used in Laos, no accounting of the cost of our support estimated at several hundred million dollars a year, no definition of the degree of command as distinct from advisory functions exercised by Americans there. Inevitably, the Presidential Statement on Laos has raised many questions as many as it answered. The questions clearly derive from continued congressional and public uneasiness over the war in Vietnam. Laos is a theater of that war. It could hardly be otherwise. For a thousand miles, the borders of Laos march with those of North Vietnam. And for a further 300 miles, Laos borders on South Vietnam. That's the geographical explanation for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which President Nixon says, the great bulk of the men and supplies of the war in South Vietnam are infiltrated. In addition, Laos shares 264 miles of border in the north with Communist China, and another thousand miles to the west with threatened Thailand. To its south is Cambodia. These strategic implications are clear. Any change in the status of Laos must send tremors throughout the entire area. Moreover, Laos is terribly vulnerable. Here is a country larger than Great Britain with a population of less than three million people. Whenever it suits them, the more numerous and warlike North Vietnamese can move into Laos and it's been suiting them for the last 500 years, particularly during the recent years of the war in Vietnam. To control the border areas of Laos was absolutely essential to North Vietnam's strategy. Step back only nine years in history and you find it was Laos, even more than Vietnam itself. That was the most important foreign policy problem to a newly elected president. The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all. In real neutrality, observed by all. I want to make it clear to the American people and to all the world that all we want in Laos is peace, not war. A truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn. A settlement concluded at the conference table and not on the battlefield. Now what President Kennedy did about Laos was to get an international agreement to cool things off. When he met Khrushchev in 1961, the one thing they agreed on was not to let Laos become an active theater of war. The result was the Geneva Accords of 1962, signed by 14 countries including the United States, Russia, Communist China, and North Vietnam. These agreements provided for a neutral Laos governed by a coalition of three princes, representing the three main factions, Boon-Um, the conservative, Suvarnafong, the communist, and the neutralist Suvarnafuma, who became Premier. The agreements also called for the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel. The United States duly pulled out its 666 advisors, but the North Vietnamese only removed a token 40 of their 6,000 troops in Laos. Thereafter, Suvarnafong and the communists walked out of the coalition government, and with their patet Laos forces stiffened by increasing numbers of North Vietnamese regulars, they've been holding two-thirds of the country and a quarter of the Laotian population ever since. The purely Laotian forces on either side are generally considered mediocre and unaggressive. The best on the government side are the clandestine army commanded by General Phong Pao and fully paid, equipped, and advised by the United States. The patet Laos, although trained in North Vietnamese tactics and equipped with Russian and Chinese weapons, are not considered very formidable either. Left to themselves, the opposing Laotian forces would probably cancel each other out. The crucial factor in the equation is the 67,000 North Vietnamese regulars President Nixon says are in Laos now. In direct violation, the president says of the 1962 Geneva agreements. In spite of American equipment, advice, and above all air power, the North Vietnamese hold the military initiative in Laos today. The United States is said to be flying an average of 500 air sorties a day, sometimes as many as 20,000 a month against targets in Laos. Most of these strikes come from U.S. bases across the Mekong River in Thailand. The White House said we made our first B-52 strike last month. But U.S. air power has still not been enough to do more than slow down the North Vietnamese forces. In the past couple of weeks, they have moved deeper into government territory than they ever have. Bernard Kalb reports on the resulting situation and what it means. Laos has a way of vanishing for a few months each year. That's usually when the monsoon rains begin, about May. That's when the war dies down, when the world forgets that Laos even exists. But then, with the dry season, one side or the other starts up the war again, and Laos recurs, so to speak. And that's the situation right now. The North Vietnamese have just retaken the strategic plane of jars. These are Laos' newest refugees being evacuated just before the communists moved in. The most tragic victims of the seesaw not-so-secret war in Laos are the refugees. The official estimate is that about one out of every four Laos has been a refugee, more than 600,000 of them. Some have been refugees more than once. Laos has the most displaced national population in the world. Some of these Lao refugees were relieved to get away from the war, but there are reports that some were encouraged to go to deny the communists the manpower of these people. What goes through the minds of these refugees? While I've talked with hundreds of refugees from towns and villages all over northeast in Laos in the last six months, what they talk most about is American bombing, being told by the male soldiers of the Royal Laos government side to leave their villages, and having to do porterage that is carrying arms and food for Pathet Laos soldiers. The thing they're most concerned about is the bombing, and particularly American bombing. Until 1967, Lao bombing by T-28s outnumbered is greater than American bombing. But starting in 1968, and particularly in 1969 after President Johnson stopped the bombing in North Vietnam and diverted the jets into Laos, American bombing has been a constant day and night at fair for the refugees. They say that the planes came over all the time, shouted everything. People, cows, buffaloes, houses, rice fields, schools. They say that there were ordinary bombs, napalm, phosphorus, and anti-personnel bombs. They all say that they've lived for the last two years, mostly underground. What about American military fighter-bombers, planes operating out of Thailand, attacking North Vietnamese positions in northeast Laos? Can you comment on that? Oh, I have no comment on that at all. We are the armed reconnaissance, but that has nothing to do with bombing or anything like that. Any comment on the reports of an escalated American military commitment, reports of larger bombers, B-52s operating? Could you comment on any of that, sir? Well, I just might make a comment. We have no commitment in Laos. Our military assistance and materiel is being supplied pursuant to the request of the Royal Laos government, and in consonance with the Geneva agreement of 1962. But to any question that would request an itemization of American military involvement, what would be the official American reply here, sir? Oh, it would certainly be no comment. Thank you very much, Mr. Messing. The official American establishment in Laos is very much on the defensive on these sensitive matters. But one American reporter, based in Vientiane, recently managed to slip into Long Chang, the top-secret CIA-supported base for guerrilla operations against the communists. Basically, Long Chang is a logistics base. They fly things in there in big planes and fly them out to the front small planes. This includes soldiers. We saw half a dozen transport planes there, DC-3s, caribous. The strip can take bigger ones. We saw about a dozen T-28 unmarked single-engine propeller bombers. These are flown by Laos and male pilots, but the Americans do all the maintenance, and these planes are part of a pool that runs out of Thailand, so an American pilot will shuttle them back and forth. The real thing they want to keep secret there, most of all, is that the U.S. Air Force runs Jolly Green Giant Rescue helicopters out of there. This is an admission that the U.S. bombs Laos, I mean, you can hear the American jets roaring overhead, and they lose about 10 or 12 Americans a month here. Are there more Long Changs in Laos? Nothing as big as Long Chang, but there are these little CIA hideaways tucked in the hills. There are a lot over a couple, half a dozen or so, over on the Bolivans Plateau. These are used for trail-walking, maybe sending in some people to cause mischief once in a while. There are others up by the Chinese border. There are literally nearly, well, there are hundreds of little dirt runways in Laos, and these are used for military purposes by the United States. By controlling the arms and the money, the U.S. in effect controls the war. Buildings like these house the requirements office, which is said to be a kind of camouflaged military assistance group. There is a variety of unarmed air support provided by Air America and Continental Air Services, which are usually referred to as CIA airlines. They admit to operating more than 100 planes and helicopters, but they are not as forthcoming as to the exact nature of all their assignments. They ferry cargo and military supplies around the country. They also transport military personnel. The people of the Antion and Laos have been described as the least urgent souls on Earth. Too hurried to be desperate or frantic the way a Westerner might be in the face of crisis is looked upon with national embarrassment as a confession of human bankruptcy. The Antion is a city that can live side by side with its worst enemies. On one of the most locally expensive pieces of real estate in town, you find the official residence of the Communist Party at Laos, and its objective is nothing less than taking over the country. And not far away, another anomaly, you find the Party at Laos accomplices, the Embassy of North Vietnam. Even the North Vietnamese may be a bit perplexed to find themselves sharing a capital with the Embassy of South Vietnam just a few dusty streets away. That is Laos. What else is Laos is that you can find the Embassy of Communist China in the midst of all this. And everyone knows that P. King helped supply the guns to the Pautet Laos and to the North Vietnamese in their effort to make Laos a communist state. The great of the Antion panorama is filled with odd political economic contrasts. There are Laos who will quickly agree, but they know too that the Laos are powerless. They are very scared. They know that there is war in this country and most of them are affected. But they feel that they are not capable to influence the cause of the events. A funeral in the Antion for a cabinet minister's pilot son. It's reported by Americans here that the Laos in recent months have been losing an average of more than 10 men a day, killed in action fighting the enemy. In a country of less than 3 million people, that's a lot of war death. For the United States, one major priority in Laos has been to try to interdict the heavy flow of Hanoi's men and material down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Spilling North Vietnamese blood on the trail would save American blood in South Vietnam. But the question now is whether Hanoi will follow up its latest successful offensive in Laos. There isn't an American in the country who doesn't believe that Hanoi, if it should make that critical decision, could cut through the Royal Laos forces and the U.S. bombing and reach the Mekong River. What would the U.S. do then? Escalate in Laos? Get out? What? That is the agonizing question that North Vietnam can fling at the White House. Bernard Kalb, CBS News, The Antion. At the time of the Geneva agreements in 1962, the United States accepted Prince Suvarnathuma as Prime Minister with some reluctance. He was a neutralist, but he seemed to be more neutral on the side of the communists. Indeed, he was their candidate. Since then, he has emerged as a pro-Western nationalist. If his position is now threatened by the growing North Vietnamese strength in Laos, Suvarnathuma did not admit it to CBS News correspondent Bill McLaughlin. Despite everything, we should not give too much importance to this offensive. Of course, we have lost men. Of course, we've lost some ground. But so far, it has not exceeded the range of normal offenses. I don't think that the way North Vietnam is acting gives any indication that the North Vietnamese wish to commit the U.S. more deeply in the war in Indochina. Would you know what the extent of the U.S. military involvement in Laos is? Do you know what the United States is doing here? Yes. When me derises, we ask for material aid. We ask also for the intervention of U.S. Air Forces for surveillance against infiltration and, if necessary, to bomb the invaders. What do you think would happen to Laos if there was no U.S. air support? If we were left to ourselves, the whole country would come communist. The whole country would be invaded by North Vietnam. However, it's the duty of the United States to protect us. Are you afraid that Laos could become another Vietnam? No. What I've always sought is to prevent Laos from becoming another Vietnam. That's why I've always rejected the introduction of foreign troops into Laos. Your Highness, are you concerned about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in Laos? I cannot say anything about this matter. Prime Minister Suvannafouma says it is the duty of the United States to protect us. The validity of that interpretation is precisely what the current controversy over Laos is about. CBS News correspondent Marvin Kalb discussed it with some concerned senators. Senator, do you believe that the United States should be in the business of protecting Laosian independence? I do not. I don't see why 10,000 miles away we have to babysit the world and jaundom the world at the cost of many billions of dollars a month in these countries when at the same time we know how desperately we need this money for the growing domestic problems at home. But I and I think most of my colleagues wish is a disengagement of both in both Vietnam and Laos. These recent activities in Laos make us apprehensive that we're getting deeper involved there, deeper involvement. We are undoubtedly doing more to end the whole involvement than has ever been done before by the Kennedy or Johnson administrations who were building it up. Naturally, with the President's great success in de-escalating a Vietnamese war, it's essential for critics to talk about something else. Hence, they've grabbed at Laos in the hope of creating an issue there. I think this ploy is going to fail. I think it's too transparent. It's ridiculous. And in relation to our commitments in Vietnam, which are heavy and unfortunate, our commitments in Laos are of a different nature. They are air commitments to protect our troops in Vietnam. I don't know why we've fallen into an attitude in some parts of this country where we think it's all right to use 500 bombers a day against a country and then say it's a very limited operation that we're going to be careful not to put in ground forces. I might say that that's how we got started in Vietnam. We had helicopters over there and reconnaissance flights and advisers and we were given assurances that we weren't going into a land war in Asia, but we've got 500,000 men in on the ground now. The President, and I say I support him, I know that he has great problems and his choices are very limited. But I think the risk involved in taking our small number of troops out of there is so much less than the risk involved in perhaps the North Vietnamese making a larger war. I think the risk to take is to get out. Whatever may be the ultimate intentions of North Vietnam in Laos, it is clear that they have already succeeded in disturbing the mantle of calm with which President Nixon has wrapped the Vietnam debate in this country. The administration's dilemma arises from the fact that in spite of all that the United States has been able to do for Laos short of ground combat, Hanoi still holds the country at its mercy. North Vietnam can take Laos. It has been able to do so for years. It had been willing to pay the price. However, Hanoi may not be aiming at a military conquest with all its legal and moral implications and with the risk of military overextension. North Vietnam may instead be trying to create the conditions for a political rather than a physical takeover. That's what Pottet Laos, Prince Suvannath Long's invitation to discuss a new coalition government sounds like. Such a solution, if it is a solution, would present the administration with problems only slightly less painful than whether to introduce ground troops to stem the tide in Laos. A communist-dominated government in Laos would cause consternation in Bangkok and Saigon, two places where the American commitment still runs. The North Vietnamese are experts at discovering and exploiting contradictions in American policy. That's what they're doing now in Laos. They see the war there as an extension of their war in Vietnam and they're forcing us to see it that way, too. As long as the war in Vietnam continues, Hanoi can cause us much distress in Laos. It is an opportunity they are not likely to forego. This is Charles Collingwood. Good night. Laos, America's not-so-secret war in Asia. Reported by Charles Collingwood. Who, what, when, where, why?


I have been tagged multiple times about this cosplayer doing a prosthetic 096 face. And I am concerned, but not for the reason you think. You see, we're not in danger from this cosplayer, because you have to see 096's actual face. Not a facsimile, not makeup, not a drawing, has to be the real thing, so don't worry, 096 isn't coming for you. I am concerned about who gave them the reference photo, though.  Sorry about it. And here we have an example of the Ophaneme, the classification of Angel responsible for guarding the throne of God. You were probably expecting some pretty human with wings, but no. The Bible is Lovecraft Country. Oh, it wants to say hi. D2487, you have to get away from that entity now! Forget the bar, just run! Note, subject has made no progress. Possible temporal anomaly? Sir, anomalous pornography addiction is no joke, I am very worried about the efficacy of this mission. Oh no. Spoilers for the video I'm duetting, so watch that one first. SCP-5886, Object Class Keter. An article and character very dear to my heart, because I wrote it. SCP-5886 is a young adult by the name of James Bidget. Young Jim was an average individual until its powers activated, at which point it became a speedster, similar to the Flash. The good news is that Jim was also granted the ability to withstand the friction that would be caused by moving at those speeds so its skin wouldn't slough off, and also the ability to think fast enough to react in time. The downside is that when you can think what we've approximated is 54,000 times faster than the average human, one person saying a sentence takes days to you. Give it a listen on YouTube. Agent Volkhov just dared me to say Candyman five times in a mirror, probably another one of his juvenile pranks, but far bit for me to turn down the opportunity to disprove another urban legend. Alright staff, here we go for science, Candyman. Candyman, Candyman, Candyman. I have seen a lot of messed up creatures in my career, just in case it's real. Hey Chimera, I got a job for you.  Did you know that there's a cult trying to create their own god, and they might actually pull it off?   It was adorable. Agent Applier was going to ask out Agent Nelson, but he was having an acne breakout, so I sent him to Bright for some vanishing cream. He gave him what? That's the last of our supplies. Close this door, lock it, and allow no one in. Good morning foundation staff, this is Dr. Theron Sherman. As you're all aware, today is Dr. Jack Bright's birthday. And in return for his countless years of service to the foundation, we are instituting what will likely be called the foundation's new purge. For the next 24 hours, the list of things Dr. Bright is not allowed to do at the foundation is suspended. Good luck, and have fun kid. Ooh, to answer this question, I get to be like Hank Green and talk about some non-fictional science today. The commenter wants to know if seeing SCP-096's face in your dreams will cause 096 to come after you. As a refresher of the rules, 096 only attacks you if you see its actual face.  It will not attack you if you see an artistic rendering of its face, such as a drawing or a video game sprite. So what if you dreamed SCP-096's face? Would it chase you down? Most likely not, because according to our current scientific understanding of dreams, you would not actually be able to see 096's real face in your dreams. The Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University theorizes that what is most likely happening when we dream is we are mixing and remixing things that we remember from when we were awake. Essentially, if you haven't seen 096's IRL, you're not going to see it in your dreams either. Sleep tight. Oh no. Which of you forgot to give the overlords that live above the sky their snacks? It's okay buddies, I have Core-Antonato cheese.  Alright good, the entity has stepped into the containment glyphs. The entity is similar in nature to what we call Sackbo- Oh, I'm giving the Thaumaturgical Department a piece of my mind later.   Oof. Located in Greenville, South Carolina, the It's Raining Men phenomena inspired the song of the same name. It was too hot for Infosec to keep it off the charts. As a child, I thought sharks were my friends. I know better now. You must be truly desperate. Hold up, uh, are we the bad guys? Use Daredevil to contain 096. This is just a hypothesis, but I'm pretty sure Daredevil would actually activate 096. Point one, Matt Murdock does not see with his eyes, but echolocation and hearing and all that kind of stuff. This allows Matt to see the outlines of things. And if my five minutes of Google research has done me well, that's exactly how blind people's brains react in real life. They still process in the visual processing centers. I mean, real world people aren't Daredevil accurate, but you get my point. And we know that all 096 needs is for its face to be in your subconscious. It doesn't need you to literally see it.  You don't even need to know you've seen it. Final thesis, if you show Matt Murdock a picture of 096, he's just gonna see a silhouette and so it's not going to affect him. But if you showed him 096, he'd see the outline with his echolocation and he'd get it. So, the other week I made SCP-173 as an anime girl, as a joke. And my friends thought it was fine, so we made it into a little dating sim down. And the reception has been unbeatable, like thousands of downloads. So, we're gonna be making it into a whole game with three more playable girls starting at 18682. Could we use SCP-131, the iPods, to contain SCP-173, the sculpture? As a refresher, the iPods don't eat, sleep, or blink.   If you read the SCP-131 document, you'll note that the iPods have helped in 173's containment before. They don't blink, it's actually really easy for them. But we will not be employing them with 173 as a long-term solution. The reason being, the iPods are sentient creatures, they run around, they have fun, they enjoy themselves. We wouldn't want to lock them in a room with 173 forever. Plus, remember, the only reason we open SCP-173's box at all is because it mysteriously leaks poop and blood on the floor. And we don't want the iPods running around in that, that's unsanitary. What would happen if you introduce SCP-999 to SCP-096? Spoiler, this isn't gonna go how most of you think. As a refresher, 096 is the shy guy.  This is an artistic representation, those don't count, you're safe. Next up, we have SCP-999. This little gooball's touching deuces a mild euphoria that increases over time and has been used to treat PTSD and depression sufferers. But you gotta ask yourself one question. Is this really SCP-999? The description in the article is very clear. 999 is 120 pounds, is 6 feet wide and 3 feet tall. And it says nothing about it having eyes. That's right, just like people who talk to their Roombas like they're their pets, we have anthropomorphized this little gooball into a mascot character because that's what humans do. This is more like what actual 999 looks like. No eyes, no 096 attack. Couple that with the durability 999 has displayed by being stomped on by SCP-682 as well as taking a bullet and I don't think 999 is in any danger. But then we ask, what effect would 999 have on 096? People who are looking for a happier ending might imagine that 999's euphoric effect might cure 096 of its shyness and cause it to no longer attack people. Maybe even being able to quell it down from an attack rage. I apologize my friends, but I and the SCP universe as a whole are not that optimistic. As per 096's documentation, we don't even know if the entity is sapient. All we've ever seen it do is pace, sit, cry, and murder. At least with the 999-682 test, we knew that 682 was capable of thoughts and feelings and emotions. It just hates us so much that it only displays rage. My hypothesis, 999 and 096 are the stalemate and neither really affects the other. Got a different take? Discuss it in the comments. See you buddy, that is a very awfully difficult answer to give you on who is my favorite because I'm not allowed to share that opinion. Hey there, Site 42 staff, Dr. Sherman coming in from the Site 42 commissary. Today's video involves alcoholic beverages, so if you're not old enough to imbibe, here's a fruit snack, go get it. In case you didn't know, the 42 in Site 42 is a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So today we're making Dr. Sherman's favorite coping mechanism for his terrible job in the darkness of the foundation, the pangalactic gargle blaster. There are many recipes, but this one is mine. In the booze department, you will need Prosecco as a base, and then Absinthe, Gin, Kremdementh, Mezcal, Tequila, and Goldschlager for flavor. For garnishments, you're gonna need a slice of lemon, obviously, an olive, minor anchovy filled because the recipe mentions fish, a sugar cube to mix with the shaker, and Mentos for fizz. Goose is our drink goblin while I do the recording today. We've tested seven different versions of this drink, but version two was our favorite, so that's what we're showing you. Start with one teaspoon of Absinthe, one ounce of Gin, half an ounce of Kremdementh, Mezcal-style Tequila, and Goldschlager. From here, you add one sugar cube, plus some ice, and shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. Strain into your glass, fill the rest of the way with your Prosecco or otherwise bubbly. Your final measurement should be about eight ounces. From there, you add your anchovy filled olive, squeeze in the lemon, and a Mentos to make sure there's extra fizz. And what you end up with is this science fiction green, complicated drinker's answer to the Long Island iced tea. Instead of not tasting like alcohol, it tastes like every kind of alcohol, and the flavor profile is wild. Slaunchy, y'all. I want to show you a picture from last night that really upset me. Okay, but in my defense, Rosa bet me 50 cents that I couldn't drink all that shampoo. That's not what I wanted. Do you drink shampoo? What? No. You're the one farting bubbles. What do you get when you cross SCP-682 and Bayonetta? An objectively horrible idea! Turn an SCP-682 into an anime girl like that bad dragon needs to be anymore, Sunderay. As if I wasn't traumatized enough by the Sisters of Cheyenne Point, where you could date Clef and Brighton Kondraki. Or the SCP-3199 dating sim. Yeah, some of y'all saw this naked in the kitchen at 3AM eating shredded cheese chicken man and decided, mm, I want some of them herbs and spices. But seriously, I always want to support new SCP games being made. I want to see this one come to fruition, go send the artists some support, they're working real hard. And you know my vote for the next SCP anime girl. Hey there, Site 42 fam. It's come to my attention that not a lot of people know that we have a Site 42 SCP merch store. We've commissioned art from multiple artists to make SCP-related merch. And we've got stickers for the Site 42 channel. And so if you want some SCP merch, as well as helping support the Site 42 channel, teespring.com slash stores slash Site 42. Thank you in advance and cheers.


It says A-Pack! I mean, on Twitter, right? Was it on Twitter? Yeah, a fun fact. And it's kind of a funny non-fact. Because we are part of a group called Code Pink, and he accused us of being paid for getting money from the Chinese Communist Party. So, can you raise your hands if any of you get money from the Chinese Communist Party? No. Nobody, come on! Who pays you? I don't even get paid. I can't. Who pays you? I wish someone was paying me. Why would you pay me? I've been going around and I don't even get metro money. You have to pay for yourself. Who pays you? Nobody pays me. The federal government pays my pension. Yay! I get Social Security. What about you, Helen? I get Social Security. Do you get it from the Chinese Communist Party, though? No, no. Oh wow, I see some money here. Maybe this is from the Chinese Communist Party. But, oh, it says A-Pack. I think I see more. There's more. It doesn't say Chinese Communist Party? No. The congressman is bought and paid for by A-Pack. He is? He gets his money from A-Pack? He has an Israeli flag outside. He has an Israeli flag outside? That's not a shame. Is he an Israeli citizen? More, more. No. So much A-Pack money and the Israeli flag outside. People who are doing this on their own dime. American citizens. American citizens are being paid for by a foreign government. Who in here is paid for by a foreign government? No. The congressman. So maybe a fun fact is... Right. Congressman John James is paid by a foreign government. And that government's name is... They are committing a genocide against my people in Reza. Yeah. It's not looking good.  That we do not receive a cent. Not a nickel, not a dime, not a dollar, not a cent from any foreign government. We are U.S. citizens who are deeply concerned. And while this is, you know, irony, what we're really here for is that our hearts are breaking for the people of Gaza. I'm really offended because I'm a grad student. I live in a deficit and I actually quit my job at my university to spend time to come down here. So it's really, really offensive when we're here on behalf of people who are starving to death. I know this is a joke, but it's also, it's not a joke. Because what we're doing is really serious. And saying something like that just serves to undermine all of the people's time and effort and their integrity with the people in this room. It's important that we realize how serious this accusation is. How dangerous it is. How insulting it is. We would like an apology from the congressman. That's what I would like. Because that's so insulting. We would like an apology because it's totally false and it's damaging to us and it's hurtful to us. And so who can we talk to about getting an apology? We appreciate that you guys have the right to be here to say what you're saying and I guess speak on what you guys are talking about, but we'll talk to the congressman about that. But that's all we have to say about that. Please tell him that we would like him to be truthful and that there is zero truth in that statement.


All right, for everybody that's here, this is Boyan Zavanovich from Commerce Guys, presenting Commerce Without Borders, and I just figured that he's not going to give himself a decent introduction, so I thought I would do it. He's the best Drupal developer ever in Serbia, and we've been really privileged to work with him since he rocked the Google Summer of Code a few years ago. Then he came into Commerce Guys and was the principal architect behind Commerce Kickstart 2.x, and he won't tell you that in a session because he's not here to to toot his own horn, but really good developer for us. He's passed that off to Jonathan Saksik, and now he's sort of engaged in a lot of marketplace and platform development within Commerce Guys, and I really respect him, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say about Commerce Without Borders. Thanks, Boyan. Thanks, Ryan. We can start. Welcome, and thank you for choosing this session. I'm Boyan Zavanovich. I'm BoyanZionDrupal.org, and I'm a developer from Serbia. I spend most of my Drupal time in contrib and have worked on projects such as the Drupals having port of views, views bulk operations in line entity form, some other modules. But most importantly, I work on Drupal Commerce and its many contrips. So in the previous year, I did two great things. The first one was leading the development of Commerce Kickstart V2, and the second one was growing a beard, and both have been a great success with the target audiences. So when it comes to Drupal, I have two big passions, and the first one is distributions and just pushing the limits on what the distribution can do and the amount of flexibility it can provide, and the second one is solving hard problems with Commerce, and we have plenty of those, and we'll see some of them in this session. Quick word about my employer, so I work for Commerce Guys. We are an awesome company behind Drupal Commerce and Commerce Kickstart. We also contributed significantly to Drupal 7 core, Drupal 8 core, many other contrips. We have about 60 people in three offices, so Paris, France, London, England, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. We are VC funded, and our business model revolves around making sure that you build something amazing with Drupal Commerce. So a quick show of hands. Who here has already built a production website using Drupal Commerce? Put your hand down, Ryan. Okay, good.  So Drupal Commerce is an e-commerce framework built natively on Drupal 7, using all of its core technologies. So if you like Drupal 7 and if you know Drupal 7, you will feel right at home with Drupal Commerce. We like to say that it's minimalistic and flexible, and in practice it means it is loosely coupled, allowing you to take only the parts that you need and ignoring the others. Building websites without cards, without checkouts, with custom implementations where needed, just it tries not to get in your way. And its flexibility lies in the fact that it makes no assumptions, which means that as you're building your project, you can think about the features that you need and not think about fighting commerce. And this has allowed us to build a huge range of solutions. So no matter whether you have a store that sells shipable products or books or subscriptions to an external service, or maybe doing event registrations, hotel registrations, donations, every single use case can be done. And it's interesting that a bit less than a year ago we had this big planning sprint for how we were going to do commerce on Drupal 8. So we had the space to re-evaluate every part and to fix anything that annoyed us. And during that time, during that week, the 10 of us could not find a single thing that is currently impossible with the current version of commerce. There was never a time where we said, this just cannot be done. And this is really a great testament to the flexibility in the architecture that was implemented by Ryan Serama and Damien Tuchel. So that's just amazing. And it allows sites such as Cartier to be done in an amazing way, implementing their own custom workflows while still using everything that we can provide. So we use views for all listings, which now feels natural, but was a bit experimental at the time. And it provides a lot of benefits, both on the back end and on the front end. It means that you can easily change any column, any data immediately from the UI. So you can customize the back end to suit your client's needs. If I need to change a column, I can edit the view in five seconds, I can add what I need, and I'm done. Same in the product catalog. If I need to add an additional field, two clicks, and it's there. Furthermore, views can use alternative back ends, which means that my results can come from another back end such as solar for increased performance, for faceted search, for full text search. And this is all done out of the box for us because we are leveraging this important technology. We use rules for all of our business logic, which means that you can respond to key events like you would to a hook and just plug in whatever business logic that you need and it works. And compared to a hook, there are many benefits here. You can edit a rule right from the UI and change its configuration. You can change the data that supplies to it. You can disable it if some kind of behavior needs to be turned off for a bit, or you can reorder the way the rules are executed. And we pass off all of our critical decisions through the rules engine allowing you to affect it. So when we need to select the right payment provider, we pass it through rules. When we need to select a tax rate, we pass it through rules. When we need to determine the correct product price, we pass it through rules.  So last night I learned that in the US, you have certain tax-free weekends. So that means on that weekend, your products have no tax. And that would be a pretty crazy thing to hard code into commerce. But with rules, you can easily add your own condition and respond to that and handle that use case and any other that can pop up. And that's really important. Of course, rules are exportable so you can still version them in your code and so on. And rules gets a bit of negativity for its UI, which is, of course, very generic. But it also allows you to build a nice UI on top, which we've proven with Commerce Discount, where we have our own completely custom and nice UI that actually generates a rule in the background. So even that is not a problem. Rules does not prevent us from making nice UIs. So, of course, commerce is minimal, but we also need our features that we are going to add to our website so we can finish our projects. And for that, we have the essential contribs or the golden contribs, as we like to call them, where the use case-specific features are located. So things such as shipping or stock control or selling access to files, it's all in those modules. And then you have additional modules that make front-end or back-end UI tweaks since they can assume a specific use case. So if we know that a module will be used on a shipping website, we can provide a better UI that accounts for that use case. So that way we keep the Commerce Core lean, maintainable and prevented from getting in your way, but at the same time give you the features that you need to actually move forward and successfully complete your project. Now, the problem here is that you suddenly have a big set of modules you need to install. There's commerce with all of its dependencies, there are the essential contribs, any other modules you might have found in the meantime, and then you need to configure your base theme, you need to just mesh it all together, and that takes time. So it can take days or even weeks for you to have something that you can demonstrate to your colleagues or your client or your future clients. And to handle that, Drupal has distributions, which allows us to package all that in an easy-to-use install profile in a complete download that has everything you need. So we can include all of the modules, the base theme, we can provide the initial configuration that will get you started, and we can even provide a full-features demo mode that has all of the features demonstrated, even the ones that you wouldn't normally configure so that you can use it to show off to a potential client or your colleagues or wherever you need to actually demonstrate the full functionality at your fingertips. And one such distribution is Commerce Kickstart, which we have built. So Commerce Kickstart has been released, well, the second version had been released about a year ago, and it has been a great success. Commerce Kickstart is currently the most popular Drupal distributions. It has about 8,000 installs, and just to put that into perspective, that is as much usage as the next 10 distributions combined. However, when you actually compare it to the number of total Drupal installations, that percentage is really small, which means that Drupal as a whole still has a lot of work to do to make distributions flexible enough and just approachable enough by new users so that they become the default option when starting a new website instead of just starting from scratch. In order to make Commerce more user-friendly, we have completely redesigned the Admin UI. So we have implemented an admin theme and an admin UI with the help of Buoy and Summers, and you can see many UI elements that have since then made it into Drupal 8, and my colleague Jonathan likes to joke that Drupal 8 looks more like a Kickstart than Drupal 7. So other than this theme, we have carefully chosen all of the filters, all of the data that should be shown to you. For instance, we see here an order listing that allows you to see the order summary right at the same page, and you can see what was bought, who bought it, where it was shipped to, and you can see all the latest communication with the client. So we gave the same treatment to every page that you interact with. We have a completely custom toolbar that gives you access to the most commonly needed e-commerce functions, and we have help on each page that allows you to go to a documentation page or see a video that will explain the key concepts behind such functionality, so you can learn as you go along, which once again makes Commerce much more approachable. Of course, nowadays, having a responsive Frontend theme is a requirement, so we have a Frontend theme that's based on Omega-3, and it's really nice to use. We provide our own base theme, you can extend, so you can inherit the stylings that we add as to the e-commerce elements, and it just works. Of course, in order to demonstrate what Kickstarter's can actually do, we implemented all of the product marketing features that you would usually implement on your own website, on your own project. So we have slideshows, we have image zooms, we styled all of the attributes, we added JavaScript, spinners, all kinds of eye candy that you usually implement on a project, and now it's there for you, so you don't need to hunt for that. We have chosen the best JS libraries, we have demonstrated how it should be integrated in the best way, and then you can just benefit from that. And of course, Search is a hugely important feature and especially for e-commerce websites. You need to have faceted search because that's the main way your customers will actually browse your product catalog. And here we rely on Search API, and we use the excellent commerce search API module that was developed by Jonathan that actually adjusts to your product types and your data structure. So as you define your product types, as you define your custom fields, the module will automatically create and maintain facets for them, allowing the whole thing to work automatically. And of course, it has really powerful full-text search as well. And since Search API has multiple backends, you can start using your database for the initial solution, and it will have no worse performance than the regular Drupal search, and then as soon as possible, you can install solar and move to that, and then gain a very big performance boost. So it's my general opinion that nowadays you should be using solar for all of your listings, front-end and back-end. And for us, we've just made the front-end listings work seamlessly with Search API. We also provide built-in payment gateways and third-party tools. So this means that when you install, you will select your country and we will try to select and install a payment gateway for you so that you are immediately ready to start selling. So we know which payment gateway works well in your country, and we have installed it and you are ready to configure it and just go ahead and start selling. And I will explain that later in more detail. And of course, the important thing is that we've built Kickstart so that it's a set of loosely coupled modules that you can install on your own website so you can use it on your existing site or maybe if you don't have a shipping site which Kickstart optimizes for, if you are selling files or events, you can still take the modules that you need and just mash them up and get the desired functionality. So even if you don't want to use Kickstart, you will benefit from all the work with it. But if you want to, it is a great tool for learning commerce best practices, for demonstrating what commerce can do and at the end of the day, for launching new stores quickly because you can really get up and running in a single day and just sell your product. So if Kickstart is so great, why don't we just stop here and go and have beer? I mean, we have everything we need and we can move forward. Unfortunately, it's not that easy because while we like to think of ourselves as the citizens of the internet, we actually aren't. And the country in which we do business provides its laws which give us a set of constraints and not only that, but the countries with which we do business with. So the countries we sell to will affect those constraints as well. So that means that many people who are approaching a new e-commerce platform, no matter if it's commerce or magento or something else, they bump into these problems unknowingly and they get really frustrated because they thought that software would solve their problems and it didn't. So at the end of the day, they're frustrated and they lost weeks more than they anticipated. So in this case, we will look at what those first problems are and how we can solve them using triple commerce. And our use case in this case is Czech startup and they're selling their first product. And let's say that the product is a deployment tool. It takes your code from GitHub and puts it on your server. And they're selling one time licenses. They want to do this with commerce kickstarts or any custom triple commerce solution. However, they also at one point want to switch to a subscription model. So it would be creative. They could build their customers on a monthly basis. Also to fill in the budget from time to time, they're also giving Git trainings. They're familiar with Git so they go to other companies, they provide the trainings and earn money that way. Sometimes they even go to other countries to do that, for instance, when they're at the conference. So those are, that is their main use case and that's what they need to be able to do and to do it quickly so that they can focus on their core competencies so they can focus on developing their product. And we start by gathering the requirements. What it is that they need on top of what kickstart gives them. So to start with, of course, they need multiple languages. At least they should have Czech and they should have English and in time they will add additional languages. So when I arrive at the website, I will have the UI in my language. I will see the products in my language and of course it should just work seamlessly. I also need prices in multiple currencies. So the Czech Republic has its Karunas but for user friendliness, we will probably also want to have Euro prices and one day dollar prices. And there are two ways you can do that. You can either enter your base price in Karunas, for instance, and then do automatic conversion or you can define completely separate prices which makes a lot more sense because then you're not tied to the exchange rate and you can actually have user friendly amounts displayed. So what I always do and what we do in our own projects is just define the prices separately and even if they're not exactly equivalent then select the right one and show it to the user. And so right away we see a potential problem. If we have two sets of prices, how are we going to decide which one we are going to show to our customer? And the main problem here is figuring out where our customers are coming from. So we need to have a reasonable guess at first. So default based on our domain if we have a store for friends, for instance, or based on the user's location, we need to allow the user to actually tell us. For instance, this website has a nice little selector in the header that allows me to change my country right away and it will change the taxes, the currencies, it will just adjust itself to me. So that's a great way of doing it and it doesn't require me to log in. So it will just save a cookie on my computer and it will work. And of course there are alternative solutions. So on our marketplace what we are doing is we are forcing you to register before checking out. So we always know what your country is because you've already told us. And that way we can always have the correct prices and everything because one of the problems is with actually refreshing the whole order during anonymous checkout. So if I came to your website and I didn't select anything and I'm checking out the product and suddenly I change my country to Serbia or France. You need to change the amount, change the currencies, change the taxes and you need to make it obvious to me as a customer that everything has changed. I'm no longer buying the same thing essentially. So it's pretty bad from a UX perspective. It can be done, it works in commerce but I would avoid doing it so late in the process. Ideally you want the user to tell you before he starts to checkout and you should have a reasonable guess that you can later adjust. We need to of course figure out which payment provider we are going to use and we currently have no clear set of guidelines on what the criteria is and how we are actually going to do that. So we need to explore that topic. And of course the one that causes us the most headaches is VAT. And you will see that if you pronounce it as one word it sounds like what? Because that's usually what your reaction is when you start exploring VAT. It's usually pretty hard. So let's see why. Of course VAT is inclusive tax. It's included in everything that you sell. So when if I'm selling something that costs eight euros it already has the VAT included. And at the end of the month I'm supposed to pay the VAT to my country. And you can see here an example of actually entering the prices without VAT and then showing the subtotal and the VAT amount. So let's dive into that. My first problem is what are my country's VAT rates? So if I haven't gone to an accountant yet I'm completely clueless about how this should work. I need to figure out which rates there are and every country has multiple rates. For example the Czech Republic has the normal rate of 21% but it also has a reduced rate of 14% for books and other things. And then it has items that are completely tax free. And every country has its own set of rates that are different and the number of those rates rise. So I need to have them all predefined in my system. I need to classify my products into those categories and then have the correct VAT actually selected and charged to my customer. In this case we still don't have shipping but we might decide we want to do some kind of merchandising maybe selling t-shirts with our company logo and in that case we need to ship something. So does shipping have VAT? In fact it does and our problem here is that if you have products with different VAT rates shipping needs to have the highest one. So you always need to select the highest rate in your cart otherwise it won't be correct. Do discounts have VAT? They do, unlike sales tax which is applied to pre-attacks in theory VAT discounts are always applied post-tax. So if you're applying a percentage, 10% tax you're discounting both the base price and the VAT. If you're applying a fixed discount it needs to have its own VAT component and that needs to work. VAT rates can change. So you know this woman, it's her friendly Angela and she thinks your country is spending too much and she thinks you're too much in debt. So she's going to pressure your country to get more money to increase its budget and countries usually do that by passing off the tax burden to us and they first start by raising VAT. It has happened multiple times in multiple European Union countries. So what happens if your country tells you that from January 1st the VAT rate is no longer 21%, it's 22%.  You need to make sure that there are no orders that are in progress and you need to make sure that immediately at midnight you change the rates to 22% so that any new orders are priced correctly and that's a bother.  So ideally we would have a system that would handle that. Not everyone pays them. So for instance, I am from Serbia and we are not in the European Union. If your customer is not from the European Union he should not have a VAT charge. So when we look at his location we need to know which countries are in the EU and based on that we need to not have the VAT applied in that case. Not everyone pays them in the case of B2B transactions as well. So if my company is selling to another company in the European Union, they are the ones who are paying VAT and my only job is noting how much they should have paid and selling it to my government. So in that case during checkout I need to ask the customer whether he has a VAT number and if he does his VAT needs to be removed because he is handling that. We also have the problem of place of supply which is a concept that exists in the European Union. So we are a Czech company and we provide our trainings and one day we are invited to go to Paris and do a gift training. Why not? And it sounds like fun. However, if we are giving that training in Paris our place of supply has changed and it is now France which means that the VAT that we need to charge is not the Czech one it is the French one. So that means that I need to know all of the French VAT rates. I need to know which ones apply to my product and I need to charge them instead based on where I'm actually providing my service. That can be kind of a problem. Then we have the troublemakers and I need to apologize to my colleague Björn here. It's not Sweden it's actually Switzerland but that's how it's turned out. So we have three countries that do things kind of differently. We have Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. And what they say is that if you're selling something to a Norwegian customer for instance you need to charge their VAT no matter what the place of supply is. So if my place of supply is the Czech Republic I'm selling it from Prague but my customer is from Norway the VAT rates needs to be the Norwegian one. And they are going to want that money. It also works in reverse. So if I'm a Norwegian company selling to the European Union I need to apply the appropriate EU tax. So now I need to know all of the rates for Norway and Iceland and Switzerland as well. And I need to know which ones apply to my product and this is becoming more and more annoying. My team has a simple motto which is we don't care about Norway. But the problem is you need to care about Norway. And at one point you need to start caring about Norway and you need to implement this. You cannot ignore the law when it suits you of course. And then we have trouble on the horizon and this is what people call woes and it's short for VAT on electronically supplied services. So this means that whenever you're selling something that's not physical. So for instance a file, an ebook, trainings whatever it is you have a special law that applies to you that says when you're selling the product the VAT is due at the place of the customer. This means that the VAT rates applied are from the customer's country. If I'm selling something, if I'm selling my training or my products to someone in Germany they will need to, I will need to charge the German VAT and same for Spain and same for Portugal. From 2015 this applies to everyone. This means that in our system we will need to have the VAT rates for the whole European Union. We need to maintain them, make sure they don't change and we just need to make sure this works. So I will give you a minute to panic now. Of course there is a solution. The first solution is just using an external service for tax calculation.  They can just use an external service but if the laws are changing this way this means it affects everyone. It affects the two person company, it affects the thousand person company and if I need to pay for an external service just to have an e-commerce website then we have failed. I can pay for the complete solution, I don't need to mess around with open source at all. So I don't think that's a solution. We need to have a solution that actually works for us out of the box. So let's see how Drupal Commerce can actually help us with that. We are kind of depressed at this point but it gets better. So the first thing that Commerce allows us is to have a price field per currency. I mean we can have as many price fields as we want. So we go and we create separate price fields and we enter our prices without VAT which is very important. So Commerce has this dropdown that says include tax in this price and it is a big shotgun pointed at your feet. You cannot lift it up, you can only pull the trigger don't. You need to enter the price without VAT because once you select the VAT here it stays selected. If I selected the check one I cannot say oh for Boyan there won't be any VAT or for Augustin the French one will be used. It doesn't work that way. So knowing that we can proceed and it will work. We use a pricing rule that selects the right price field. So that means when the price of a product is calculated the system asks do you have anything to add to this price and then we say yeah sure where is the customer coming from? Oh he's French. Okay I'm applying the French VAT and or I'm selecting the Euro price and that will work. Of course there it is not completely user friendly. Ideally I would be able to select my rate right when I'm adding a product but we'll get to that. And this is where David Kitchen saves us all. He's right here in case you want to buy him a beer afterwards. So we have a set of commerce modules that handle all of the edge cases that I described for triple commerce and I think this really gives us an edge over competing solutions. So what these modules do is that they handle all of the rate changes automatically. So they will compare the date of the order and based on that select the appropriate rate that was valid at the time of the purchase. So if I added suddenly manually an order that was valid for a previous period it will know to select the previous rate that was used. It knows how to collect the correct VAT on shipping. It will always select the biggest rate. It predefined all of the rates for the European Union and they maintain it. I must admit that it took David four days to add Creish after they joined the European Union. It's quite a long period of time but we survived. So we have all of the rates and they are being maintained. So you can just install that and the system suddenly knows about all this. And there are additional modules that will do the same for Switzerland and other non-EU countries that still force you into this. It handles B2B correctly. So what's EU called reverse charge? It will add a VAT number field and if that field is entered it will not apply the VAT. It will handle the place of supply. So it has a much more efficient rules mechanism so that it first determines the country that's valid and then it determines the rate of that country that should be applied which means that you have drastically less work to do in your rules with evaluating all of the different conditions. And of course it gives you the ability to pre-select the VAT when you're adding a product. So you don't need to go into rules at all to say this product should have this VAT by default and so on. And it's ready to handle your woes. So I think this is major. So please give David an applause. Of course the problem that we have is that we need to scale David. It's not okay for one person to maintain all this when all of our businesses depend on this. In commerce we have the list of countries that are maintained by the contributors and it has always worked well. A developer from a specific country will come and say my currency is not in here and they will help keep it current. So we need to start doing the same for the VAT rates. We need to care whether our country's rates are current and keep them up to date so that David doesn't have to. And that way we ensure that the system continues to function for others and it's constantly up to date as it should be. In general I was asked about the problem of updating. So if the country keeps changing its VAT rates the system needs to be updated as well. So it might still make more sense to use an external service. But I don't really agree because countries don't do this every five days. They usually do it in something like once a year. This gives you plenty of time to install that commerce VAT point release and get the updated rates. And so now that we have VAT covered and we feel better about it, we know that it will work for us and our accountant won't escape to another country. We can actually think about choosing a payment provider. And the problem here is that people usually don't know how to think about the problem. I myself before we just start googling for random solutions choose one that kind of looks okay and then try to implement it if it has commerce implementation. But let's look at what the actual criteria is and should be.  Not every payment solution will work in your country and it might not support all of the countries that you want to support. If you really want to sell to Serbia because I'm there and I will buy your product but it doesn't support Serbia, you just lost me as a customer. Or you need to provide an alternative. So that means you now have several payment solutions you need to have on your website which you need to track which is not really nice. So that's our first criteria and we need to think about that. Our second criteria is budget. So the thing is that different payment providers have vastly different pricing models and pricing strategies based on the business that you're actually doing. So are you doing hundreds of sales per month or are you doing hundreds of thousands? How much money is that actually bringing you? Which countries are you selling to? Which payment methods you need to support like you need PayPal, Amex, all this is taken into account and some payment providers might have a flat rate up to a certain amount but others might actually be cheaper if you're doing more requests. So there are many varying factors and you usually need to contact them and get a quote and we'll see how we can actually get around that so we can have more information. So to recap, the main question is do they work in my country and can I afford it? There's also a question of coverage. So we can classify payment providers into two buckets that they call regular and alternative and they might not be the best terms but the idea is that for a regular payment provider is one that processes the payment directly. So you have a merchant account with American Express or your local bank and they just do this thing for you. However, you also have alternative payment providers such as Amazon and PayPal that will partner with a whole range of smaller gateways and just deal with them for you. So you don't need to open accounts for every new country you need to support, you can just, they will just handle that for you. They will take the payment and they will route this to the appropriate place. It's something to keep in mind and it's important to know what the future plans of your provider are. So are they planning to move into another country? If I want to support Croatia and it's not supported, it might matter that they have it on their roadmap in the next six months. In that case, I don't need to look for another payment provider. So that matters. There are also many additional questions like are we supporting 3D secure? So most of you have seen 3D secure in action. You go to buy something and it redirects you and then it asks for some additional information, your password or your date of birth, different banks have different ways of implementing this. Visa calls this verified by visa and by having this additional step of verification, you feel more secure, your customers feel more secure, which means there's a higher chance of your order actually being completed and the bank feels more secure which means there's less of a chance for them to block funds. So it really minimizes the problems that you might have. There's also the question of PCI compliance, not all payment providers and not all implementations are made the same and you need to take that into account. Even with PayPal, you select one solution but it actually has a bunch of different solutions included and not all of them are the same when it comes to PCI compliance. So this could be a session or two all on its own. I can say that we have an awesome website and an awesome white paper on triplePCIcompliance.org. It was partially sponsored by Commerz guys and it will tell you what you need to know both to select the right payment provider and to make sure that your shop is secure and that you've minimized your liability. So go there today and read everything about it if you're actually doing e-commerce on triple. I also mentioned that our company might want to have subscriptions at one point and not every provider supports this in the same way. So this year Commerz has seen the development of awesome recurring solutions. We have Commerz recurring done by Pedro that handles the prepaid use case which is great if you're charging for a magazine or a file and Jonathan and me also have a solution called Commerz license billing which aims at assess use case. So that means you can charge based on a plan, you can charge based on metered usage, you can have plan changes, postpaid charging, everything you would want to if you're charging for an external service like you're selling the right for the customer to send emails and you're giving them a certain quota and then charging them over that quota and so on. And both of these solutions use Commerz card on file so that the user doesn't need to actually enter his credit card each month. So the way card on file works is that it stores the credit card information on the payment provider, they basically do it themselves and they give us a token and we can use that token for all future transactions and that way we can do recurring each month or each billing cycle no matter what its length is and it will work automatically. So ideally our payment provider should support card on file not everyone do. And then there's the question of zero authorizations. So imagine that you're not actually that you're doing postpaid billing. You will charge someone at the end of the month but you need to actually make sure that you can charge him at the end of the month. So you need to do an authorization to test his credit card. And certain payment providers support zero authorizations which means you can do that without actually charging them anything and some don't. And ideally you would want to have that. We use PayMeal for that for precisely that reason because it allows us to do zero authorizations which allows us to actually sell you Commerz platform and we can actually be sure that we can charge you. And in the same ecosystem we have Commerz dining that will handle the use case when the card could not be charged and then we need to notify you and so on. So this is another big story and if you really want to get into it it's something that you should think about when you're selecting your payment provider so that later you can just add the modules and implement that instead of being stuck or having to actually redo your payment implementation or change it in any way because let's be honest it's also a stress on the user who suddenly sees a completely different payment flow on your website. So I wanted to show you how we can help. For a long time now people were coming to us and asking these questions. How do I know which payment provider I should use? What should my criteria be? Do you have any listing that I can look at? And now we do, it's called the marketplace and it has constantly expanding listing of payment providers and other third party tools that you can look at and you can inform yourself. So we are taking the effort to actually gather the information from them and then present it to you in an easy to use way and then if you want you can download the module and open an account with them. We even ship the connector inside Kickstart so you can click a tab and immediately browse and when you select one for instance if I open PayPal it will show up in my add-ons later and it will show me my credentials. So it's a big convenience and I think it really helps people decide. So what we provide is we give you a general overview of the cost. We cannot give you an exact cost because they will always want to know all of the parameters they use for pricing so they can give you a quote but we will tell you what the general category is so you will know whether it is for you or not because for instance PayPal is a really flexible solution it supports many countries, customers trust it but it's really expensive and it's okay if you want to grow with them but if you're just starting out you might want to look at some other solutions. Also we tell you clearly what's the functionality. You don't need to go yourself through the marketing talk we will see what's important and we will present this to you and we are constantly working on refining this so it's actually more informative. We will tell you how to sign up so we will direct you to them or we will give you a form you can fill in right away to send them an inquiry. For certain solutions we will allow you to register right away through the marketplace so you will immediately get your account details and you will be able to see them right away even from Kickstarter. So this also decreases the time needed to actually get you started. We also provide the quality guarantee so if something is on the marketplace that means we've completely reviewed the code sometimes multiple times and we've worked with them to ensure that they are secure and that they maintain a certain level of quality which is really important and together with that it also means that there is a maintenance guarantee. This module will not be abandoned because we are here and we are helping maintain it and you might have 20 PayPal modules but ours is maintained. It's not just maintained, it's maintained by Ryan so that's a pretty big thing to consider and even you know that it's on a roadmap so even as commerce changes as times change we are still here, we are maintaining it and making sure it's good and honestly that would make me sleep much better at night. We are very interested in finding out what you want. What are your questions? What do you worry about when selecting a payment provider? So come to our booth, talk to us, talk to Shannon and tell us so we can actually refine this and we can provide all of the information that could be useful for you. That way we will come to a point where we have all of the great payment providers right there ready to compare, ready to review and then we can just pick a good one and we can implement it and we're done. So all of this really saves time for you and it helps us because you're not building a crappy site. We need to talk about few technical caveats about implementation. I won't be able to go into all of them in detail because we should start with the questions but let's go through it real fast. So with translating the UI, many people think like this. You know at some point you just have to realize there are some strings that don't want to be translated and you need to honor their decision because the Drupal T system only works on strings you define but if something is user defined like the title of a text type or a checkout completion message you cannot translate that but if you use the internationalization module which provides the string and field sub modules that will work and when you install them many of the commerce strings that you couldn't translate previously will automatically become available and this solves 95% of the support requests around that in our queues. Translating the content, you use entity translation for everything. Forget about the old translation module forget about the internationalization taxonomy don't use different approaches for different entity types you use one module to translate any entity whether it's content whether it's a product, a term, it doesn't matter. For invoicing there's a nice module called commerce billy you can use it if you don't use an external system make sure that you're following your country's laws different countries have different laws on how the invoice needs to look and what information it needs to contain and that information varies from country to country. So if you have a presence in multiple countries you also need to think about that. So inform yourself and then implement the correct template at one point it would be great to have a contrib that would do it automatically for you of course. So what's our future? Right away we have a buff at one PM and we would love for you to come and talk about the actual problems that you have implementing this in commerce. It's some of you are probably listening to me and saying yeah it sounds so easy but I ran into this bug or this problem and I didn't know how to proceed. Well we can discuss all of that at the buff. At the buff so David and I are doing that at one. Please come if you're interested at least we can have a chat. We need better documentation so Josh Miller is working on having a complete step-by-step guide on how you should translate commerce and how you should translate commerce kickstart. This is our biggest cause of confusion right now and just doing this on Drupal 7 is really hard which you know if you ever listen to Gabor we can make it easier but actually showing you the right way and we are working on that. We are working on the full documentation and you're free to contribute. We of course need better contributes so we can make this even more user-friendly. For instance we have a nice discount module maintained by Jonathan Kuma and it really helps you define discounts in an easy way and it also needs to handle VAT rates easier so you don't need to worry about modifying rule weights and so on. It just should handle everything automatically for you, it doesn't but it's really close and we are working actively on it. We need all the help we can get. As I said, David doesn't scale, Ryan doesn't scale. Most of our developers do testing on their own so you have a project that's done by only one person and these are the things that affect us all so we need to care. We need to care that commerce does this in an easy way, in a bug-free way and we should all at least provide testing to point out the hard things to point out any bugs and we should contribute because we cannot do it alone and we need to have this. And remember, commerce without borders is Drupal without borders. If we have an amazing solution for e-commerce, amazing beyond the borders of Drupal itself and the more we spread commerce the more we will spread Drupal. So please, if you have any questions, step up to the mic. I'm working as newly implied as head of Drupal service with a Dublin-based company and we use Drupal for making big websites. I'm sorry, can you just be a bit louder, I couldn't hear you. Hello? Yeah, that's much better. Yes, I'm newly implied as head of Drupal with a company in Dublin and we use Drupal first at big websites. If the big websites have a small e-commerce section and we use Drupal commerce. Yes, definitely. If we're making a big website with a big e-commerce section and we use Magento, how do I get my boss to use Drupal commerce? Well, show them all the great huge websites that use Drupal commerce. Go to our booth and see some of the examples. If Royal Mail can do it with 18 million orders a year, if Cartier can do it with sites in every country and point of sale terminals in every store, I would say that's pretty big and we have plenty of those examples and we have shown that commerce scales amazingly on the projects of that size and of course, you can contact us and we can help with any talking points or examples or anything you need to actually make that switch. We will support you in any way we can. Thank you. Hello. I want to ask you if there are some features or something other that can add me to import some content type as a product then to or when I raised all the website with commerce, if I can import the contents, photo, video and other. Yeah, so the best solution for importing anything into Drupal is migrate. Migrate will allow you to go between Drupal versions, go from external systems and we always use migrate for everything. Commerce Kickstarter actually has migrate built in and we use it for our own importing of the demo content. So that's definitely the solution you should use. When you start the website, use migrate to import your data no matter where it comes from. Yeah, we have a video channel that helps. So, well, we have tutorials about that so you can, and we have time for one more. Oh, thanks for a great presentation. I think I represent your nightmare. I'm from Norway. I'm sorry. I also represent a publishing company in the same country and we do sell a lot of stuff but we still are seeking for some kind of transparency regarding the ERP integration possibilities in Drupal because we are totally dependent on that and it's a big part of our supply chain and it also is actually a fact for most other companies in the Nordics at least in Microsoft Dynamics is the solution with Navision and stuff and the biggest sales argument to get Drupal through to the organization is how well it works with an existing ERP solution. So what are your thoughts and experiences? So in my experience, the different ERPs always need different custom implementations and we've had experience with integrating various different ERPs and so far it seems that that work wasn't shareable. That's how custom it was but I think we can definitely talk about how we can actually improve that. Maybe we can document the process. Maybe we can release some code even if it needs modification so to actually get you started on that but right now it's always a custom integration. Okay, yeah, Brian. Did you know while you were talking I fixed that shoot your foot with a shotgun thing? There's a patch now to remove a VAT that's already been included if you entered a product price including that VAT. Nice. So yeah, I should say that every single commerce release has had at least a few fixes for intranslization and translation. We are constantly improving things. The commerce 1.8 has about 10 patches and improvements to make this really smooth and to make the ad to cars form and everything easily translatable. So we are constantly working on this and thanks to Ryan, we are constantly progressing. So I think that's good and make sure you're always using the latest code because it's always a working progress. Yes? What about rounding with the VAT? If you don't include the VAT in the original price and like your product is one cent and you buy a thousand of that and the VAT in the product price is shown as the product is just one cent but if you buy a thousand of that it would be like 10 euro and 11 euro or something because you have the VAT but you don't see that in the product price. Yeah. So the commerce VAT has some additional options to handle the rounding. One other example is that if you're entering prices without VAT it's really hard. You cannot get a price such as 14.99. So we allow you to change the rounding so that you can actually manage that. And I think that helps whether it resolves your problem completely. I'm not sure but we can discuss it at the both together. Okay. And if you enter the product price with VAT isn't there, why can't I not just remove it again for business customers? Because the patch wasn't written. Yeah. Okay. Because that's what we ended up doing. And then about this, you say you update the module and then you get the new VAT. Does it mean that it switches immediately or it switches at the correct date? It always switches at the correct date. It knows when the rate starts and when it ended. Yeah. Okay. Otherwise I would say why not make our own web service for this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, some of my colleagues say that ideally the government should have a free service so that you can ask what's the rate for this and you will just get back a response. The problem is we would still need to classify our product but maybe the NSA can do it for us. So at least for sales tax we can use that. We'll see. Okay. Thank you for your time and see you at the booth. Oh, and please take the survey and tell me how I can improve. Thanks.