I’ve been recommending Magento as the e-commerce platform to chose for my larger clients for many years now, starting with Trading Depot. Cater For You is moving to Magento early next year with customer log in facilities and CSE is also imminently launching on Magento. Each of these are B2B or majority B2B customers and the theme of this conference was very much how B2B could maximise the future around a Magento platform.
I went with my colleague from Trading Depot, Darren House and arrived on the Monday and took in some of the sights and sounds of Barcelona before an early start at the conference round the corner from our hotel.
Incredibly there was torrential rain and the main keynote stage was closed all morning, but I had elected to see most of the B2B stream of talks with very interesting case studies from a range of outlets trying to make a success of e-commerce, particularly hybrids of retail outlets and e-commerce – clicks and mortar.
A lot of the time though was spent chatting with the various vendors on their stands who have some fabulous offerings to move your web site onto the next level. I knew a few people already from my years in the industry and LinkedIn contacts but met some really interesting people and solutions to our upcoming requirements. Darren is much better at networking than me and also introduced me to a swathe of very interesting people!
The highlights of the show were seeing other businesses that had similar issues to ours and how they resolved them, improving conversion rates and the keynote speech by Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden and so much more besides. It was also interesting to hear about the recent buyout of Magento by Adobe and their CEO’s plans for the business.
I do not develop Magento myself, I am able to help clients build an e-commerce specification to their requirements and interview various agencies who may or may not be able to work with the client. Typically Magento is for clients who wish to deeply integrate with their ERP system pushing information such as stock, prices, customer account details to the web site and pulling the orders down to be processed. For non connected web sites I develop myself using WordPress / WooCommerce.
I also wrote a personal blog on my Barcelona experience if you are interested. If you are thinking of developing your business e-commerce proposition further and would like an informal chat, please get in touch.
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