24th July 2014 / Written by Caroline Walker / 0 comments

Magento Live 2014 was good as always, full of interesting topics and excellent speakers.   This year the event was held at the Park Plaza Hotel in London Waterloo. The breakout sessions were aimed at merchants, marketing teams, developers and business users with a dedicated track for each.

B2B in a B2C world

One of our clients Mark Selby from Macfarlane Packaging spoke on the 'B2B in a B2C world' panel.  He provided lots of useful insights about how important integration is.  The panel informed the crowd about the need to give your customers a reason to go online rather than to phone, (or fax!) orders through.  The selling point is TIME! Making your B2B website simple and easy to use plus making it familiar to customers through a B2C 'experience' will entice your customers to complete their orders.

The panel were asked what are their top 3 tasks to make a good user journey on a B2B site… the answers… drum roll please…

1)     Enrichment of Products - this goes for B2C sites as well as B2B

2)    Search - Making the site easy to search and offering customers with 'Did You Mean' options instead of no search results found

3)     Marketing - getting the right message across to your customers and potential customers is vital in closing those sales

Navigating the modern spice route

Another session we attended was 'Navigating the modern spice route' - a panel discussion about going global from Paul Smith, 3M and the North Face.  It was a very popular discussion as many of the attendees were in the process or thinking about going global, so there were lots of shared experiences being discussed.

The panel agreed on the top tips for going international with Magento:

1)     Know the market you are going into, do your research, get to know the local customs before setting up a site

2)     Impact - Understanding how going global will impact your current business, do you have the infrastructure in place, how will you manage change within the organisation? Is your company ready for that commitment?

3)     Trust - Are you providing the right payment and shipping methods in the markets you are in/entering? will users in the region you are entering trust using online payment methods? Or do they prefer cash on delivery or bank transfers?

4)     Listen to your customers - look at the data you have collected from your customers, that will help you make an informed decision about which markets to enter next

5)     Manage excitement! Don't rush into it, look at the various markets and ensure you have the best reasons and business case to enter a new region

Tapping Omni Channel in Retailing

Omni channel retailing was a much discussed topic during Magento Live 2014 as we see retailers facing challenges of how to bring their digital and physical challenges working together. We attended business forums where we heard about how Boxpark and Liverpool Football Club overcome their omni channel challenges using Magento. The omni channel consumer has now become a reality and it is of utmost importance that online retailers take on this challenge and move towards providing an omni channel experience for their customers and a rethink of retail order management. It has been found that multichannel consumers have proven to be more profitable to retailers. Case studies of successful omni channel implementations were mentioned specifically UK based retailers like Toys R Us offering a collect in store with 30 minutes lead time and John Lewis claiming that 60% of their orders online being click and collect.

Magento as always provided lots of entertainment for the after party from retro games, to table tennis. There was also some 'interesting' dancing (no names mentioned).

Thanks to Magento for another excellent and informative Magento Live UK. We look forward to seeing you again next year!

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