Magento Imagine Conference 2019: A burgeoning event for us and for the community
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The premier Magento Imagine Conference 2019 unfolded in the dreamy city of Las Vegas between May 13-15. The 3-day event attracted innovators, movers, and shakers of the industry and who’s who of top corporate entities at Wynn Las Vegas.
Being the premier Magento event, the leading e-commerce platform showcased its vision, innovations and the industry insights driven by consumer needs and how Magento is re-discovering itself on each step to match these demands.
What a Grand Event! It had ALL _ Aspiring sessions from global experts, labs, certifications, great food & networking, amazing party and a rocking band killing the floor.
Special thanks to @magento for bringing the whole business world under one roof. #magentoimagine pic.twitter.com/zZ9WcW15RR— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 16, 2019
Broadly speaking, Magento Imagine conference 2019 can be broken down in 3 categories
- Customer Experience;
- Omnichannel Innovation;
- Commerce Intelligence
The customer experience here holds the key. In order to increase B2C and B2B sales, uber customer experience is quintessential and Magento is ensuring to tick all the boxes to make customer shopping experience simplified, engaging and seamless including mobile as well.
Hear from Chris Sater about this new feature #AMP for #Email.
How it gives users an interactive, real-time experience and keeps inboxes safe!@magento #MagentoImagine pic.twitter.com/ygnSn6CGS9— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 15, 2019
Then the next buzz is innovations related to omnichannel. Omnichannel holds the key to retail’s success. The key focus of omnichannel is to blur the lines between online and offline. It can be best understood as to transfer the online experience offer to offline or vice-versa. Omnichannel has come as a sigh of relief for retail outlets which otherwise were being crushed by e-commerce.
Another crucial development in the Magento Imagine Conference 2019 was integrating your store with the largest of e-commerce marketplaces i.e. customers move their catalog to the e-commerce marketplaces and receive orders. At the same time, control the entire sales related operations from their online store itself.
In this series, Magento is now offering integration with Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Pay and Amazon FBA. Through integration with these 3 services, merchants can gain new customers, provide new payment methods and ship faster.
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Delighted to get captured with happy faces Mickey from @amazon seller central and sharing business knowledge!@magento #MagentoImagine pic.twitter.com/GdCM5BAW1d
— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 15, 2019
As far as commerce intelligence is concerned, the Magento aims to educate customers to measure right metrics and make sense of the data in order to understand customer behavior, product performance to adopt ameliorating methodologies to improve customer experience and as a result increase conversion.
Mid-market being the hyper competitive #INDUSTRY for the merchants, @jasonwoosley_mg had a talk with @BrittanyHodak .
Know how @adobe and @magento are collaborating to enhance #Enterprise capabilities to the same? https://t.co/oQVfCbYCW9— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 21, 2019
CedCommerce at Magento Imagine Conference 2019:
This year was the best year for CedCommerce as it not only get to absorb multiple things, make new connections and generate new business opportunities and but the icing on the cake was getting a booth to showcase our innovation – Collaborative Shopping – a technology that aims to bring offline shopping experience online through employing AR (Augmented Reality).
Our take on Magento Imagine Conference 2019:
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Somesh Katiyar from the CedCommerce got the opportunity to attend Magento Imagine Conference 2019 as representative of CedCommerce.
From from participating in a big dam run to showcasing the innovation by CedCommerce, and from attending seminar and networking to exploring business opportunities, his presence ensured that CedCommerce participated with full force.
This 4D Photo Booth is remarkable, surrounded with overwhelming fun and great enthusiasm here at #MagentoImagine. Must Try!@magento pic.twitter.com/NYbvD5exOu
— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 14, 2019
Major activities pursued at Magento Imagine 2019:
- Showcasing collaborative shopping innovation at Magento booth
- Attending keynotes and breakout sessions
- Exploring business opportunities
1. Showcasing collaborative shopping innovation at Magento Imagine Conference 2019
The first and foremost mention here should be about the latest innovation by CedCommerce – Collaborative Shopping. Here the idea is to bring the best of online and offline and merge them seamlessly so that customer can have an offline store like experience online. To do so so we have employed augmented reality with Twilio APIs which enables prospective buyers to share the products (in real time and with different scenarios) to their peers, friends, and family. The major takeaway of this innovation is to arrive at decision with more confidence or to expedite the decision-making. Also, this helps greatly in increasing the conversion rates.
Day2 was full of enjoyable experience, session was amazingly started by #MagentoMasters,most appreciated one.Proceeded by informative sessions by extraordinary people at Magento Imagine,here exciting things happen which can enlighten the mind of people!#MagentoImagine @magento pic.twitter.com/LWfbCJayeV
— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 15, 2019
2. Attending keynotes and breakout sessions at Magento Imagine Conference 2019
This one is among the biggest opportunities that we get to learn from the best in the business. There were so many great seminars, keynotes, and breakout sessions happening that it was getting difficult for us to choose which one to attend and which to leave. However, we had our agenda according to the verticals and product lines we offer. Therefore we zeroed down on some of the breakout sessions which were great in terms of providing inside expertise and industry best practices.
a) Drive Growth in eCommerce with Google
Since integration with Google’s shopping actions program and Google shopping is one the foremost products offered by us, it was of utmost priority to attend this session where Google explained how it’s helping businesses of all sizes to connect with their targeted audiences and drive desirable actions and as a result get a revenue boost. Here they Google explain the latest innovations related to chrome, Gpay and Google shopping.
b) Fueling Growth for B2B Merchants with SEO and Content Marketing
Being marketer himself, he cannot miss out on this great session where Ronald talked about his experience of driving customers to their B2B business. As we all know Google constantly updates its search algorithms, within few years there have been multiple updates by Google such as Panda, Penguin, and Rankbrain which contribute towards better search engine ranking if their guidelines are followed.
However, here, as well, customer experience is the king. It means to produce content which not only educates the customers but is engaging at the same time. Furthermore, voice search is on the rise, therefore, brands cannot underestimate to optimize their content for voice search. Here, being behind means being marginalized. We intend to share this knowledge with all our clients of Magento B2B marketplace extension.
#SEO and #contentmarketing, two of the major pillars of digital marketing well explained by @Visiture_Search.#MagentoImagine @magento pic.twitter.com/rwBz3Oofer
— CedCommerce 🎯 (@cedcommerce) May 15, 2019
c) Learn from the Leaders at Magento Imagine Conference 2019: How B2B Excellence Award Finalists are Transforming the Buyer Experience
In this session, Mark from Adobe threw light on the practices adopted by the B2B excellence award finalists. It was an enriching experience which taught us how to get the experience right to optimize the buyer journey and engage the customers and what to consider when expanding to newer markets.
See the complete presentation here.
d) Stories from the Edge: First Explorers of Progressive Web Apps
This session led by Eric Erway and James Zetlen, both members of Magento community, dealt with their experience of using PWA (they’re among the earliest adopters of PWA) to increase the front-end development standards, they shared their findings and shared their views about the future of PWA which will help us ameliorate our existing solution. All the discussions can be understood by the following PPT.
See the complete presentation here.
e) Business Strategies: Control Amazon, Don’t Let Amazon Control You
As the combined USPS and comScore study found out, “96% of customers first browse products on Amazon before making a final purchase”. It can’t be truer as Amazon has control almost half of the US e-commerce sales and its 3P e-commerce marketplace burgeoning with 3rd party sellers.
However, it is also important to employ practices that boost your product’s visibility so as maximum quantity can be sold.
as Amazon charges multiple types of fees which further depends on the programs you’ve subscribed to. Again learning from this session will help us enlighten our customers of marketplace integration product line which is a strategically important vertical for our business.
See the complete presentation here.
f) Best Practices and Tailored Strategies for Cross-Border Commerce
This breakout session was one of the crucial one. It has a panel consisting of John Glasgow, Mark Sieczkowski, Claudia Summers, Frédéric de Gombert. The panel talked about the nuances you need to consider when moving to newer markets. The discussion majorly revolved around the content consumption behavior of customers from different regions, their preferred shipment method, loyalty programs, and the different payment methods preferred by the customers from different regions.
See the complete presentation here.
3. Exploring Business Opportunities at Magento Imagine Conference 2019:
On this front too, we got multiple leads and held several meaningful discussions. There is an inherent benefit when you attend a gathering of like-minded people. There are several areas of mutual convergence. Here we had several fruitful meetings with representatives of Paypal, DHL, Amazon, Walmart, MagePlaza, Wagento, Total Server and Fanplyr.
Conclusion:
Being part of the Magento community, it was a delightful moment for us to network with our peers, explore business opportunities, and also get to showcase our innovation at Magento Imagine Conference 2019. In fact, we thank Magento for providing us the booth to present our innovation. We hope all the skepticism around conducting Imagine 2020 next year gets cleared as these types of events are the fuel for the growth of thousands of e-commerce agencies who gets to meet the persons of the same interest. It’s like meeting the family!
As inputs from Somesh Katiyar, CMO, CedCommerce