Ecommerce world doesn’t stand still – Meet Magento UK is back in 2020. This year we have lots of marketing ideas and top-notch solutions to empower your online business. Keep reading the article to learn about all of them.
The 9th time the UK has welcomed Magento and ecommerce community – Meet Magento on Wednesday, June 17.
The Meet Magento UK conference is an annual live event but this year sponsors have to make some changes due to the pandemic. Even though it seems that there are fewer Covid-19 cases worldwide now, it’s not the time to relax and forget about social distancing.
So, how can you gather the community during the pandemic? Move the conference to the online format.
To be honest we all expected the format that Adobe already provided – they decided to load all the videos at the specified time to the website. But JH – Meet Magento Association – provided the online conference with live chat, live speeches, abilities to communicate with each other and speakers. The conference started at 9:25 am by the UK time and included lots of sessions on the main stage, merchants, developers, solution providers and technical tracks.
Presented by JH, Magento has one significant goal online. During the registration, all the participants have an opportunity to donate money for the charity – the amount of money is not limited. As a result, Meet Magento UK raised to selected charities – The Trussell Trust, Mind, Age UK and Clifton Community & Family Support Group – £82,595.
The annual conference always aims to unite the community and online business owners giving them an opportunity to communicate with each other, share their experience and learn directly from the industry leaders and core Magento architects. On the Meet Magento UK 2020 were 34 speakers and 900 attendees. Those who missed the event might find any informations by the hashtag – #MM20UK. The benefit of the event this year was an easy networking opportunity, all the participants might directly ask questions to speakers and share their thoughts on Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. So, how was it?
The conference started with a welcome speech by Jamie Huskisson, Meet Magento UK organizer and CEO at JH. He said some words about the current epidemic situation, and wished all the attendees to have fun and support the community. And then he gave the floor to Peter Sheldor, Senior Director, Commerce strategy at Adobe. Peter was talking about the new normal of customer buying experience, and showed how ecommerce sales are changing during the pandemic. He says that Covid-19 became an unprecedented accelerator.
We all expected the decrease in sales, but the situation is opposite. Comparing with the Adobe predictions from March to May last year, $52 billion extra has been spent online during the pandemic. While share of products purchased through smartphones increased by 10% in May, compared to January 2020. As a result, lots of customers – 42% – are not going to return to brick and mortar shopping after the pandemic. Businesses have to adopt, and companies like Zara, Bose, Canada Goose, lululemon and others have already closed their physical stores to drive online or are looking for solutions to improve customer experience. So, Peter wants to say that ecommerce is a winner of pandemic, and the world will be adapting to the new shopping rules.
After the welcome speech and keynote, the conference, traditionally, divided into breakout sessions. We will tell you in detail about some of them. If you want to watch all the videos, you can visit Meet Magento UK website and find them there.
Andy Mulcahy, Strategy & Insight Director at IMRG, was talking about the Covid-19 impact on online retail. While Peter gave us statistics about the ecommerce growth in general, Andy compared the influence on clothes retailers, healthcare industry and others. He had a very informative presentation, and we strongly recommend watching it.
Meet Magento UK is always an event that gives you knowledge and good working business tips. One of such presentations was a speech by Chloe Thomas, author and the eCommerce masterplan podcast host. Chloe gave advice on how to grow an online business in 2020. She said that every online retail needs to focus on 5 points:
- Avoid shiny objects – you need to focus on the problems you need to solve, instead of creating new ones.
- Everything should be optimized -always review, analyze, and adapt.
- Don’t forget the whole customer journey – you need to see the whole picture.
- Be ready to make changes fast – have a levers plan.
- Treat geographic regions differently.
Ray Bogman, Senior Business Solution Architect in Adobe, was speaking about blocks of digital transformation “Innovation Matrix”. The expert gave a guide on how to lead your digital transformation from Magento 1 or 2. Ray showed best practice frameworks to prepare for the transformation, using his 10 Building Blocks. Such blocks include Business Vision, Customers, Partnership Network, Data Analysis, Business Model, and others. So, if you’re replatforming your business, this guide is a must.
Meet Magento UK 2020 is at the height and we come to the Magento Product Roadmap update session. John Stockton, Senior Director of Adobe Product, announced lots of new solutions important for ecommerce and sum up their achievement for the last 12 months.
The most awaited – Magento 2.4 – is coming in August, 2020.
The new Magento version has already been announced at the Adobe conference, but now we have some more details about its improvements: new B2B capabilities, expanded support for headless and omnichannel, intelligent commerce and security improvements. Moreover, the beta version is now available for SI & Tech partners. John also announced two TCO tools – Safe Upgrade and Site-Wide Analysis tools. Safe Upgrade tool aims to identify conflicts between the new Magento version and your store. Site-Wide Analysis monitors health aspects of the website and notifies, if there’re any errors.
We also recommend watching the session by Samar Elshafiey, UX Researcher & Consultant at Google, “Designing Memorable Mobile Experience”. The sessions is a ready guide on how to create an eye-catching homepage, product listing page, checkout and FAQ pages.
Among the sessions we have mentioned, you can also view videos created by Luke Carthy on how to nail Google Analytics, Karolina Szachnowicz about importance of test automation, Drew Garratt “Progressive Web Apps today”, and other experts from Adobe, JH, Adyen, MageMojo, Vertex, PayPal, Google and Klarna.
Meet Magento UK 2020 also surprised its attendees with the comedy set by Danny Posthill. The performance was right after the lunch, and allowed attendees to rest a little to be ready for the new experience.
Wrapping it up
JH has prepared once again for the event and delivered a good experience to the whole Magento community. Speakers and attendees were able to communicate live, and the live chant already has hundreds of thankful messages from all the participants. If you want to join this atmosphere or to watch sessions again, you can always come back to view recordings, stop a session at any time to make notes and rest, if you want. Who knows but maybe in the future online conferences will take place of all offline events. You can’t deny that it’s more comfortable and less expensive. But in any case you lose this feeling of community, going online. So, we’ll see what the future of eCommerce events will be.
What do you think about Meet Magento UK 2020? Share your opinion in the comments below!
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