MagentoLive a Big Hit in London
June saw the arrival of the MagentoLive UK conference in London. This event attracted merchants, designers, developers and systems integrators who came together for two days to talk about the latest eCommerce trends and the development of Magento.
The conference agenda featured a number of high profile speakers, including eBay President Craig Hayman, and VP Mark Kirschner, as well as Ben Pressley and Paul Boisvert from Magento. There were several speakers from the wider industry too, with companies such as AXA, Nestle, Accenture and Hornby sending delegates, together with representatives from email marketing companies such as Dotmailer, and the conversion experts at CloudIQ.
Accessibility and the Future
Perhaps the most interesting session of the conference involved accessibility. Evan Gordon, eCommerce Manager at the RNIB, recently launched an accessible shop using Magento, with helpline order entry in addition to EPOS and a trade store. Prior to his time at the RNIB, Evan worked for Event Network, and managed several online stores. His work with the RNIB will do a great deal to help improve the accessibility of ecommerce websites across all sectors.
Understanding Your Customers
No eCommerce conference would be complete without a session on understanding your customers. Magento is a well-designed system out-of-the-box, but there are always improvements that can be made in order to help reduce cart abandonment, improve bounce rates and increase customer retention and repeat purchases.
Store owners don’t approach their stores in the same way that consumers do, which is why it’s so important to focus on usability testing and data analysis, as well as the use of highly targeted marketing techniques. Building high traffic volumes is not particularly helpful if the traffic is not of the requisite quality.
MagentoLive hosts events all over the world, bringing together the user and developer communities. They are designed to complement community-run events, and the popular Imagine Commerce Conference and are a must for anyone who runs a Magento website and wants to get the most out of the system.
The next MagentoLive event will take place in Australia on the fourth of December and the conference organisers have already put out a call for speakers. If you are doing anything particularly interesting or unusual with your Magento store, this could be a great opportunity for you to tell your story to the eCommerce community – in the heat of the Australian summer!