During the last four years, the e-commerce market in Poland grew by 33.5 percent, earning its place among the fastest growing e-commerce markets in Europe. With that, it’s hardly surprising that more and more events for business professionals take place every year. Among this year’s major ones was the recent Ecommerce Trends 2014 CEE conference, which happened to take place in the famous National Stadium in Warsaw. And if you had doubts about the energy and ability of Polish e-commerce to innovate and move forward, it would have left you with very little room for that.
The September edition of Ecommerce Trends provided two days of insight, starting on September 23rd. And it did so by offering the participants two events that took place simultaneously – the Show & Expo, where dozens of companies from Poland and abroad put what they are most proud of on display, and the conference, where Polish and foreign guest speakers pondered the current state of affairs in the world of e-commerce.
The Show & Expo’s way of showing what matters
The expo side of the event was a chance to talk to the representatives of some exciting e-business companies. The Lithuanian team from SearchNode told us about their latest search engine for e-commerce, with a goal to bring intelligence and dynamics to on-site searching, enabling instant autocomplete predictions. They believe this could increase the conversion rates tenfold among the many users that use on-site searching.
Polish cloud-based project Sheepla advertised itself as the new way to monitor packages online, while the Krakow-based and already very successful Sales Manago, which offers the automatization of online marketing processes, talked about their further plans to expand. So did GetReponse, another intelligent tool, this time tasked with automating email marketing.
Oktawave attracted lots of attention. The Polish start-up aims to give companies and individuals access to cloud servers tailored to their current storage needs. Its cloud storage automatically increases and decreases as the needs change, saving time and giving an unprecedented amount of control. Hurra.com’s TV Tracking and Tag Manager are tools that to some extent served as the point of reference for the whole event. That’s because they are all about what the event itself is about – the intelligence expressed by precise gathering, analysis and use of data about customers. The TV Tracking tool is an especially interesting one, enabling you to determine the time your or your competition’s ad is aired on TV. That way, you can enhance/counter it immediately with online ads of your own.
There are is just a few of the projects we got to see at the expo. All of them helped us realize that today’s e-commerce is just as much the domain of marketing and management as it is the domain of technology. And it’s increasingly about data.
The conference’s way of putting it all into perspective
It didn’t take much time to understand why putting the one-day expo and the two-day conference together makes so much sense. The talks tackled all kinds of topics, but in the end they helped paint a clear picture of what the world of e-commerce, especially in Poland, looks like. And it is the world in which everyone wants “more” and “better” all the time. E-commerce players are able to learn a lot about their consumers and use that knowledge to target them with personalized content. Consumers are increasingly more aware of this and they demand a great shopping experience and offers that really meet their needs in exchange.
The proliferation of new devices and retail channels added to the need to diversify technology, design and marketing decisions. That is one of the main takeaways we could learn from the keynote speakers, Ian Jindel on day one and Ibrahim Ibrahim on day two. Internetretailing.net’s Jindel stressed the need to think of mobile, app and web design and ads as separate entities that meet different needs. The latter, the owner of online branding and design company Portland, shared many examples of why focusing on what each and every consumer wants individually is the best way to stand out.
If there is something that E-commerce Trends 2014 helped confirm…
… It’s that the Polish e-commerce market is maturing at a rapid pace. There are a number of start-ups as well as well-established e-businesses that have come up with technology innovations to enhance the capability of Polish e-commerce. The stores themselves are at the same time more willing to benefit from them than ever. Polish e-business understands the underlying concepts of the mobile and post advertising era and is trying hard to dig ever deeper.
This article was previously published on web.gov.pl