Just a week ago, orange invaded Las Vegas once again to get “Unbound.” Imagine Commerce took over the Wynn for three days packed full of announcements, amazing keynote speakers, networking events, and innovative breakout sessions.
A lot has happened, and a lot is happening, here’s what you can’t afford to leave behind:
1. Imagine 2015 drew in over 2,400 attendees. Over 240,000 customers use Magento code all across the world. There are over 300 tech partners, systems integrators that make it happen. We are the largest ecommerce ecosystem in the world.
2. Focus on payments, on the bottom of the funnel too, in order to convert the funnel into a chute.
3. Increase transactions by putting the PayPal Express Checkout button in the cart, instead of just in the default Magento checkout.
4. Trust seals really do make a difference!
5. You want better user experience? In every step, in every interaction, focus on reducing friction. Go through your store, pretend you’re a customer, and see what frustrates you (then fix it).
6. Tokenization and a flawless integration is key to a successful payment solution.
7. More online fraud is coming – keep your security practices up-to-date, use payment extensions that work with tokenization, ensure no one can hack in and implant malicious code, have someone reviewing code regularly for suspicious activity. All of these and more can help increase security.
8. Shopping on mobile tends to increase by 30-40% every year.
9. Keep your checkout clean and simple from start to finish.
10. Some binding is helpful, others hold us back – you have to get unbound and the first step is to ask yourself what binds you (and answer honestly).
11. eBay has taken the #1 spot in the Internet Retailer Top 500.
12. Omnichannel is here to stay. Doing it well allows you to shrink the distance between the customer and your brand, shrink time to market, and own your own channel.
“We need to stop playing defense and start playing offense.” – Craig Hayman
13. Innovation isn’t just technology, it’s a never-ending cycle; it’s not just a mindset you have, it’s an idea you live.
14. “Run to a problem.” –Fred Argir
Be accountable, run to it, and learn from it.
15. Embrace the chaos. There is no certainty in our world, and new ideas don’t stay that way for very long. You need to look everywhere for ideas and, when you find them, seize them, break through & break free, and be deliberate & quick.
“This is the moment, the moment is here to act, let’s act together.” – Craig Hayman
16. Measurement sets AdWords apart. If you can measure it, you can improve it. Study your AdWords for what’s next, it’s data at your fingertips.
17. Reviews are still relevant. Customers are much more likely to purchase a product when they see a positive review of that product.
18. “We’re focused on the inputs, not the outputs.” – Danny Essner
Marketing needs to think of itself as a revenue center, not a cost center. In all areas, we need to focus on outcomes, not efforts.
19. In ecommerce, only three elements matter in your revenue planning/forecasting: traffic, conversation rate, and AOV (average order value).
20. In a survey of 2,000 merchants, over 40% responded that they had received some kind of attack. The latest attacks are increasingly sophisticated and human-like – they mimic human behavior. Take steps to protect your Magento site.
21. Getting the basics of SEO right makes all the difference for your Magento site. Build it into your page templates and into the structure of your site. Invest in it; when done properly, it has the best CPA/COS (cost per action/cost of sale) by far.
22. “Start with simple truths, and proceed from there.” – Steve Wynn
In terms of guest experience, people make people happy; it’s human resource engineering. When it comes to creating a company where employees and customers are truly invested in it, you have to create a culture they want to be a part of. Cultures are the most powerful thing. A single employee, acting alone with a single guest, can change the history of this enterprise – if that is true, then that is the basis of a culture, not a company.
23. “Leadership is about making ordinary people perform in extraordinary ways.” – Steve Wynn
Reward socially beneficial behavior. Anything that enhances self-esteem will be repeated over and over again – this is one the most powerful energies to latch onto when trying to get a result Use positive reinforcement to influence behavior, to make people feel good about themselves and want to repeat the action.
24. Don’t get so stuck on the route. The route will sometimes have to change, but the vision doesn’t.
“What’s your cause? What’s your vision?” – Jamie Clarke
25. “We’re past the inflection point. Now, we’re at the point, we no longer need to be afraid. We don’t need to be bound by things anymore, we can be unbound.” –Mark Lavelle
Retail used to be simple. Customers came in, got the product, and left. Then, there was the internet and ecommerce, which created separate systems for fulfillment. Then, there were connected devices. Now? There are 1.5 billion smartphones out there. Major marketplaces have matured and several aggregate millions and millions of customers for an almost endless number of products. Instant gratification is a reality and now we’re moving towards anticipated commerce – it’s happened. The brains of the omnichannel system exist. There is no change to fear, just the need to create and innovate, completely unbound.
26. You need to know your customer, provide a great experience, and have the technologies to make it happen. This means having your inventory synced across all platforms and multiple shipping methods to ensure the customer gets the product quickly, efficiently, and in a way that delights them.
27. Magento 1.x is the code base that got us here. Innovation will continue on this base and it will be used for years to come. The records for this code base look like this:
- 100k concurrent shoppers
- 3 million unique pageviews a day
- 15 million+ SKUs
- 100 concurrent admin users
- 2,800 orders per minute
- an implementation for 7 brands and 65 sites across several countries
28. The Magento 2 timeline is on track. The developer beta was released last quarter, the dev release candidate has already been released this year, and the merchant beta is on track for release this year.
29. As always, the dev process is open and transparent. And, GitHub has been changed to include attribution, so if you’re a dev and you want to contribute to the Magento 2 code base, download it and get coding – your contributions will now be attributed to you!
30. Magento Connect will get some improvements, like scanning extensions and themes to ensure they do what they say they do and the code is strong & secure. In addition, you’ll see user-generated reviews, extensions vetted before they’re listed, a new dashboard to keep analytics in one place, automated copyright review, and more.
31. ROM (Retail Order Management) is the next big software for clients. It can help provide an order management system, ship-from-store, dropship, retail associate platform, payments, taxes & fraud, and more – it’s all included in the software.
32. The Magento Small Business Program launched this year and offers choice and flexibility for retailers at any stage. It helps small business owners find partners to help them deploy Magento. The forums have been reopened and small businesses have two solutions: a DIY option as a SaaS and a Do It For Me option.
33. The Visual Merchandiser Tool and Swatch Tool were launched last year. These help you sort products by best sellers, by color, etc. with smart category rules.
34. With the mobile software development kit, you can create a full-featured Magento store app. It comes with a sample app and is fully customizable. Right now, it’s the iOS SDK, but an android SDK is in the works and will be available by the end of Q2.
35. With tools, documentation, & training from Magento, upgrades from Magento 1.x to 2 will still be a migration, which will depend on the number of customizations and complexity of theme, but it will be nothing like a replatform.
36. The cloud is a solution to well-defined problems, not everything. It’s more of a tool that’s available to help you connect multi-sites with well-integrated CDNs. The “cloud” is not so much a place where you input everything and it just works, it’s more about using it as an underlying infrastructure to efficiently deliver applications. For now, we’ll be operating in a hybrid world.
37. Imagine 2016 will be April 11th-13th at the Wynn, Las Vegas.
Freeing yourself (and your business) from what binds you takes a lot of courage. As this year’s theme proposed, your business needs to operate unbound. That’s why a fluid, seamless omnichannel experience is so important. After all of this, it’s time to ask – what binds you?