Highlights from Meet Magento NL 2019
Every year, the Dutch market gets its own opportunity to connect with Magento and learn from a wide range of Magento e-commerce experiences. The focus at Meet Magento is on shared interests and knowledge sharing. This year’s event took place on April 18 at the beautiful Louwman Museum in The Hague!
Here are some highlights from this inspiring day:
Hosts Guido Jansen and Sander Mangel, the driving forces behind Meet Magento 2019, welcomed the audience and walked everyone through the program: a lineup of interesting keynotes, complemented by sessions for business, development, and mixed audiences.
Driving your Magento shop to the future
After the kickoff, it was time for Waldo Smeets from Adobe to take a deep dive into the joint innovations, ambitions, and market position of Adobe and Magento, almost a year after the acquisition. Together with Ray Bogman, he looked at the tools that, like Magento, are part of the Adobe Experience Cloud and help online store owners deliver the ultimate customer experience. Think marketing, analytics, and advertising tools. For some online store owners, the sheer range on offer may still feel a little overwhelming, but the real-world examples captured the imagination and were genuinely inspiring. One example showed how Bever Zwerfsport connects its offline and online experience. When a customer buys a product in one of its physical stores, what they see on their next online visit (the products displayed on the homepage) is instantly tailored to that purchase, regardless of which device they log in on. The session also took a close look at PageBuilder, one of the flagship features of Magento 2.3, which lets store owners create attractive, inspiring pages and landing pages without needing a developer. Finally, several other Adobe ecosystem integrations were covered. One of the most striking was the direct integration with marketplaces such as Google Shopping and Amazon.
Take control of your total cost of ownership and ROI with an SME
Ray Bogman then took over from Waldo with a passionate argument: every company that wants to get the most out of its online sales channel needs an SME on-site. An SME, or subject matter expert, is the organization’s authority on e-commerce as a whole, not just someone with specific Magento system knowledge. An SME also defines business requirements and oversees every element that affects the e-commerce strategy. A must for every e-commerce organization? Absolutely, according to Ray. Getting this right affects your system’s total cost of ownership and ROI. Ray also presented tools you can use to stay in the driver’s seat of your e-commerce business:
One example is the MoSCoW method for setting priorities in your development process. It sorts a project’s requirements into must, should, could, and would. Ray also highlighted the value of user stories as a way to shape requirements from the user’s perspective. Of course, some of the advice was (in our view) fairly obvious: plan your migration to Magento 2 well ahead of time, choose the right migration approach (“Do or Redo”), and lay the right foundation. That means ensuring scalability, making performance and security your top priority, and reviewing your capacity every quarter against the trends in your industry.
Fietsenwinkel.nl: migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2
Next, Oscar Mannbro from fietsenwinkel.nl gave an inside look at the move from their Magento 1 store to the new Magento 2 platform, which was developed entirely in-house.
The company, which employs more than 500 people in the Netherlands alone, has started a major transformation, both on the customer-facing side (online platform, 42 stores, customer contact center) and behind the scenes (delivery, repair, and maintenance). The launch of the completely redesigned online store offers a substantial first look at what’s to come.
The project had a wide range of goals, and they weren’t purely technical. Naturally, the team also used the migration as an opportunity to improve the customer and online shopping experience. Customers can now build their own bike from scratch with an extremely user-friendly wizard, instead of checking boxes across an endless list of options.
Of course, the project had its challenges too, such as the various integrations with external systems and a rebranding that was decided on very late in the process. It was fascinating to hear fietsenwinkel.nl talk about both its ambitions and its challenges.
Magento Association
Meet Magento 2019 also had a touch of Cream pink. During a panel discussion, a delegation from the Magento Association’s Board of Directors, which includes Cream’s Danny Verkade, explained the association’s goals and ambitions.
The Association aims to be the central point of coordination within the Magento ecosystem for anyone interested in contributing to and learning from Magento. It’s now laying the groundwork and building on it. By promoting and supporting projects, community events, training, education, and online collaboration, the Association is working toward an open, healthy, strong Magento ecosystem that’s ready for the future. We’ve written about this before.
Did these highlights leave you wanting more Magento news? You’re in luck! Next month, Magento Imagine takes place. It’s the global Magento event where more than 3,000 attendees from 50 countries immerse themselves in Magento. We’ll be there too.
Want to know more about the developments discussed at Meet Magento 2019, or talk through one of the topics? Get in touch with me.
