Looking back on Meet Magento NL 2016
On May 12 and 13, Meet Magento was back: the Dutch edition of the world’s leading Magento event. This was the eighth Meet Magento in the Netherlands, but this year’s edition was special. The past year brought major changes to the Magento world with the release of a new version, Magento 2. Not surprisingly, many talks focused on Magento 2 and all the changes it will bring.
The program was split into general e-commerce sessions and development sessions. Interestingly, only one of the general e-commerce talks was about Magento 2. It shows that the core principles of e-commerce stay the same, whether you’re on Magento 1 or Magento 2. Moving to Magento 2 doesn’t mean rethinking how you approach e-commerce. It just makes those principles easier to put into practice.
E-commerce
One session worth highlighting was Theo van der Zee’s talk on conversion optimization for online stores with low traffic. Not every store is a Bol.com or a Coolblue, handling hundreds or even thousands of orders a day, and with less volume, optimizing for conversion can be tricky. Split testing only really becomes viable at around 1,000 orders a month (unless you’re prepared to run your tests for much longer).
So what can you do with fewer than 1,000 orders a month? And what if you have more?
Here are a few things you can put into practice today:
- User testing
- Visual analysis
- Website speed
You can get user testing up and running quickly. Testing with real users is incredibly valuable, because it shows you right away where people run into problems. Sit next to each user and ask them to think out loud. With just 5 users, you can uncover roughly 80% of the problems on your site.
You can also use websites such as peek.usertesting.com or wegvink.nl, which offer a simple, accessible way to run user tests.
The slides from the session on conversion optimization for low-traffic online stores are available on SlideShare.
“Did you know Cream has built a unique split testing tool for Magento that sends all your A/B test data to Google Analytics? You can then segment all the data you already have in Google Analytics into group A and group B. For example, group A might see a green order button while group B sees an orange one. Want to start A/B testing with Magento too? Get in touch with Cream.”
Development
The development track featured plenty of Magento 2 content. That makes sense, since developers face the biggest changes: Magento 2 changes the way you build templates, deploy code, and test it.
One session that really caught developers’ attention covered the Magento 2 deployment process: actually pushing changes to your Magento 2 online store live. It was presented by Bart Delvaux, author of the book “Magento 2 Development Cookbook.”
Magento 2 completely overhauls the deployment process, and the result is an online store that can run a lot faster. That speed is one of Magento 2’s biggest advantages over the first version.
Of course, the slides on deployments with Magento 2 are also available on SlideShare.
Want to see all the sessions?
Of course. You’ll find links to all the slides on Dutchento:
View all e-commerce presentations or view all development presentations.
