The one and a half days at the Meet Magento #6.12 conference helped me to shape the vision of Liip as a Magento solution provider. I can see an exciting futureĀ with a lot of opportunities in the eCommerce business and the upcoming version Magento 2.
Magento is a widely accepted eCommerce solution for running web shops. It is available as both the open source Community Edition and as the paid Enterprise Edition. A worldwide community of developers contribute modules as extensions to the core functionality. At the conference, Bas Nawijn, ā Magento's Head of Sales for Europe and Africa ā shared the vision of Magento as a flexible, open eCommerce platform that everyone can use. Also, Magento announced that Magento 2 should be available in the first half of 2013.
Bas Nawijn holds the keynote.
Yoav Kutner, co-founder and former CIO of Magento, appears on stage.
Liip has been developing eCommerce projects with Magento for three years. The first implementation was for Carlo Bernasconi AG, a web shop selling stones and mineral products for the building industry. This early Magento shop featured a custom-developed shipping fee calculator that takes into account the different locations throughout Switzerland from which the goods are delivered to the clients.
The Schild.ch web shop received a Best of Swiss Web Award in 2010 in the Technology category. Liip developed the shop on the basis of Magento Enterprise and has continued to work on its further expansion up to the present. The online shop accounts for growing revenue every year.
The Jungfrau.ch project with its online shop developed by Liip won a Best of Swiss Web Silver Award in the Business Efficiency category in 2012. The Magento Enterprise based shop has been extended to communicate with over a dozen different third party services including SBB tickets, Skidata ski passes, STC hotel reservations, and event ticket reservations.
The Liip Magento team has been an active part of the developer community. The five team members have attended many Magento conferences, the last one Imagine eCommerce 2012 this spring in Las Vegas. During their up to three years of experience they have developed many extensions and contributed some of them back to the Open Source community. One of the latest contributions was to the Openstream's SaferpayBusiness extension. Despite the great success with the Magento implementations realized by Liip, we have not made it to becoming an official Magento Partner yet, but we are definitely considering this for the near future.
This year's Meet Magento in Leipzig was my first Magento conference. It was a great chance to meet the German community and learn about what else is going on in the Magento ecosystem. Topics addressed in presentations by experts and solution providers ranged from case studies, payment solutions, building trust through independent certifications and labels, to general advice on how to improve customer satisfaction and conversion rate. Since I was mostly interested in eCommerce business, I did not attend any of the many developers' talks also taking place. The conference was held in a relaxed yet dynamic atmosphere at the West In Hotel. At the end of the first day the attendees were invited to the After Show party at the fantastic Moritzbastei. Throughout the conference we got to enjoy good food and plenty of coffee.
Food, drinks and music at the Moritzbastei.
Leipzig proved to be the perfect place for a conference like this and the city itself is well worth a trip. I was glad to take an evening walk in one of the many parks. And I was suprised by the many big names of German cultural history that are present in the city ā Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Wolfgang Goethe being only two of them.
So at the end, on a very hot day I left Leipzig with the urge to listen to some Bach organ music, contemplating the things I'd learned and thinking about how we can further strengthen Liip's eCommerce expertise using Magento.
Video footage of all the talks can soon be viewed on the Meet Magento website.