Ecommerce Forum 2015: A Short Recap

We’re just back from the E-Commerce Forum, the national e-commerce event promoted by the Consorzio Netcomm, held in Milan on April 21, 2015.

It’s a highly specialized conference aimed at industry professionals, especially managers and business owners. As a development and design agency, we work with e-commerce more and more. In recent years, requests for these products have been growing steadily. That’s why we felt it was important to be there, to better understand a world that is anything but simple.

The day offered several thematic tracks: from the classic one, focused more on technology, to Marketing with the obligatory “increasing conversions” topic, all the way to Logistics, Payment and Customer Care. This range alone shows the level of specialization needed to run an online store, which by now calls for management approaches completely different from traditional retail.

We were pleased to see the case of PrivateGriffe, for which we handled client-side development with AngularJS. Ivo Mosca, CTO of PrivateGriffe, shared the experience of integrating the platform with FACT-Finder, a service specialized in optimizing product search with advanced filters.

Ivo Mosca, CTO of PrivateGriffe, talks about the integration with Fact Finder

The opening keynotes focused on an overview of the market in terms of 2015 sales/transaction volumes, and the outlook for 2016 points to substantial growth in the sector. Even so, the room for entering the market is limited, or at least needs careful analysis:

• (Lower) price alone is not enough
• You need to actively measure and analyze sales data and, crucially, learn to interpret it correctly.
• Even the small players must adapt to the standards of the big sales platforms.
• Treat delivery processes as part of the overall process.
• Offer customer care services.

Of all these topics, the one that got the most attention was managing delivery processes as a key to customer loyalty. This process is often seen as a merely secondary activity to outsource. Instead, the speakers stressed a very important point: in fact, delivery is the only physical interaction between vendor and user. It’s no coincidence that the ads of Zalando, by now a national icon of e-commerce, have always put all their emotional weight on two distinctive features: returns and parcel delivery.

Also in the delivery space, Roberto Fumarola presented the Florentine startup QAPLA' which specializes in exactly these services. QAPLA' offers an intuitive multichannel shipment tracking system, useful both for the back office and for individual users.

Finally, one last point of Florentine pride was the closing keynote with guest Andrea Panconesi, CEO of Luisa via Roma, who illustrated the company’s exceptional success story, as a globally established name in high fashion.

Launching and running an e-commerce business certainly takes strong determination from a company, both in terms of budget and internal procedures, because even though the market is growing, the skills required and the competitors are top-notch.

An advanced, sophisticated development approach makes it possible to offer the right customization, both in checkout processes and in product presentation. In some cases, you can evaluate and integrate third-party services that make certain processes easier to manage. Of course, there may also be particular markets and/or situations, or niche logic. But beware: we believe these are far fewer than you might initially think!

But we don’t want to discourage you from your business venture; when you don’t have full knowledge of the domain, we suggest taking more of a startup approach to the project and testing every hypothesis with tools that limit risk, following the MVP logic.

If you want to check whether an e-commerce business is viable and run a test, it may be useful, purely as an example, to use products like Shopify, Software as a Service solutions that are great for getting started, with most key processes available out of the box, albeit with inevitable limitations.