Du 14 au 17 juin 2011, San Diego (Californie) a accueilli les leaders de l’e-commerce à l’occasion de la grande messe annuelle du secteur, l’Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE).
With 175 speakers, 500 exhibitors and over 7000 visitors, Prestashop took part in an unmissable event, during which we met the key American players in e-commerce today. All sectors and all the latest trends were represented there.
We received advice from leading internet figures, such as the Vice-President of eBay North America and top representatives of Forrester, Walgreen, Accenture and of course Google, all giving e-traders the benefit of their experience.
Multi-channel retail was a key trend: “Customers who buy via several of our retail channels, including mobile, the web and in-store, are three times more precious than those who only buy via a single channel,” stated Sona Chawla, the President of E-commerce at Walgreens. Walgreens is the convenience store leader in the USA, with a turnover of 278 million dollars in 2010.
However, the stars of the 2011 event were inarguably the social networks. Social Shopping is growing, and traders are increasingly taking an interest in these methods of communication, which are close to their customers. We will be taking a look at the benefits of Social Shopping in an upcoming article!
Open Source is everywhere
In the exhibition hall, it was plain to see that Open Source is enjoying exponential growth compared to SAAS.
Jason Shaw, CEO of MyPerfectColor.com, a group specialising in interior design products, provided proof of this at a conference. He recently migrated two of his sites from proprietary platforms to Open Source platforms. This enabled him to achieve improved performance and functionality with a lower implementation cost. After an in-depth study of many e-commerce programs, he discovered that Open Source technology was the best option for combining functionality, control and deployment costs.Open Source allows developers to build their sites as they wish by allowing them to access the application source code.
Leaders in online payment, logistics and listing, such as Authorize.Net, PayPal, Fedex, USPS, UPS and DHL, were in attendance alongside the e-commerce platforms. We had the pleasure of meeting these key players and forming ties with them, with a view to building new partnerships!
And… because for us, feedback from our Community is the most precious of all, we took advantage of our time in San Diego to meet several of our members: a big thank you goes to Chris, John, Emmanuel, and David for their valuable comments and suggestions, which enable us to constantly improve our e-commerce solution!
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