MLUK16 definitely did not disappoint again this year, it brought a whole host of brilliant talks and exhibitors along with a super passionate crowd to mingle with! This year’s event was the second one I have attended with iWeb, and I cannot recommend them enough. It is always such a great experience to join in with the Magento ecosystem and learn about the latest innovations in Digital Commerce.

MLUK16 Day One

On June 20th, a very rainy Monday morning, my journey started with a drive to the iWeb Offices to pick up Andrew ‘pembo’ Pemberton on the way to the train station.

The rain did not let up at any point, and it was impossible to stay dry when getting from London Euston to the Park Plaza where Magento Live was hosted. Hair = No longer straight.

The venue looked fantastic, the vibrant orange that is the signature of Magento along with the new block style designs were just stunning. Spread across 2 floors, it really hit home just how much of a big event this is for the Magento community. Second only to Imagine, apparently 😉

Magento Live UK 2016

Applying Design Thinking to Your Website

The first talk that I went to was run by Eric Erway & Keith Howard who are big names of the User Experience team at Magento Commerce. They talked about how design thinking was applied to Magento 2 and shared key learnings on how we can apply the same methods and processes in our projects, there were even worksheets on all the tables for us to work through during the talk which I think it great! I love getting involved with speakers and their topics. You can check out the slides from their presentation here: Applying Design Thinking for Your Website

General Session I

I love the general sessions at MLUK, it’s so great to see the leaders at Magento get up to share exciting news, and their appreciation for the community that surrounds Magento. Afterall, we are all there because we are enthused by and passionate for the same thing, Magento.

Magento CPO, Steve Yankovich was our main host followed by Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento and they both had loads of great news to share with us. Including the story of Jack Daniels joining the Magento club with their new UK store, which looks fantastic! It’s great to see more big brands taking advantage of what Magento has to offer.

Payment microscope

Understand the Little Things that Make a Big Impact. We went to see Kevin Groarke, Enterprise Sales Manager at Braintree give his enthusiastic talk on payments which was really good and showed off the ‘big step’ (if you saw the talk you will know what I mean :-P) for payment gateways that Braintree has taken to improve mobile conversions and usability. He also had a slide with a fat dog.

Magento Live UK 2016 - Kevin Groarke

Driving Success from Magento 1 to Magento 2 B2B Migration

David Deppner, VP of IT & eCommerce at ClearBags, gave some great insight for merchants looking to work with an agency to migrate to Magento 2. He also hit home to us just how fast the deprecation of Magento 1 will come around, and how now is the time to move to 2! View the slides: Driving Success from Magento 1 to Magento 2 B2B Migration 

Foundations of B2B eCommerce Success

Mark Selby, eCommerce Director, MacFarlane Packaging
Paul Cooling, Digital Content & eCommerce Manager, Uniphar
Philipp Lüders, VP Sales and CRM, Zoro

Moderator: Mark Brinton, Sr. Technical Product Manager, Magento

This panel of eCommerce executives from leading European B2B businesses spoke about the  top challenges that they face and what they do to tackle them.  The discussions were around scaling quickly to handle growth in customer activity, delivering custom pricing & promotions to individual customers, quickly adding functionality to address changing customer needs and balancing focus between ERP and CRM technologies. We also got on to the design and usability of B2B sites and how it is just as important for B2B as it is for B2C.

The B2B user on a Monday morning was the B2C user on Sunday afternoon, usability should be a big factor no matter who you are selling to.

Opening Night

After one last tour of the marketplace and a few cocktails, we moved to All Bar One for the opening night networking event! You could say we were a bit jolly, but a great night was had by all, even though England didn’t win.

MLUK16 Day Two

I will admit, I wasn’t feeling too fresh when my alarm woke me for day 2 after the many mojitos but I wasn’t going to let that stop me! The sun was shining and there was hardly a trace of the torrential rain we had seen the day before!

Magento 2 Technical Deep Dive

Migrate from Magento 1.x to Magento 2 Like a Pro

The first talk of the day that we saw was from Gordon Knoppe, Business Solutions Architect at Magento, on the migration methodology and set of best practices that the Magento Expert Consulting Group has developed, based on a range of client experiences. The main takeaway was that preparation is key, and the code is only one part. The seven phases of migration are Analysis, Strategy, Development, Quality Assurance, Staging Cutover, User Acceptance Testing and, finally, Production Cutover. View the slides: Magento 2 Technical Deep Dive

Swag

Our next mission was all about swag and finding out what the exhibitors had to brag about. There were loads of big names on the stands: Ingenico, Bronto, UKFast, Nexcess, PayPal, Nosto etc. and it was great getting to meet and talk to their representatives.

Next up: A well-earned sit and a coffee.

iWeb team at Magento Live UK 2016

Personalization: Balancing Business Wants With Customer Needs

I really enjoyed this talk! Paul Green, Business Development Manager at Tryzens, showed us loads of statistics from their extensive research project targeted at both eCommerce Directors and Consumers and what they mean. A few of my favourite statistics were:

  • The average person spends >£6k online annually.
  • Women spend 14% more time shopping online
  • But Men outspend Women by 44%! That’s huge!
  • 26-45 year olds are the most active online

View the slides: Personalization: Balancing Business Wants With Customer Needs

Preserving Your Conversion Rate Through Site Redesign

Next, we headed to a really popular talk led by Gabriel Goldenberg of ConversionRateOptimization.co. Gabriel really owned the room and gave some hard-hitting truths on when companies redesign when they don’t have a good enough reason to. So why should you redesign? Only for huge changes. He also showed us some interesting and disastrous case studies where big changes were implemented without taking advantage of CRO. View the slides: Preserving Your Conversion Rate Through Site Redesign

Update on Magento Marketplace: The Official Magento Extension Store!

During this session we heard from Adam Hundt, Magento Marketplace Lead Product Manager, Bhavin Rawal, the new Head of Magento Marketplace and Kristof Ringleff, Founder of Fooman, about the Magento 2 marketplace and what’s new, including the processes involved when approving new modules and creators. View the slides: Update on Magento Marketplace

 General Session II

We heard about the future from Steve Yankovich, which is full of flying cars and robot arms that make pasta by the way! He also predicted the next big thing being Alan Kent’s Magento/Amazon Alexa integration which was very interesting.  Here’s what else we heard about…

  • Thanks to Michael Sonier, #MagentoOMS is forever trending on Twitter
  • The Magento powered omnichannel innovation at Frankfurt Airport is just incredible
  • A formal partnership between the Meet Magento Association and Magento was announced by Paul Boisvert
  • Magento 2.1
    • Later this week (20-26 June)
    • Awesome new staging & preview to drive sales growth
    • Elasticsearch
    • PayPal In-Context Checkout & Saved CC
    • Refined Management Interfaces
  • UK brand Oliver Sweeney is one of the first on Magento Enterprise Cloud
  • Magento 2 Roadmap Strategic Plans
    • Improve Developer Experience
    • Increase API Coverage
    • B2B
    • Enhanced CMS
    • More Promotion Types
    • More Sophisticated Personalisation and Segmentation
  • It takes an ecosystem to stay agile and fast growing. #WeAreMagento

 

If you were there, I’m sure you enjoyed it as much as me!!

If not… Why not come along next year! I promise you won’t be disappointed.