Forum Retail 2014 – Multichannel, Shopping Experience and Big Data

Last Thursday we attended  the Retail Forum in Milan (Italy) and I would like to share a few notes about our participation as exhibitors together with our friends Extra (Gold Partner and official localizer of Openbravo in Italy).

To give you an idea, this Forum focused on the Retail industry, located just outside Milano, in Pero. There were big names in retail such as Ikea, Carrefour, LVMH, Samsung, Epson, Adidas, Fujitsu or Decathlon, Replay and many others talking about a wide variety of topics.

About the topics elaborated on during the so-called Premium Conferences, “Integraziones multicanale: what’s next?” was particularly interesting. 3 hours about omnichannel, O2O, multichannel integration. It seems that the evolution of our Commerce Platform is perfectly aligned with the major concerns and demands of the market.

Let me give you a personal feeling about this kind of retail event:  you see a company which sells coffee together with Ingenico, or a security company, apparel, or fancy stuff for the shops to improve the shopping experience…honestly,  retail is a very big word and I have the feeling that everything can’t be covered properly in just one event. I wonder if there should be a sub-industries approach. Just an opinion.

Back to describing the Forum. I am positively surprised that at least one of the conference rooms was almost full of attendees permanently. There were many topics in the free conferences:  security, logistics, technology, loyalty, payment means,  Business Intelligence and Big Data. I´m surprised though that the BI and BA conference was not that crowded being so critical for the future of the Retail industy.

My last comment would be the importance and concern for the shopping experience shown at almost all the conferences regardless of the main topic. Many people we spoke with one to one,  had particular questions about our mobile POS, being web based, for the cost of our products, by how easy or difficult they are to use, but is also true that, as in the conference, behind every enquiry, question or doubt there was a clear preoccupation about the shopping experience. It was clear that above any trend, success is in the shopping experience. It is to this great shopping experience that we want to contribute through our Commerce Platform.

This was seen very clearly by the fact that the most crowded conferences of visual elements for stores contrasted with almost empty conferences on something as critical  as Big Data and Business Intelligence.