Take away from Magento Conference in Shanghai : “A powerful OMS is key to Omni-channel”

E-commerce in China has been growing 3 times faster than traditional retail (45% vs 15% sales growth in 2013). If the growth is mainly driven by huge marketplace platforms, with a clear leader at 50% market share: Tmall (part of Alibaba group), brands need to create their dedicated online sales channels in addition to being on the marketplace platforms. As the leading open source in ecommerce, Magento is very popular in China, and attracts many foreign and local companies. It is mainly appreciated for its flexibility, support for Chinese local payment gateways, such as Alipay (part of Alibaba group), and the strong support from the Magento Solution Partners in China.

Magento Solution Partners, customers, and related services providers gathered on November 18th at the MagentoCom, organized by Bluecom to share experiences, new trends and success stories around Magento deployments in China. Openbravo China and its local partner System in Motion were amongst the Gold sponsor of the event, and cover a trendy topic in a 1h presentation: O2O Retail Strategy.

Openbravo and Magento share many characteristics: modularity, openness towards integration with 3rd party applications, flexibility, user-friendliness, agility, and both enjoy a large and growing community of supporters around the world.

The Openbravo presentation on O2O Retail Strategy attracted a lot of attendees, and sparked interesting debates on innovative initiative in Omni-Channel. Brands wanted to better understand how innovative and agile technologies can support new business models, which are out of their reach with their legacy systems. Magento Solution Partners wanted to better understand how Openbravo can act as a consolidated Order Management System, and support cross channel transactions. The key success stories in China, especially Home’s Up, of Magento – Openbravo deployments, showed that true omni-channel is possible today, to support a great consumer experience.

Brands and partners wanted to learn more about Openbravo China future Retail innovations: such as support for mobile payments Aliwallet (part of the Alibaba group), Tencent pay or Wechat social commerce.

The O2O Retail Strategy will soon be available as a Free Webinar called “Prepared for the Omni-Channel Transformation?” (available also in Spanish and Chinese) the next December 10th. People attending to this webinar will also receive exclusively the “Roadmap to Omni-Channel Championship” eBook free of charge.
No doubt it’s a great opportunity to learn the best practices to define your own Omni-Channel Roadmap.