The familiar faces of Jamie Clarke and Mark Lavelle greeted us bright and early (too bright and early for some after the previous evening’s celebrations) at the morning keynote session on Day 3 of Magento Imagine. They were joined by Roy Rubin, Co-Founder and Board Member of Magento, and Jason Woosley, Senior Vice President of Product and Technology at Magento. The four Magento powerhouses discussed the core mission of the company, along with Magento’s continued success and commitment to a high level of accessibility and community engagement. The Magento ecosystem’s involvement around Magento 2 was praised once more, along with the energetic feedback from Magento enthusiasts throughout the community.

Jason shared Magento’s product technology vision:

• Customer experiences shaping technology (a platform that is secure)

• Breaking down silos

• Ingenuity of the Magento ecosystem

..and he explained how Magento is rising to the challenge, by making it easier to work with Magento, by democratizing key functionality, and by fostering innovation and acceleration. Jason also shared that Magento is introducing new departments, like the sustained engineering department and is expanding the quality program to include extensions. Because what you attach to the platform IS Magento at the end of the day, and everything that is Magento should be nothing short of the highest quality. Customers, connectedness, and experiences all enable the work that Magento is doing in building the confidence of merchants and brands that trust the Magento platform around the world.

Next, Paul “Product Paul” Boisvert, Vice President of Product Management at Magento, revealed Magento’s latest exciting product offerings, and boy, were there enough offerings to go around today! First, Paul introduced the new B2B opportunity, which for merchants means a larger and more addressable market, expanded opportunity, and a better platform for innovation. For the ecosystem, it translates to a faster time to market, lower costs, and less complexity. Magento is “expanding the core” with custom catalogs and price lists, assisted sales support, backend system integration, and a single platform for B2B/B2C. Next up, Paul announced the Magento Social extension, a new way to monetize social networks through the Magento platform, and Magento CMS via BlueFoot technology.

The bevy of products didn’t stop there, with Magento Shipping promising to automate fulfillment processes, reduce shipping-related costs, drive cart conversion and revenue, and easily connect with global carriers. And in case you were wondering, the four tenants of how Magento is enabling innovation is via:

• Wearables

• Artificial intelligence

• Headless commerce

• Progressive web apps

Michael Sonier, Head of Omnichannel Products, Magento Commerce then took the stage to discuss Magento Commerce Order Management. Michael reiterated how omnichannel is no longer optional. He explained that first, it’s vital to KNOW where your products are so that you can capture the order, and then you need some business logic and intelligence to route the order to the best fulfillment source.

Michael then talked about Magento’s partners and how they are driving success on the OMS platform. 5 out of 10 clients displayed on the screen are Vaimo's clients (Tous, Dyson, Helly Hansen and Brown-Forman).

Paul came back on stage next to share insights into Magento Business Intelligence. The full stack, singular solution consolidates data and helps merchants visualise and share insights. Dashboarding, ETL and data warehousing, data replication and consolidation make up the new stack. It includes best practice reports, custom report creation and Magento and Google Analytics data.

We didn’t make it to too many sessions on the last half-day, when the sessions ended with another lovely lunch on the Sunset Terrace with our fellow Magento devotees (and kebab devotees too, apparently!)

Three B2B Companies Balance the B2C Equation with Andrea Evans, Director of Project Management & Magento Certified Solution Specialist, Human Element, Sean Phaler, Manager of Digital Innovation, Pentair, and Dree Ziegler, Director of Marketing & Magento Certified Solution Specialist, Human Element.

Warner Bros and Nestle talked about their experience with Magento; both of the companies were amongst Magento’s first clients. Warner Bros has been for example on three different M1 versions since they chose Magento platform and preparing slowly to upgrade to M2. Nestle is currently in 96 markets around the world, and they’ve had a customised platform from the 2000’s.

What were the main drivers in selecting Magento?

Warner Bros:

• Multi-store capability

• Open-source leveraging community for basic features

• One back-office system

Nestle:

• Super feature-rich

• Ability to deploy quickly

• Community

• Magento skills globally

• Pilot project took only 8 weeks

• 18 months from end to end for the whole project

How did the centralised model take shape for both companies?

Warner Bros: There were so many different stakeholders; we have persons responsible for eCommerce in different countries.
Nestle: A global steering committee where our brands get together and make strategic decisions.

What were some international challenges?

Nestle:

• Language (right to left, left to right; build it into your maestro)

• Shipping can be complicated

• Taxes

• Returns and refunds

Warner Bros: Every territory has its own store; if you have a model that works, use it and replicate it to go to new markets.

How did you determine to which markets to enter?

Nestle:

• Slower in phase one

• Created an eCommerce academy with all the information needed for phase 2

• Managed to create solid foundations in order to go and finish phases easier

Warner Bros: Determine what territories drove the most revenue.

And finally...

The Vaimo team would like to thank everyone for another great Magento Imagine this year; we loved the breakfast meetings with our existing clients, meetings with prospects and partners, and re-connecting with familiar faces! We hope to see you again next year! (We are missing two of our team members at Imagine on this photo, who could not wait for the Magento snack break following the keynote.) Also - get in touch with us today!