Last week, Pixafy attended Magento’s 2018 Partner Kick Off event in Hollywood, California. The event was a one-day “brain dump” where we had the opportunity to network with Magento’s Executive leadership, Sales & Customer Success teams, and Partner ecosystem, while taking part in this exclusive learning opportunity to hear about Magento’s 2018 company and sales strategies, organizational updates, product roadmap.
Here are the top 3 takeaways from the event:
1. Global Focus – As ecommerce is paramount to all industries, with more and more companies going online and a major increase in competition, merchants need to focus their attentions on acquiring new customers in global markets. With the ability to open multiple storefronts for various countries off one single back end, and native integrations for global shipping carriers, Magento fully supports this and is major value add to merchants with global aspirations. Additionally, with support for multi-warehouse inventory, in store pickup, and distributed order management capabilities, companies with global operations facilities are fully enabled to run their business via all of their global locations.
2. 2018 is the year of B2B – Did you know that online B2B purchases in 2017 more than doubled those of B2C? As more merchants, distributors, and manufacturers go digital, there is tremendous market pressure for wholesalers to offer their buyers friction free purchasing options. This streamlines efficiencies and allows your company to be fully accessible to your customers 24/7, where they can make LARGE purchases on their own time, without the need for human interaction. Magento’s native B2B solutions offer fast to market personalized experiences for wholesalers in all industries. If you are a wholesaler who is NOT currently selling online, now is the time!
3. The Magento Marketplace and Community is a tremendous asset. Being an open source platform, with thousands of developer agencies contributing features and functionality to the platform, there is a deep marketplace of features/plugins that can easily be rolled into merchant’s websites, allowing them to focus their energies on more core engineering initiatives and performance, instead of figuring out ways to develop new features. Many new and exciting features that will ultimately be part of Magento’s core application are being developed by partner agencies. 2017 saw a 300% increase in extensions sold in the marketplace, 400% growth on orders placed within the marketplace, and 600% traffic increase to the marketplace. The takeaway, if you are on Magento and are looking to enhance your website, go to the marketplace where you will almost certainly find that “There’s an app for that!”
Bonus takeaway
Be careful when you stay at the Sheraton Universal (right by Universal Studios theme park) as they have Minions trying to look inside your hotel room.
