I visited Meet Magento day yesterday. Here in The Netherlands, so for me only a short drive through morning traffic. The Magento meetup was organized for the 3rd time by Guido Jansen, who has been a key player in the local Magento community from the beginning. The location was the same as the years before, but almost getting too small now. Magento has been popular here from the beginning and because of that there is a pretty active community. The Meet Magento event has been rapidly growing during the last three years, just as the Magento platform. So, was there any interesting news at the event? Yes and no, I would say. Personally I had a great time and learned some new stuff I wasn’t aware of. Enough inspiration for the next blog posts here at BoostingEcommerce. But let’s have a look at some of the highlights:

Bob Schwartz, president of Magento opened the day with a keynote and gave us a great insider look at the company.

Starting from there the visitors had several options of visiting presentations of speakers about marketing, google, media psychology, integration, hosting and so on. Some of the things I learned:

• E-mail integration with Magento is getting better now. Emailvision offers for instance a complete integration, so that you can actually use your Magento data within your e-mail marketing campaigns. Very powerful.
• Psychology is more important in e-commerce than I expected. The difference is often very subtile but oh so important for your conversion. Make sure that you give your customer first without asking something back. Your customer will give you something back because of the human nature (read: more orders, better conversion rates)
• Always do your math to see if your goals are reasonable. What is the conversion rate you need to reach to be able to work with for example Adwords without completely losing your money? It are some simple calculations, of which we’ll tell you more in a next post.
• Social media and reviews are very important for your conversion rates. ‘Best sold’ products and e-mail marketing still work very well, if done in the right way.

The end of the day another key note was presented by Baruch Toledano. He delivered some interesting information about upcoming changes in the Magento software. His presentation was a bit boring though. At the end of the day we needed something more spicy to keep us awake. Or maybe I should just have taken more coffee. Anyway, this is what we may expect in the next releases of the Magento community version:

• Better integration with the carriers. Although this seems to be introduced for the large carriers in the United States. Local companies in other parts of the world still need their own solutions
• RMA functionality for your return process automation. Very good that this is included, companies often need extensions now to handle this process.
• Better marketing options like reward points. I wonder how far this will go in the community edition since the reward points functionality is currently one of the benefits of the Magento Enterprise edition.
• Magento will continue to improve Magento Go, the Saas solution. However, for the European market the missing payment provider support is still a major issue.

Some good news for the Community users: Magento clearly stated that the development of this version still has and will continue to have their attention because the community is the reason why Magento exists at all. Keep up the good work and Guido, thanks for the great organisation of the event!

Did you visit Meet Magento in The Netherlands or Gemany? Or recently in a different country? What is your opinion? We’d love to hear more Mangento news from your side!