As shown in a study by WorldPay 95% of online shopping happens at home. And that makes absolutely sense to me as that is the place where I am relaxed and ready to make decisions about what to buy next and take my time to compare information about products and sales. Additionally everybody in commerce knows that the rush hour in online shops in terms of orders is starting at 8pm and that is the time most of us are on the couch at home.

And what kind of devices are you using on the couch or in the living room that was voted 1st place as shopping location at home? A recent study from Zanox says it is the tablet that gains attention:

In 2011, the long-promised tablet-revolution finally took place. As a result, in December 2011, the iPad was behind 50 percent of all revenues generated via the mobile channel. In the zanox performance network, the average revenue per transaction generated via the iPad is 63 percent higher than that for the iPhone and double the amount made by Android devices. The iPad is therefore the No. 1 revenue-generator and the motor for all mobile commerce in Europe.

Despite tablets TVs are also getting ready for the commerce battle at home. At this years CES Samsung presented its latest Smart TVs supporting voice, face and motion control. The video below presents how it technically works and also unveils that online shops and the software in general are not ready to move the TV in the position of a 1st screen for shopping, yet. Anyhow, I see them already in a good position as 2nd screen linked to other devices as smartphones and tablets.

disclosure: alexander is founder and ceo of CouchCommerce and tends to be very excited about news concerning post pc devices like tablets.

It often seems like the only products I see shared in my Facebook and Twitter feeds are from my startup friends testing their new projects. Is all this sharing overhyped? The only products I ever share, if I actually do share, usually have something humorous or interesting to do with them. I don’t want to share to my social networks that I just bought a new pair of Vans shoes or a new bottle of shampoo using Amazon Prime. It won’t provide any incremental value to my friends, similar to posting something like “eating breakfast”. And if I’m looking for an opinion, I’ll ask a close friend via email.

E-tailers should definitely still include these social sharing buttons, as some customers will still share their products. Unbeknownst to popular belief, adding social sharing buttons, doesn’t make a site social. It allows an easy avenue for users to be social and share their products. If you’re using a more sophisticated sharing module instead of the simple Tweet/Facebook buttons, you will be able to grab the users social graph. This should be analyzed and incorporated in your marketing strategy, but it’s still only a very small part of the puzzle. Social & ecommerce are still two young friends trying to develop their relationship. In the end, I’d bet on them figuring things out, but it will take some time.

About the author:

Matt Bahr, NYC, Operations at TheEmob, a private b2b social community of e-commerce merchants. Prior to joining the TheEmob, he was an intern at General Assembly, a co-learning educational space, in NYC. During the summer of 2011, he interned for LocalMind, an iPhone app company based in San Francisco, that is doing really cool things with location-based APIs. Earlier in 2011, he worked for Spinback, an Ecommerce social media analytics platform for E-commerce websites. Spinback was acquired by Buddy Media in May 2011.

In terms of setting, the OXID Commons was completely different from Meet Magento. Rather than squeezing the crowd into a (grand) hotel, the OXID organisers used the spacious exhibition hall in Freiburg both for the presentations and the after-show party. The effect was, that although there were similar visitor numbers in Leipzig and Freiburg – namely about 600 – one had more room to move around and find quiet corners to do the occasional phone call. All in all, it was professionally organised, as in the case of the Meet Magento there’s no need to whinge about catering, wifi – it’s a grown-up conference, full stop. A major difference that could be pinpointed is the fact that Meet Magento was a 1 1/2 day conference with 3 tracks, the OXID Commons covered only 1 – yet fully packed – day with 2 tracks.

Keynote

The keynote was delivered by Roland Fesenmayr, CEO of OXID eSales AG. He talked about the current status of their main product and the whole OXID ecosystem and stressed the fact that much of the innovation and new developments came from the community, either by pushing interesting shop projects based on the OpenSource edition of OXID eShop online or becoming active in the forum (which has gained 5,000 more active users since last year according to his presentation). Fesenmayr emphasized that while fostering the community approach on the one hand, the company also had a clear vision for catering towards Enterprise level customers. This was the reason why the Professional Services unit as well as the Premium Support Level has been introduced. Also, the new 4.6 version brings performance improvements of up to 30% and in the future the focus will be addressing high-performance scenarios by master-slave constructions and enhanced caching.

After this summary, Fesenmayr outlined the areas in which he sees considerable growth in the future and how OXID eSales have positioned themselves: be it B2B, online pure player, longtail or multi-channel, he provided relevant showcases.

And this is also what I liked about it the most: no heartwrenching and emotional commitment to the community “obsessed” with the product (as happened 3 days earlier @ Meet Magento) but a rather down-to-earth look into the Commerce reality (note: the e from eCommerce got also dropped here as well, something we have been preaching for quite some time now). Surely, a keynote cannot fly without some hyperbole and marketing lingo, but at least the examples that were given focused on the German market – something very sensible considering the German audience.

The stage and the floor

You know how it is: there’s action on the stages, but the real show happens on the floor, at the coffee stands and in different corners of the venue. I saw the Best Practices Enterprise Commerce session, which because of its tight timing and a rigid presenter was actually an insightful and fun thing to do. For the rest of the day, I was hopping through the event until finding my way back into the main conference hall for the final session on the future of commerce, with Lars Jankowfsky, Marcus Diekmann, Benjamin Loos and Johannes Altmann. Hosted by Roland Fesenmayr, who asked a couple of quite relevant questions regarding the future of retail, multichannel scenarios etc., this for me was the best thing that happened on stage that day.

I only managed to get into the developer track once, only to witness an extremely boring and way too long presentation about the semantic web and the GoodRelations ontology by Martin Hepp. One thing that struck me, though, was the fact that this track received an amount of management attention that was totally missing from its Meet Magento counterpart: With Oliver Ciupke, Erik Kort and Marco Steinhäuser, three employees of OXID eSales were in the room or on stage all the time – something Magento could only dream of!

Together with a great aftershow party, I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s OXID Commons. Next up is the Shopware Community Day, I’m looking forward for the third and last event of the Commerce spring and hope to be able to give a final verdict afterwards. See you there!

Read the full feature at excitingcommerce.com!

The general set-up can be dealed with in a few sentences. Since its inception in 2009, the conference has matured perceptably in terms of organisation. Classy location in Leipzig’s Westin Hotel, great catering, working WiFi, streaming/video-recordings of all sessions, mobile camera teams – everything you would and could expect from such a conference in the year 2012. All in all: great job, hat tip to all the busy bees behind the scenes! Needless to say it was great to catch up with the crowd, make some new acquaintances and generally have a good time.

The Magento Déjà-vu

However – and it actually feels like a bit of a Déjà-vu because I’ve written exactly the same regarding an earlier edition of Meet Magento – the way in which the Magento (or should we rather say eBay) management presented itself to the crowd of followers was unsatisfactory to say the least. After the initial words by German community guide Rico Neitzel, the keynote was delivered by Bas Nawijn, Head of Sales, EMEA. He very routinely trotted out slides (which had previously been used by Roy Rubin and Bob Schwartz at the Imagine Conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago) sporting all kinds of facts and figures such as more than 800,000 in the community (where do those figures come from?) are supporting Magento now and that everything is growing and superb and what have you: more extensions, more certified developers, more yadda yadda. And not to forget: Passion. Ah yes. And Love. Love for the product. Hang on. Obsession, yes, that’s the suitable term. Thank you community, you’re the greatest, you foster the Magento spirit when you organise hackathons and cross-desert-runs, we owe everything to you, developers, developers, developers (as in Steve Ballmer but without the mad jumping and the sweating).

Please Magento, I say it again: if you don’t want this to be interpreted as mere lip service, get active! Don’t send us a sales guy (nothing personal Bas), send us somebody from management. Have him sit in the developer track for a couple of minutes as a sign that you care. Buy everybody a drink. That sort of thing. Is this really so hard?

What saved the day was the fact that Yoav Kutner, founder and former CTO of Magento (who had magically disappeared from the official presentation’s slides) hit the stage and said a few words about him being there just because he cared and still felt connected to the community. Big round of applause and everything felt right and authentic again.

[Time shift: more presentations, aftershow party, drinks and cigars]

Also the second day keynote was not really an entertaining eye-opener but rather an eBay sales pitch. Bas tried to outline what the basic idea behind x.commerce was (which is a really promising one, ie. interconnecting all sorts of services in the ecommerce space so merchants can concentrate on selling their products rather than maintaining a successively complex array of interfaces and services), but could not get the message across. There were a whole lot of question marks in the conference room. Veery curious. Even more so, because, as I was told, there are a few hundred people in eBay working for the x.commerce product right now!

The open path

A couple of weeks ago I have suggested that based on the knowledge I had to this point, Magento 2 would never see the light of day (Death knell for Magento 2?). Also the Magento 2-related things that were talked about at the Imagine Conference, which as far as I know were mostly restricted to a new design editor for the frontend, seemed to point to a functionality that was more relevant to the Magento Go product instead of the “real” Magento 2.

But, I’ve talked to a lot of people, including Yoav Kutner, and the good news is that it seems as if I was wrong. In the recent weeks, more and more core developers have been switched over to developing Magento 2, the company is also providing a Github repository now for everybody to see what’s being worked on. At the moment the latest commit is about 12 days old, but I was told that eventually this codebase will reflect the latest developments made by the core team. A quite surprising amount of openness I have to say. This would be in line with one of the major goals for Magento 2 – transparency. Let’s see if apart from technical enhancements the communication processes will also be improved further.

In my perception, Magento seems to be back in the race again. Though it will be delayed, Magento 2 is alive and kicking. And regarding the OpenSourciness of the product: even though with regard to the community eBay behaves like a bull in a china shop, they are well aware that the crowd of followers are their most valuable asset. And who would take an OpenSource product away from them when there is so much love around, anyway?

Read the full feature at excitingcommerce.com!

Incubators. Let’s use a very broad definition here and say that these are programmes by major corporations, providing platforms for new ideas they can benefit from in the long run. So, if you’re startup with a dedicated team in need for some cash as well as some strategic and organisational advice, you have yourself taken under the corporate wing and hope for the best. The above-mentioned hub:raum will work that way. Similarly, German retailer Otto (see Otto pouring 50 million Euros into Project A Ventures) is on the quest for spotting startups that are fresh and have working business models – ie. generate a sufficient amount of cash. Usually, those models are cloned and virtually within weeks, the original, boot-strapping founders are put out of business because of the sheer marketing power of the aforementioned corporations.

In other words: as soon as you come up with a great product or service, corporate company builders might be after you. Especially if you’re an online retailer, your business model is threatened to be cloned: Buying and selling products per se is something that is not terribly hard to copy for competitors.

Innovation

Let’s call a spade a spade, what’s at stake here is how innovation can be fostered and maintained. Unless innovation is at the core of your business (like for Amazon and Apple, who generate billions in turnover yet are able to regularly come up with products and services that push them even further), major enterprises increasingly find themselves missing out on all innovation fun because their very structure prohibits courageous moves. Enter incubators: Support startups or clone exisiting ones, have them gain a considerable market share and thus provide rejuvenating effects for enterprises which have been founded in the days of yore. If Otto isn’t able to prepare their offerings for the future of digital commerce themselves, it buys some ex-Rocket-Interneteers and gives them enough toy money to do what they should have done quite a while ago in the first place.

Before I zone out to much and let this one turn into a rant (which, knowing how my mind operates, will come out sooner or later), I’d like to ask you guys: What’s your point of view here? Are the initiatives outlined above necessary for a healthy growth of innovation or are those practices actually counter-productive?

(Image by jurvetson)

(Image by Vectorportal)

(Image by morning_rumtea)

Read the full feature at excitingcommerce.com!