MakoLab at eTail Germany 2022

eTail is one of the most influential conferences for ecommerce retail and marketing innovators in the DACH region. It was held in March this year and the slogan, ‘Transforming Retail. Together’, is a spot-on description of the scope of the event and the people involved in it. Our presence in Berlin was an excellent opportunity for networking with other technology experts and exploring ecommerce and digital marketing trends in various countries. Those encounters ranged from major players to start-ups.

One thing worth emphasising is that eTail Germany is not a mass gathering; there were around two hundred and fifty people participants. The important thing, though, is that most of them are decision makers and that has an impact on the quality of the discussions that happen there. We have been building and extending our skills in the sphere of ecommerce and related support services for a long time now and this year we also became an official Shopware business partner. In the light of all this, we decided to head for Berlin as one of the twenty-five eTail exhibitors.

We invested our efforts in making the best possible use of our time before we left, contacting other participants so that we would be ready to talk to potential clients about their specific requirements and present them with appropriately tailored ideas and solutions at the event. Visitors to the MakoLab stand included representatives of companies responsible for the development of ecommerce platforms, as well as the largest players in the cleaning agents, hygiene and personal care, FMCG, fashion, beverages and optical industries, to name but a few. Our meetings with many of them were firsts.

One of the fascinating talks was given by Hannes Weißensteiner, Managing Partner at Artefact Hannes, who addressed the rise of customer data platforms in the wake of the cookieless future of digital advertising. It is certainly no secret that utilising the data of third parties and collaborating with organisations such as payment providers, for instance, is very much simpler if the seller’s own customer data platform (CDP) is well organised. Mr Weißensteiner provided numerous examples of what the CDP ‘journey’ can look like and why best practice is to create a CDP which is solid, unified and accessible to other systems from the outset.

There can be no doubt that Glassbox, Quantum Metric and Contentsquare are all trending, with tools that fill the gap between data quantity and quality. Here, rather than using an old-fashioned package consisting of Google Analytics/Google Firebase plus a screen recorder, in other words, Hotjar or Crazy Egg, we have a novel approach in tools that go beyond traditional analytics, facilitating an unprecedented understanding of the customer experience.

As problems with the General Data Protection Regulation grow, a great many companies are turning to comprehensive consent management services like those from Didomi, Usercentrics or Piwik PRO, for instance. During eTail, Stefan Santer of Didomi moderated an absorbing panel discussion on integration between channels, systems and applications for the purpose of trouble-free shopping.

Two more technologies that caught our attention come from Empathy.co and Prefixbox. Empathy.co is grounded in AI and both technologies are sold as the best ecommerce sight search tools, providing results in a flash. It is worth noting that Prefixbox is already in use in a number of well-known companies, including international drug store Rossman and Poland’s eobuwie.pl, aptekamelisa.pl and militaria.pl.

Our meetings went beyond trends and the future of the industry, of course, since we were also very much there to present MakoLab and discuss our ideas and what we can offer in the ecommerce sphere, including our partnership with Shopware, as well as our quality assurance, user experience, user interface, web analytics and conversion rate optimisation services. This meant that, for our representatives, managers responsible for implementing ecommerce and digital solutions on the international market were a crucial group of participants.

Almost all the talks we held during the conference have led to further discussions and are ongoing, reflecting the fact that, in our sector, the final effect is built on identifying the client’s requirements, compiling an offer and agreeing terms and conditions, processes which will often take months.

How do our representatives sum up their impressions of eTail Germany 2022? In a nutshell, after the long stretch of doing everything in the virtual world, it was outstanding to get back to real world meetings and discussions about future trends and the upcoming opportunities and challenges awaiting our industry.