Does e-commerce underuse the potential of emerging technologies?
Impressions from the E-commerce Berlin Expo
After attending the E-commerce Berlin Expo I wanted to give a quick overview of my thoughts.
First allow me to give my full respect to all the companies present showcasing their latest and greatest in content management systems, web hosting and data analytic tools. I wasn’t really impressed with the expo but I did learn a thing or two. For example it was quite interesting to hear from Google/Youtube about how they leverage "AI" to sell add space in lightning speeds. To the right customer for the right client at the right time. Programmatic advertising is a fascinating thing.
I set myself the task of finding the most innovative company in the expo. Out of the hundreds of stands I found three that were sort of in my lane.
Two companies did something with Augmented Reality:
One provided a web shop plugin for "virtual try-on", an AR mirror sort of speak where users can see how different glasses, make-up and jewelry look. Kudos for them for creating an easy to use plugin that can be added to an existing stock overview. This however does mean they don’t use 3D at all, their tool "cuts" the images and adds them to the face of the user.
The second company in AR was a bit of a surprise. They make scales, to measure things. From cheeses in stores to big industrial type scales to measure big things. On their stand however, their main eye-catcher was AR. Well they do something in AR, printing and augmenting product cards. To display product information, receipts, allergy information etc. It looked quite buggy and definitely has a lot of room for improvements, but it’s good to see there is someone doing this, because this will become increasingly important when we’ll have AR glasses.
My favorite use of emerging tech:
The one company that I am genuinely excited about is ChatChamp. They exist in the Conversational UI sphere where they offer a full service chatbot tool for brands to interact and engage with their customers. Covering the whole customer purchase journey. And I have to say it actually looked quite good. I had a chat with both of the founders and they have been playing around with different tools since the beginning (as did I so we had loads to talk about). This was definitely, in my opinion, the most innovative company at this event. Coincidentally they have also won an national innovation price in commerce in Germany last month.
Quite interesting to see that there is still so much room for new emerging technology in this space (not counting innovations in CRM, hosting, analytics etc).
If you have any more questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.