Commerce Expo 2017: women drive the sales growth in e-commerce

On 30 March the eCommerce Expo was organised in Budapest. There were 50 speakers and several thousand participants at the event. No wonder that interest was great: according to data from GKI Digital, last year online sales augmented by 18 percent and represented a HUF 310-million value. 2.8 million people made an online purchase in 2016.

The first speaker was eNet analyst Tünde Hack-Handa, who told that in 2017 online shop owners need to focus on the mobile platform. In part the two-digit growth in online sales is the result of the appearance of women shoppers in large numbers. E-commerce businesses continue to prefer price comparison websites and Google tools in marketing. Another important lesson learned last year is that logistic capacity needs to be improvable as turnover is difficult to predict in peak periods.

eCommerce consultant László Vecsei drew and e-commerce management pyramid that contains all the tasks online shop owners should focus on when they start a web shop. Mr Vecsei mentioned that the government prepared an e-commerce development strategy in February, which can be downloaded from the website kormany.hu. He told that e-commerce businesses can rent or develop their website, or they also have the chance to use an open source code web page. Rental is cheap but the website has limited functions, developing is expensive but the result can be easily combined with existing marketing systems, while the open source code solution takes more expertise and time to start. The consultant told Trade magazin that Hungarian retailers like to rely on already existing resources when they start selling online.

Szilárd Vajda from Conversific talked about the importance of data driven decision-making. The company’s solution can be used with online stores rented from shoprenter, and it makes objective, data driven business decision-making possible. From the data types that are worth measuring the expert mentioned e-commerce conversion rate first, which changes depending on the number of orders and visits. Mr Vajda opines that online retailers can benefit from keeping track of the number of buyers, monitoring regular customers and newcomers separately. The number of orders placed by a given customer should also be measured: those who haven’t made a purchase for quite a while can be lured back with well-targeted offers.

László Stygár, founder and owner of számlázz.hu introduced their automatic invoicing system. The service was launched in 2005 and 1,828 online shops use it at the moment. It can be used on any type of mobile device with an online connection. Deputy CEO of Hungarian Post Kálmán Majtényi told that MPL delivered 17.6 million parcels last year, and one third of this quantity was ordered from a smartphone. At the GLS stand our magazine learned that so far 3 percent of their customers used the bank card payment service that the company had introduced last year; this form of payment entails a 3-percent extra cost. DPD delivery men also have POS terminals and bank card payment entails no extra cost; 4-5 percent of payments are settled this way.