Magazine: ‘E-commerce is making progress

Sándor Nagy
president
Ecommerce Hungary

In the middle of February president Sándor Nagy opened the year-starting conference of Ecommerce Hungary in the Öbölház event centre in Budapest. He talked to the more than 100 participants about the good market mood and the opportunities that e-commerce businesses should exploit.

Dr. György Bőgel
professor
CEU

The first speaker was CEU professor Dr György Bőgel, who told: technological solutions that make our daily lives easier can also cause social and political problems. He said that in the USA, after the economic recession that had lasted until 1980 it took 5 months to reach the former level of employment. Then when a similar negative period had come to an end in 2001, already 38 months were needed to restore the pre-recession employment rate.

András Vértes
president
GKI Gazdaságkutató

This presentation was followed by the lecture of Dr András Vértes, president of GKI Economic Research Zrt. He revealed that consumer trust is likely to drop this year both in Europe and the USA. In his view there is a trade war going on at the moment. Hungary is a small country, so we can’t generate a big crisis. Mr Vértes’ expectation is that demand will change and the market concentration will continue. It is best for e-commerce businesses to only plan for 1-2 years, as the situation looks difficult in the long run.

Róbert Pintér
head of research
eNET

A roundtable discussion followed and the two speakers were joined by Róbert Pintér, head of research with eNET Internet Research and Consulting Kft. He also counts on global changes and told: everyone is watching what Amazon is about to do, but it must be taken into consideration that retailers are different, just like their level of preparedness. His company forecasts a 10-percent annual growth in the e-commerce segment.

László Szetnics
regional business development director
Mastercard

László Szetnics from Mastercard (the main sponsor of the conference) called attention to the importance of strong customer authentication (SCA) for retailers from September.

János Zátonyi
Giro

János Zátonyi from Giro Zrt. introduced the advantages of the instant payment system that will debut in July.

Norbert Madar
GKI Digital

Norbert Madar, head of department at GKI Digital analysed the performance of the e-commerce market in 2018 and talked about possible future trends.

Szabolcs Kun
founder CEO
Arenim Technologie

Szabolcs Kun from Arenim Technologies (another conference sponsor) spoke about how to serve customers at the highest level possible.

Fruzsina Donáth
consultant
Smart Commers Consulting

Fruzsina Donáth, a consultant with Smartccommers Consulting gave a presentation about the large volume of data that is generated and how to process data efficiently. The main message of Ivana Pongracic from Facebook was that e-commerce enterprises shouldn’t think only in terms of their own country’s market as every other Facebook user has international relations. Frantisek Strupl from Google talked about the differences between Czech and Hungarian online shoppers. //