What lies ahead for Czech e-shop users? News from E-nnovation
What's popular in e-commerce in foreign countries and soon to be available in the Czech Republic? Jiri Hlavenka and Lenka Stasova from NetDirect s.r.o. share the news and their impressions from the international E-NNOVATION 2010 conference.
An important international e-commerce conference took place in Poznan, Poland at the end of September 2010. Lenka Stasova, Jiri Hlavenka and Jan Svoboda from the NetDirect were part of the team of renowned specialists from around the world and speakers at this conference. What were their impressions and news from the E-nnovation conference?
International e-nnovation e-commerce conference: The representatives from NetDirect speak about the situation on the Czech market.
Read more about the innovation e-commerce conference.
All questions are answered by the well-known internet specialist Jiri Hlavenka and Lenka Stasova, the future director of the Polish branch of NetDirect.
At the e-nnovation 2010 conference, you presented : Czech E-commerce: past, present, future. What was the reaction of the audience to your presentation?
Lenka Stašová: Our presentation was received very well. A lot of people were interested in how the Czech e-commerce market looks. One of the reasons could well be that the speakers who were presenting before us mentioned several times the importance of focusing not only on your local market from the very beginning when launching your business, but rather to think globally.
We initially feared there may not be much interest in the Czech market, especially as the presentation in the other hall was a very interesting presentation by a Polish representative on “To process or not to process”. However, our hall was full, there were lot of questions at the end of our presentation and after our talk, a crowd of very interested and interesting people formed around us, offering their services or establishing relationships for future cooperation.
Lenka Stašová from NetDirect s.r.o. speaks at the international e-commerce conference which took place from 23. - 24. 9. 2010 in Poznan, Poland.
Jiří Hlavenka: From the immediate reactions, I can say that our presentation was very warmly received. It was, as I remember well, the fifth presentation that day so I was trying to make it amusing and lively to make people focus and forget their tiredness after lunch. There were several questions; we were limited to 10 minutes for them but we managed to answer everyone’s queries. It is more than obvious that the Polish visitors to the conference were really interested in the situation in the Czech Republic.
The visitors wanted to expand the topic of our presentation. They were asking about, for example, internet travel agencies, the main players in the Czech market and how they stand compared to foreign players.
"Czechs do not look across their borders and this could cause us a lot of trouble in the future because contrarily, entrepreneurs from neighboring countries will be looking at us." |
I like the fact that the vast majority of visitors could speak and understand English very well (only a few people used the translation headphones) even though they were mainly, as we found out later from the conversation in the lobby, small or new internet entrepreneurs. In the area of English language abilities I think Czechs have a lot of catching up to do.
Even though we are a small market, Czechs do not look across their borders and this could cause us a lot of trouble in the future because contrarily, entrepreneurs from neighboring countries will be looking at us.
Do you perceive your participation at the international conference as a specific and measurable contribution to NetDirect? Have you established any interesting business contacts or cooperation opportunities?
Lenka Stašová: Yes, at the moment we are already working on one web site for a Polish client who approached us with a request to modify and modernize his site. We also received some very interesting contacts for attractive services which we would like to offer to our Polish clients who establish their e-shop on the FastCentrik platform. Above all, we have found business partners who are well informed in the Polish e-commerce market and who gave us valuable information which will help us to get quickly and easily oriented in the Polish market.
Jiří Hlavenka: Yes, we can already see some partnerships and business for NetDirect. We have started to act on these and move forward and we are pleasantly surprised by the swiftness and willingness of our new Polish partners. However, I cannot reveal any more at this time – these are such interesting things that we would like to keep them in confidence for a while and then surprise you.
Presentation about the development and forms of Czech e-commerce which was presented at the e-nnovation conference by Lenka Stasova, Jiri Hlavenka and Jan Svoboda from NetDirect attracted the attention of a large international audience.
What presentations, news, theories or possibly speakers at the e-commerce E-nnovation 2010 conference interested you the most and why?
Lenka Stašová: All the presentations were fascinating! It was great to find out the differences between individual countries and compare them to the situation in the Czech Republic. Some presentations were extremely motivational and nearly made me to stand up from my chair, buy a plane ticket to USA, go to Silicon Valley, stay there for 3 months and gather all the possible information from that environment – from place where e-commerce arose. What I enjoyed most was the lecture by Jon Bradford: E-commerce in Europe – a VC´s View and Igor Karpachev: Russian E-commerce: Landscape, Main Players and Trends.
Jiří Hlavenka: Another surprise for me: All the lectures I saw were great! It is obvious that “outside”, and I do not mean only Poland as there were presenters from around 10 countries; it is possible to create a great presentation and present it with grace. None of the presenters were boring or poured a pile of slides with thousands of words on their audience – something of bad habit with Czechs.
Renowned Czech Internet specialist Jiri Hlavenka talks about forms of e-commerce in the Republic at the 2010 e-nnovation conference.
Did you hear any “revolutionary” visions for e-commerce from speakers? Anything the e-shop providers should start focusing on?
Jiří Hlavenka: I would not say, or call it “revolutionary”, although there is one trend, which is not very visible at the moment but will be mandatory for all e-shops providers in the near future. We are talking here about “m-commerce”, shopping and all the work with the e-shops through mobile phones. In particular, smart phones, such as iPhones or Android devices, will significantly change our ideas about what those little toys are for and what they can do. For those who really take their e-business seriously, it will be necessary in the future to adapt their e-shops for such mobile facilities.
"For those who take their e-business seriously, it will be necessary in the future, to adapt their e-shops for such mobile facilities". |
Other interesting topics, which are a bit undervalued in our country are, for example, the “smart” recommendation systems. These can find connections through the analysis of the behavior of tens of thousands of customers and visitors, and create a knowledge-based system for recommending other products, able to increase turnover by tens of percent.
Generally speaking, the Polish online traders are very active and aggressively search for new ways to increase their success in business – thus confirming what they say about having business and trading in their blood.
Foto: e-nnovation.pl;
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