I just came back from this interesting E-commerce exhibition in Paris, Porte de Versailles. It was the first time I attended it and I have to say that I was agreeably surprised.  There was 450 exhibitors, all kind of e-commerce actors. There were big e-commerce « blockbusters » such as CDiscount (ecommerce French leader), Ebay, LaPoste (French post service) but also a lot of good « start-ups ».

There were also a lot of conferences more or less interesting. These conferences were obviously often for a public with intermediary knowledge in ecommerce.  The conferences didn’t really offer advanced techniques, but I guess the paid trainings were there for that purpose.  It was a shame that the walls were so thin, and actually not real walls at all, because we were able to hear all the noise from the other conferences and exhibitions.

The big trends of this exhibition for me were:

– SEO, a recurrent trend,  there was a plenty of SEO agency, many conferences on this subject (usually crowded) . It’s a tricky science, so you can sell anything at any price because it’s hard to measure. But regarding the importance of search engines in terms of traffic in a very competitive sector, it’s a very good business.

– The “modelling”, there was a couple of exhibitors who presented very innovative products which make a virtual model of your poducts in 3D. Some even offer a possibility to consumers to model clothes and try them on “themselves” in order to know how they fit.

And also in term of e-marketing, there were presented also more common techniques (check, cash-back, blog, affiliation, etc…) and I was a bit surprised by the amount of emailing companies, which are kind of old fashioned already.