Meet Magento Thailand 2022 Recap: The Return of the Disruptors

“After the last few years of being apart, getting the regional eCommerce community in was fantastic. You could feel the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit in the air throughout the day as the region’s top business leaders got together in an atmosphere of innovation, learning and development for all,” says Tony Nguyen, Country Manager at SmartOSC.

The event had over 600 guests representing over 400 companies in the region. The partners were Adobe, Palexy, Mirakl, Stripe, True VWorld, dotdigital, ChannelEngine, Magnolia, and Acumatica, while the media partners include The Story Thailand, Retail in Asia, DTC Group, Digicon Asia and Thinklogic.

Guests were treated to several in-depth talks from ten prestigious speakers, including:

• Chief Digital Officer, Siam Piwat
• Country Manager/Managing Director, Bata Group
• Head of Marketing (Systems), ASUS Singapore
• Founder and CEO, Palexy
• Head of Product & Technology, True Digital Group
• Senior Consultant, Adobe
• Marketing Lead Asia Pacific, Kimberly-Clark
• Head Of Information Technology Solutions, Qi Service Thailand
• CEO and Market Lead, Stripe Payments Thailand
• Head of Data and Insights, Foodpanda Thailand
• Managing Director, Wunderman Thompson Thailand

Morning session

While including industry booths, a networking lounge, and many sessions for attendees to widen their networks, it’s fair to say the all-star lineup of speakers was the biggest highlight. 

Axel Winter’s keynote speech about eCommerce by 2030, driving towards a Web 3 future, was an insightful 30 minutes. In an attempt to describe the future of shopping Global brands, he demonstrates the efforts of Global brands towards new Web 3 ecosystems, intending to increase customer engagement and leverage new business models in Web 3 environments.

Why is this important to us and at this conference?  

“In 2023, the abilities to learn and deliver capabilities fast enough will become the lifeblood of business growth. As traditional ways of executing new features and ideas become outmoded and disrupted, businesses must radically and smartly improve their delivery capabilities in order to get ahead,” says Axel Winter, Chief Digital Officer at Siam Piwat and Founder at Pivot Digital.

Customers are focusing on trend and innovation leaders, especially in Southeast Asia. Without rapid development and advancement in a consumer vertical, customers will move to the one who leads.

The next talk comes from Tony Do, Founder and CEO of Palexy, a startup with AI strength that successfully gained venture from Do Ventures and Access Ventures in 2020.

Tony Do gave the attendees a detailed framework for Smart Retail Store Transformation, from People, Process to Product. His demonstration showed attendees how AI helps retailers save time and cost while operating more efficiently.

The final session in the morning was delivered by Eddie Teng, Head of Marketing, ASUS Singapore & Head of E-Commerce Growth, APAC. From a retailer’s point of view, he demonstrated his journey to success with ASUS’s new online marketplace for offline spaces.

With ASUS’s deep expertise in customer understanding, he walked attendees through the changes in customer behavior in browsing, buying and loyalty. How ASUS Singapore coped with these said challenges to become the highest-revenue branch of ASUS? Eddie Teng has said it all and even answered some tricky questions from our audience!

Afternoon session: Commerce Unlocked

Neelabh Tripathi – Marketing Lead Asia Pacific at Kimberly-Clark opens the afternoon sessions with a topic that’s probably on the agenda of all other companies: Digital Connect and  Personalization in Marketing.

Needless to say, the talk was much appreciated by the audience at Meet Magento event, since Neelabh Tripathi didn’t just give them insights but also how Kimberly-Clark navigates and wins using personalization and an innovative mindset. Three key takeaways from his talk include:

• Personalization is about journeys, not sessions
• Create meaningful segments to target 
• Test and Learns

The next talk from Tawin Tusnajareon, Managing Director at Wunderman Thompson brought out exciting and practical insights from their report: FUTURE SHOPPER 2.0.

The report is a global commerce study by Wunderman Thompson with 31,000 respondents across 18 markets globally. It aims at uncovering How the global online shopper is shaping the future of commerce and What consumers want from their digital shopping experience. Brands can use this report to guide their implementation strategies, services, and technology plans to meet customers shifting digital shopping expectations.

The final speaker of the afternoon session is no other than – Ms. Wilasinee Parnurat, the first woman and the first local Country Manager of BATA THAILAND since it started business in 1929. With her expertise, she gave an insightful speech about “Seamlessly mixing in-store and online sales – a true omnichannel approach”.

According to her, it’s vital to note at this point that a quality omnichannel strategy isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about being everywhere your target market is. An overview of the retail landscape, the changing customer and how Bata Thailand resolves using technology has been demonstrated in her speech. As an esteemed business leader, she also gave out 4 key points for attendees if they want to follow Bata’s success.

At the end of the Commerce Unlocked Session, four speakers Neelabh Tripathi, Marketing Lead Asia Pacific at Kimberly-Clark, Eddie Teng, Head of Marketing at ASUS Singapore, Wilasinee Parnurat (LALA), Country Manager/Managing Director at Bata Group and Tawin Tusnajareon, Managing Director at Wunderman Thompson joined a panel discussion moderated by Joy T, Account Manager at SmartOSC.

Together, they dove deep into how brands can better serve today’s more discerning consumers and strategies brands can adopt to stay competitive.

Afternoon session: Trending Technology 

The trending technology sessions start with an exciting product from True VWORLD, True Digital Group. Their Head of Product & Technology, Tharawit Disyawongs talked about “Empowering Hybrid Working Culture with Virtual Online Meeting Platform”

He walked us through the evolution of work, the “New Normal” situation, and how True can help inspire the new workforce by empowering them to work whenever and where they want.

Our next speaker, Manish Mittal, Senior Consultant at Adobe, was much welcomed by the audience with his presentation “Global Reference Architecture – Distributed multi-region and multi-tenant deployments”. 

As one of our partners, Stripe surely had many insights. The presentation “Payments as a competitive advantage during economic uncertainty” was delivered by Tee Chayakul, CEO and Market Lead at Stripe Payments Thailand. He talked about the state of the retail landscape, the pain points in payment experience, and ways Thai businesses can maintain their competitive advantages.

The final speaker in this track is Hattaiwat Pusanti (Thor), Head of IT Solutions and Applications at Qi-Service Thailand. He is an expert in Cloud Infrastructure thus, his speech was of great value to our Technology audience.

The panelists as part of the ‘Trending Technology’ track looked at how retailers can achieve deeper personalization with data. Luminaries like Thong Do – Founder and CEO at Palexy, and Akanksha Rastogi – Head of Data and Insights at Foodpanda Thailand debated the challenges and opportunities retailers face in data collection and personalization.

The event was a huge success

“The Meet Magento Thailand 2022 does not disappoint. SmartOSC has rallied some amazing speakers and they were a very empowering group of leaders. All of the presentations were dynamic and the messages they conveyed will definitely help businesses become future-proof in the years to come,” says Barami Rai, CEO at DTC Group.

Event partners True VWORLD, dotdigital, Mirakl, Magnolia, ChannelEngine, Palexy, Stripe, Adobe, and Acumatica brought their considerable expertise and experience to the table as well.

“Meet Magento Thailand 2022 is a groundbreaking conference. We are truly enjoying the experience here. From the innovative and unique sessions, we look forward to seeing a lot of technological advancements being made in the next few years, as well as the increasing adoption of these technologies in Thailand,” shares Aloysius Soh, Senior Business Development Manager at dotdigital.

“We are truly thrilled to meet a large cohort of attendees and tech leaders here. We believe that True VWORLD will be one of the leaders and tech enablers that will help transform businesses,” says Attapol Sinchalong, Managing Director at True VWORLD.