PayPal Partner Event 2017 – Increasing Number of Sales across Borders

Great time and interesting insights at Paypal Partner Event in Berlin!

Since we developed the official PayPal Plus Plugin for WooCommerce , we got invited for their yearly PayPal partner event in Berlin 2017. This time it was happening at the EUREF Campus.

In the beginning PayPal CEO (Europe) Rupert Keely was talking about last year and what to expect for the next year. They see an increasing amount of sales across borders. More than 20% of sales are happening already across different countries, and the number is rising. PayPal wants to become the global leading payment method – they do have ambitious goals.

Rupert Keely, PayPal CEO at PayPal Partner Event
Rupert Keely, PayPal CEO (Europe) with ambitious goals

To meet those goals, they partnered up with many global players, also with back then competition. Now they teamed up to use their network, services and possibilities together.

After his talk, Hermann Scherer had his really cool session. It was really great and fun to listen to him. His Session was focused on what customer want and figure it out their needs.

He stated, the human being has been always the center of attention – that was already the case with cannibals back then.

Hermann Scherer - what clients want
Hermann Scherer with a great session

He also says, almost always the worse one is winning on long term. Like light bulbs vs. candles, the candle industry was laughing about them because of the low light and lifetime of light bulbs back then. Producers of analog cameras were laughing about digital cameras, with their pixelate results, in the beginning. You know what’s the end of the story.

It is necessary to have a problem awareness before you look for a solution. He showed it with an example for contraceptive.

Just asking the clients is not enough. Back then, John Ford, the founder of Ford Automotive was asking the people what they need, their answer “faster horses”.

What we need is intelligence of chances. The challenge is to find problems, which don’t really exist for the customer. Like travel agencies for cuddle toys. Yeah, really this actually does exist!

Another topic is your environment. As you can see in this video, it is important and we can direct the customer in their doing, to make what we want.

Last but not least you do have to break the rules sometimes. You need to do crazy things to move forward. Because we regret less the things we have done, but we did not.

After the session of Hermann Scherer there was a panel with:

  • Jörg Boecker – Moderator
  • Heiko Hubertz – Founder of BigPoint
  • Jens Diekmann – Director Business Development and Omnichannel Douglas
  • Roland Fesenmayr – CEO OXID eSales
  • Karsten Traum – Head of private customer DKB
  • Dr. Frank Keller – CEO DACH PayPal
PayPal Partner Event - Expert Panel about E-Commerce
Panel of Experts in E-Commerce

Roland Fesenmayr, CEO of Oxid eSales was mentioning, when they started with OXID, it was the time when the bubble just burst. Everyone thought they are crazy to create a new shopping system, but their success is undoubtedly. They do pretty well, even though they were acting anti cyclic. Like Hermann Scherer said, sometimes you have to break the rule.

For the future, he sees industry 4.0 is coming, personalized products can be ordered for the same price as mass products.

He also noticed, that on many websites are already 10-15 cloud services are included on a starting page nowadays, like PayPal, Trusted Shops and so on. And for the future, they focus on transactions in context, for example Uber. In a context, the customer get’s triggered to make a payment with just one click.

DKB made a virtue out of necessity. Since they didn’t have any locations. Also for them it was very important to have transparency. In the near future it also should be possible to do banking with devices like Alexa, asking for your account status or asking Alexa to transfer money.

Douglas has their online shop since 2000, and their hotline is a great feedback channel they use. Instead of always searching for new things it is also worth it to check out your current products. For example, they improved their customer card, which is more personalized to their customer needs now and raised the sales significantly. And even if their online shop runs very well, they would never consider to close their stores.

Heiko Hubertz, Founder of BigPoint, said, most of the startups are not failing because of finance, they are failing because of scalability and internationalisation.

PayPal sees itself as payment platform with many partners. For PayPal a big topic is flexibility in payment, like on credit, payment by installments and so on.

After a good tasting lunch, I checked out the session about product development. Where they showed how they are doing user oriented product development and how they get feedback from the end user.

PayPal Partner Event 2017 - Usability
How to examine usability at PayPal

They are talking personally to the users and also doing eyetracking. They separate their tests in 2 phases. First they just let the user act on certain pages. Then they do it again and meanwhile they are telling them, what they are doing right now and what they feel and how they understand what they need to do. A way not to be distracted, when they are doing it the first time.

After all session all visitors teamed up in several groups and we had to do an exit game together. That way a great chance to get to know people and start networking. It was really interesting to exchange our expertise with other and vice versa.

When we accomplished all our tasks at the exit game, we had a great BBQ all together and even better talks with interesting people about their services or their needs. A day which was absolutely worth it!

A special thank you to PayPal for their invitation and for their great organisation and superb hospitality!

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