Thoughts On The Mail Order World Trade Show

We spent the last two days on the "Mail Order World" trade show which copes with ecommerce and mail order business. Our cosy stand was at hall 9 right around the corner to Google and Paypal. The road show lasted for two days and Ramon, Angela, Dorothé and me talked to so many people who gave us willingly or unintentionally so much precious feedback. It was amazing.

The first big lesson we learned: None of our potential german speaking customers knows SilverStripe. At the beginning I told everyone that our ecommerce module SilverCart ist based on the great CMS/Framework SilverStripe, but no one knew it. On the second day we changed our tactics and told people just in case they asked about the tecnical background of our software. Most of them were amazed when they learned that there are so many modules already available.

The second lesson: Advertisement has to point out precisely what your business is. Our software is called SilverCart our banner showed a cart and talked about "ecommerce software". In english speaking countries everybobdy would know what a "cart software" would be but german speakers would say "webshop". "Webshop" is bad english, and we germans are not very proud about our language and often we choose notions that are supposed to be english. We say "Handy" instead of "cellphone" or "mobile". But on the other hand it was an advantage that people did not really know what SilverCart is about because we had a chance to tell them and we told many people.

The third lesson we learned on our first road show: Never rely on your smartphone as a router! I thought after many years of mobile internet connections the carriers would be able to cope with the concentration of traffic that occurs at a trade show, but they do not. This is a very sad conclusion. I was very ashamed when I tried to show visitors our live projects or our demo website. I really felt like being in 1995 (I can still hear that dial-up sound of my 28k modem ;).

In the end we convinced many people of our open source project: no license fees, no restrictions of usage and a modular system that makes customization very easy and cost efficient.

Next week we will make many phone calls and we are looking forward to the calls incoming.