On November 20, 2015, very first Meet Magento was held in Tokyo. Magento market in Japan is still premature, and has a lot of space to grow. Finally the time for Japan to embrace the world’s most dominant ecomemrce platform.
Most of the photos were taken by Fumiki Kanno from StyleTune.
This is the part of Magento Advent Calendar 2015. (Advent Calendar means series of tech blog posts by a group of people with the same topic in Japan).
Magento in Japan
With my limited knowledge about Magento market, Japanese users choose Magento because of its multi-currencies and multilingual support. The session was mainly focuses on those topics.
I was very honor to be the translator for the event and meet Thomas Fleck from Netresearch App Factory AG to represent Meet Magento Foundation, Yoav Kutner from Oro, Inc, Ben Marks from Magento Inc. and Hieu Nguyen from SmartOSC.
Thomas Fleck, Netresearch App Factory AG, speaks about Meet Magento Foundation.
Yoav Kutner Oro, Inc talked about how he started Magento.
Ben Marks from Magento Inc. introduces newly released Magento 2.
Hieu Nguyen from SmartOSC gave very impressive talk about their ecommerce solutions.
Me giving the live translation.
Pick-ups
Here are couple pick-ups from Meet Magento.
Magento case in Japan
Hironori Mii from Iwakura, Japan, who happened to live in the same city as I do, happened to operate international yo-yo store introduces his usage of Magento.
After trying a several ecommerce solutions, he ended up with Magento.
In his session, he explained why he chose Magento, and how he struggled with Japanese delivery system and payment.
Eventually, it’s all about how Magento community grows and be able to adopt and embrace Japanese ecommerce culture.
EC Cube, the Japan’s no.1 open source solution
In Japan, EC Cube is the best open source e-commerce platform. My colleague of concrete5 Japan, Inc, Tao Sasaki, who happened to run an EC Cube dev house and core contributor, gave the comparison between Magento and EC Cube. He explained why EC Cube is very popular and not Magento.
EC Cube was first released in 2006 and grew its community.
EC Cube has very limited features available. But this reduces the learning curve and makes it easier for the people to learn. If you only need to spend less time to learn, people likes it better. Tao is not 100% sure why EC Cube become successful compared to Magento. But this could be one of the reason.
Magento in Japan and its future
One of the strength of Magento over other open source e-commerce platform is multilingual and multicurrencies function.
One of the very hot topic of Japan is Tokyo Olympic in 2020. Many people are looking forward to increasing the overseas sales.
Fortunately, EC Cube is not really good at multilingual and multi-currencies. So it has the very good potential for Magento to beats EC Cube.
The New Encounters
I have been working mainly with concrete5 and WordPress communities. I’ve known Nishi for over 5 years since he started Magento communities in Japan.
One of the pleasures working with a global open source is that I can meet very talented people all over the world.
Special shoutout to VeriteWorks
Kudos to Momoko and Hiro at VeriteWorks.
Yoav told me that he was very glad to be in Japan after cancelling the first Magento meet-up 4 years ago because of Earthquake and Tsunami.
It took them 4 years. But I’m sure that Magento community will grow more and faster in Japan in the next 4 years.
Momoko Asaka closing Meet Magento Japan 2015
Hirokazu Nishi toasting for Meet Magento Japan 2015 After Party
I will see you all in 2016.
