Following two years of transformation and evolution within the events industry, event organizers and marketers are continuing to embrace digital solutions to reach a wider audience and build year-round community engagement strategies. One component of these strategies that is playing an increasingly important role is ecommerce, which has been growing in popularity in the business events space over the past few years.
“We see ecommerce as being almost essential to the survival of events, because they need to create 365 communities, which are going to be key for the future,” says Brenda Hobday, CEO of UK-based event marketplace provider ShowShoppa.
“Events are transitioning from being a singular occurrence to being community focused, and ecommerce marketplaces are just one element of that whole community,” she continues. “They reinforce the year-round engagement and keep that bond between the organizer — the focal point for that event community — and their exhibitors, visitors, and other stakeholders.”
ShowShoppa’s offerings include both B2C ecommerce platforms for consumer events, as well as their newly launched B2B marketplaces targeted to the exhibition and trade show sector, a development that was fast-tracked to meet the demand from event organizers for additional digital engagement avenues. ShowShoppa is also developing a cryptocurrency functionality in yet another sign of the changing times.
Hobday shares that the B2C marketplace has been very well received, and the B2B marketplace has also received a lot of interest, with several events having already signed on, since it launched at Confex last month. “I think when we look back in 10 years’ time, we'll wonder how events ever survived from just having a live event for a few days a year without really focusing on the whole community,” she says.
In addition to allowing for year-round engagement, ecommerce marketplaces like ShowShoppa also provide organizers with data insights about their communities, which eventprofs have come to expect from online platforms, and helps them build out their visitor database all throughout the year as well as generate additional revenue.
Hobday notes that ShowShoppa’s marketplaces saw a huge uptick in 2020 as everything went virtual, and interest then slowed down slightly in 2021 as many events were suddenly fully focused on coming back in person. However, she sees this as a growing trend going into the rest of 2022 and beyond.
“I think event organizers have woken up to all the risks that they're exposed to, and digital engagement solutions, including marketplaces, have been adopted much quicker by event organizers. They're much more aware of it and open to it, and want to find out how it could benefit their event,” she says.
Another factor driving the rise in ecommerce for B2B events is the tech-savviness of the next generation of buyers. “The people who are now the B2B shopping and becoming decision makers in their companies are used to buying everything online. The profile of the buyer has changed,” notes Hobday. “You only have to look at Amazon's business platform and what they've invested in it over the last 10 years to know that the B2B Market is naturally going to be the way forward for a big percentage of B2B buying.”