As every year, September is a fully-booked period for e-merchants. Lengow is therefore getting ready and is organizing its participation to important ecommerce events in Europe in order to meet merchants and discover new digital technologies! Here is a little summary of September events:

DMEXCO Exhibition in Cologne: on the 12th and 13th of September, the Lengow’s team will be present on this huge digital fair in Germany. Dmexco is one of the most important events in Europe as regards global digital marketing and media industry. The show is focused on advertising, creativity, and branding. Furthermore, Dmexco gives information and offers services on trends and innovations to publishers, advertisers and digital agencies.
Lengow’s team will therefore present on stand A028. You will meet there Maxime, Nicolas, Sina, Laure and Nenad! They will answer your questions with pleasure!

E-commerce Paris 2012: on the 18th, 19th and 20th of September.  E-Commerce Paris allows visitors to discover the online marketing channels used by competitive e-merchants. In one single place, visitors can find innovations regarding e-shops, best e-marketing techniques or delivery services. The show also introduces emerging solutions, such as the cloud commerce, ecommerce, mcommerce and social commerce evolutions. Ecommerce Paris 2012 gathers together almost 500 exhibitors, coordinates more than 350 seminars and 15 trainings.

Lengow’s team will be present on stand C21 during the 3 days of the event and will hold 2 conferences. Find all the information here.

E commerce Expo London : on the 2nd and 3rd of October.  Lengow’s team will be on stand 414 and will hold a conference. Ecommerce Expo is UK’s number 1 event dedicated to online business, with more than 6000 visitors and 50 conferences. You will meet there Yacine, Mariko, Randa, Laure and Nenad on stand 414!

In the meantime, Lengow wishes you happy holydays!

Let’s make a trip overseas today since we have the honor to meet Virginie de Malavois, in charge of Lengow’s Canadian office.

 

 

Hi Virginie, can you introduce yourself in a few words?

Hello, I joined Lengow in October 2011 to launch the North-American subsidiary. Since the 1st of October, we have been running an office in Montreal where we manage Lengow’s Canadian and American activities.

Can you tell us more about your missions at Lengow?

My job consists in launching, running and developing Lengow’s North-American activity.
Our office is located in the city center of Montreal (on McGill College for those who know). Our short and medium-term goals are dual: we have to build a local merchants network and meet local partners who act either as commercial partner (e-commerce solution, web agencies) or as distribution channels (comparison shopping sites, marketplaces and affiliate platforms).

What about your career?

I began my career in France in 2003 at Kelkoo, leader of the French comparison shopping sites at the time, as an Account Manager. Then, I took advantage of the purchase of Kelkoo by Yahoo! to evolve within a big American group.

In 2007, I decided to join the subsidiary of eBay – Shopping.com – as a Key Account Manager. Shopping.com had just been launched in France and had to develop its e-retailers network. I was then in charge of purchase and fostering key accounts loyalty.

In 2009, I was appointed as the Sales Director at Shopping.com. I took part in the local strategic reflection, in commercial strategy set up and managed a team of accounts managers and sales managers. I am also the one who decided to raise the merchants’ PPC (Pay per Click).

At the end of 2011 I decided to join Lengow. You know what happens next.

How has the new Canadian office launch been going?

As for every company creation (Lengow Inc. is a Canadian company), time is precious. Last October has been mainly dedicated to the research and set up of the office, to the first recruitment phase and to the organization of our first fair in Canada – http://webcom-montreal.com/.
This event allowed us to test our offer with a new audience and to meet potential partners.

As a matter of interest, I started to canvass our first clients in a big apartment quasi empty where there was a terrible echo when I spoke. It is quite like the cliché of businessmen who launched their business in their garage!

Since November, several employees have joined us and we are all fully prospecting merchants and taking part in partnerships. We are already working with Shopbot.ca and Shoptoit for the Canadian part.

What would you advise to merchants who begin in e-commerce?

In this crisis period, e-commerce makes dream. A lot consider this field of activities as an Eldorado and think that they can become a millionaire just by creating a web site.

Reality is completely different. Merchants have to work hard to make the web users enjoy their website. It is difficult to make people want to get back and therefore generate incomes. Beyond the ergonomy of the site, which is maybe the most important part of the creation, it is necessary to plan out above a online communication strategy and to ask the right questions:

•    Is my site a window with a few loss leaders or a real transactional site?
•    On which tools should I communicate? Sponsored links, comparison shopping sites, affiliate platforms, social networks…
•    What are the KPIs that I can follow (turnover, conversion rates, profit margin…)?

Lengow gives e-tailers solutions to these issues and a support in their strategic reflection. Lengow offers an efficient tool adaptable to every distribution channel. Our solution is made for every e-merchant, whatever their size.  They have 10 products or 1 million? Our solution will always fit to their specific needs!

Many thanks Virginie !

We are delighted to interview Raphaëlle Menajovsky, BrandAlley France Purchases Director.

What is the activity of BrandAlley?

BrandAlley is a e-merchant specialized in fashion great brands (men, women, kids, beauty, home) in private sales and catalogue, with important discounts up to -80%.

On which e-marketing channels do you position yourselves and why?

BrandAlley is present on all the following channels: affiliate platforms, SEM, SEO, retargeting and so on. We are visible on all these channels in order to catch the most new registered persons possible.

What are the daily problems encountered in this type of feed management?

Our private sales activity, with short length and quickly changing stocks, makes complicated to put our products forward.

How did Lengow help you to solve these problems?

When we just started using Lengow, it helped us to structure our products feed. Now the solution helps us daily to exchange our catalogue information (brands, products, prices, stocks) with our partners.

What features proposed by Lengow help you to go further in these marketing campaigns?

Lengow allows us to deeply follow the results by products categories, which enables us to act differently regarding their results. We can therefore optimize our purchase costs.

Why did you choose the Lengow’s solution?

Lengow is a well-known solution on the market and is used by most of the actors. It allows us to get quickly in touch with them.

What piece of advice would you give to an e-tailer looking for listing on comparison shopping sites/affiliate platforms?

Using Lengow, definitely!

Lengow celebrated its 3rd anniversary on the 1st of July! The moment has therefore arrived to make an assessment of the situation after 3 years.

The team:

Currently, Lengow counts 42 employees: 22 jobs were created over the past 12 months. Staff have been recruited on two different ways: on the one hand, recruiting has been done in Canada with the opening of a North-American office held by Virginie de Malavois, former Sales Director at Shopping.com, and on the other hand, staff have been recruited in Paris with the opening, in early 2012, of an office dedicated to the European operations, held by Nenad Cetkovic, former South Eupore MD at Affilinet.

We are proud to create jobs. We feel like taking part to the domestic businesses with some pride which is emphasized thanks to the quality of the team. Every day, the team shows that this is the essential element to make a startup success.

Lengow is about to hire several news employees in 2012, in different activity fields: sales, web development, etc.

The Clients:

Now present in 14 countries worldwide, our systems index 68 millions products every day and 15 000 feeds on more than 750 supports in the world. Lengow helps this way the 800 clients who trust us (vs. 400 a year ago; our growth therefore raised by 100% in one year) to index and optimize their products catalogues in the best conditions possible.

This year, Galeries Lafayette, ToyRus, Lafuma, Oxbow, Ellos and Eider are some of our big references.

A solution in constant changes:

The will of the team is to support the clients in order to face new issues. The R&D department brings constantly evolutions to the solution, proposes new features and innovates every day. The motivation remains the support to the merchants so that they can sell better and more!

This year, a lot of innovations came and completed the solution:

• The creation and management of emailing campaigns thanks to the integration of API such as MailChimp or YourMailingListProvider, in order to provide new ways to use the products calalogue,
• The launch of a tool that propels e-retailers on mobile. This tool makes possible the automatic creation of an m-commerce store directly from a merchant’s products catalogue,
• The enhancement of the tools for Marketplaces by integrating several Marketplaces such as LaRedoute, Cdiscount, Play.com or Brandalley,
• New features have been developed to help merchants with stock control, free templates for eBay and PriceMinister or the management of the invoices within the solution and orders’ API XML,
• The launch of some interesting features such as  the measure of number of products displays on comparison shopping site, or TagCapsule with allows to encapsulate all the site trackers in a single and unique tracker,
• And the last innovation: Lengow proposes RTB and AdExchange tools and makes available a new dashboard to enable merchants to have an actual management board of their e-shop.
• What about the future?

What about the future?

It is full of projects that Lengow enters into its fourth year. Here are some projects to come:

We have strong ambitions for the product we want to develop to touch on new aspects of e-commerce and therefore propose e-merchants solutions to help them daily. Indeed, Lengow has e-retailers’ most important thing: the products catalogue! It is therefore necessary to help them to use it in the best way possible.

Lengow also has great ambitions for the European and North American markets in order to make Lengow known as the reference in the management of e-commerce products catalogues.

It is a big challenge but we love that and we are going to do our utmost to succeed.

Many changes for the staff are coming as well: the teams of Paris and Nantes are moving in brand new offices in the two cities. The company will hire several employees by the end of the year to strengthen our staff’s skills on several markets.

Many thanks again

Every year, I can’t help thanking everyone who helps us daily so that this adventure can be the greatest possible. I am also grateful to our close families who support us every day.

Once again, many thanks to the Lengow’s team and its hard and great work #heartswiththefingers (private joke )

I can’t name all the persons who help us and all our partners but to all of them THANK YOU.

Thanks to Alven Capital and Kima Venture for trusting and giving us the means we need to succeed!

At last but not least, I especially thank the city of Nantes (France) who welcomed us and continues to surprise us every day.

« Rendez-vous » next year with a lot of surprises until then

Mickael, Jérémie & the Lengow’s team.