The Ecommerce Show and Cards and Payments Show in Dubai has been rebranded to Seamless. It takes place May 1-2 at the World Trade Centre and if you haven’t registered for the free exhibition yet, you can do it here
Eyes on Ecommerce and FinTech
The show brings together two of the most talked about areas in digital in the Middle East at the moment – Ecommerce and FinTech. The recent acquisition of Souq by Amazon has rekindled interest in Ecommerce in the GCC, with the deal being an endorsement for online shopping in the region.
Merchants have traditionally complained that barriers to Ecommerce in this market have been hampered by a lack of payment options, but this is also changing rapidly. The disruptive nature of FinTech is making banks and governments adapt to remove some of the red-tape and create new laws to stimulate the online economy.
Arab Federation for Ecommerce
One of the initiatives of governments in the region is the Arab Federation for Ecommerce. The Seamless event will feature a conference within a conference under patronage of Lieutenant General His Highness Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior.
Building trust in Ecommerce sites and merchants is key to the growth of online shopping in the GCC region. To that end, the Arab Federation for Ecommerce is creating a Trust Mark which will show customers that a site has met certain criteria in relation to quality, security of information and operating policies.
Not So Seamless
It’s easy to reverse engineer the new branding of the show, especially within an omnichannel idea of commerce. The lines between Ecommerce, Retail and Payments is blurring – in fact for consumers there is no distinction. Nevertheless, the Seamless event is divided in to three separate conference streams.
Having attended the annual Shopify Unite partner event last week, I can tell you that solution providers have moved on from this segmented view of commerce. All merchants are thinking about the same issues, so it seems strange to divide retail content and eCommerce content into separate conferences. In fact, this kind of segmentation just perpetuates an old-fashioned idea that somehow Ecommerce is ‘the enemy’ of retail, when in fact it could be its savior.
Nevertheless, Seamless is arguably the largest gathering of Retail and Ecommerce professionals in the same place at the same time in the Middle East and it’s only two days a year, so it is worth attending either the conference streams or the free exhibition.
After you have Registered, you can use the Seamless app to make an appointment with me or catch me chairing the Ecommerce stream of the conference.
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