For those of us deeply immersed in the Magento community, E-Commerce Berlin Expo serves as an annual reminder that the e-commerce world is vast. Following the call of our partners, I went to Berlin to attend the partner dinner and the Expo on the following days.
The event was huge, the crowd buzzing (at least on Day 1), and the insights ranged from thought-provoking to delightfully nerdy.
Day 0: A Pre-Expo Toast to Collaboration
Before the main event kicked off, Hyvä, maxcluster, and Mollie hosted a partner dinner, masterfully orchestrated and hosted by Thien-Lan Weber (Hyvä) and Nicole Mentzen (maxcluster). Around 30 people attended, mostly from German agencies, setting the stage for industry connections and a bit of insider news.
During the dinner, there was a surprise announcement: Meet Magento Germany is making a comeback in 2026! Location: Düsseldorf. The event will be co-organized by several well-known faces of the German Magento community: David Lambauer, Simon Sprankel, Tobias Niebergall and Torben Höhn. And while the announcement wasn’t planned for this day yet, but was nudged into existence, it was probably for the best to announce this live event in front of a very well good-humoured audience. If you want to know more about the return of Meet Magento Germany, check out the mageOS podcast.
Hosts Hyvä have made the photo gallery of the partner dinner public and shared a video of it (so many hugs!). They all show beautifully how this dinner felt like: a gathering of like-minded people, all happy and eager to enjoy an evening together.
There was also some live-cooking involved. Unfortunately, we were all so deeply involved in conversations that too few people took part and the Dubai chocolate mousse that was actually planned was not made. What a pity!
Day 1: AI Takes Center Stage
After a caffeinating breakfast and a refreshing walk (over ice) to the venue, I was curious to see the E-Commerce Berlin Expo in all its glory. With blinding sunshine, a packed venue, and a soundscape that was more ‘ambient chaos’ than ‘clear acoustics,’ Day 1 was a impressive.
In between catching up and connecting with others, I spent a lot and maybe too much time listening to presentations. Most had AI in their titles. Some had innovation in their title - those were usually talks by e-commerce platform providers. With so much buzz and so many buzzwords, you need a good filter for the relevant news. Let's try to cut down to the relevant info:
Highlights of Day 1
Stuck in Generative AI Hype? (Dr. Ralf Hünermann, Odoscope)
Key message: Generative AI creates content, but Operational AI makes money.
According to Dr. Ralf Hünermann, AI is turbocharging fast fashion: brands generate product images and market products before production is finished. B2C companies employ hyper-personalization which leads the charge in e-commerce AI applications as it cuts costs, increases revenue and improves customer experience, with great results. What is hyper-personalization? It's a digital marketing tactic that uses real-time data of the website visitor and artificial intelligence to tailor the content to the user's preferences and needs. Here are some of the results that were presented:
- Peter Hahn: 18% boost on product pages
- Hofmeister: 32% revenue increase via changes to product detail pages and listing adjustments
- Felgenshop.de: 25% margin improvement by boosting sale of pre-assembled rims
Compared to the repeatedly seen "use AI to translate text" examples, this session provided some real insights into the more interesting use cases of AI in e-commerce.
The Collapse of Traditional Commerce: Why Innovation is No Longer Optional (Michael Türk, Spryker)
Key message: With the rules of (B2C) e-commerce rewritten in recent years due to intense competition, it is incredibly hard to compete solely by price dumping. Instead, adding experiences to your product can be a way out of the price comparison, enabling you to charge more. To get there, Michael Türk challenged the audience to dare to experiment based on leveraging data and flexible business models.
Four perspectives on AI in digital commerce (Panel Discussion)
Key insights: With panelists from Meta, Otto and Glambou, this was an interesting panel with different points of view on digital commerce. While these are mostly big companies, some with separate AI teams, they agreed that only in very big companies such a separate team makes sense. Usually, you need all team members to use AI. Some interesting use cases for AI were mentioned: First, use AI to challenge ideas and to brainstorm. Secondly, employ AI to make creative the new targeting: AI generated images reach different target groups. Instead of defining the target group first, then create a matching campaign, let AI "experiment" and see which creatives work best.
Highlights of Day 2
Marketing Machines Reloaded: How AI is radically transforming our jobs (Ben Harmanus, Hubspot)
In my opinion, this was by far the best presentation during the Expo that I attended. Taking the history of an ever-changing marketing landscape into consideration (27,8% year over year growth of marketing technology), Ben Harmanus shared his setups or has he termed it "the nuggets" that enable him to achieve more.
While many sessions promoted AI as a saviour without any doubts or questions, this presentation addressed ethical questions, reminded the audience to use AI for the right cause and to be transparent about the use of AI tools. All in all, the presentation by Ben Harmanus made it clear that AI is not a hype, at least not in marketing, where it's already disrupting many domains and having a massive impact on day to day work and job opportunities, but also makes it essential to reconsider the kind of marketeer you want to be in an environment where most single tasks can be done by AI.
Moving the focus away from AI tools and use cases, Ben had a surprising message: While tools change fast, humans don't, so invest in your soft skills. Considering that this is an e-commerce event where mainly tech solutions are presented, taking the human element back into the center was something I hadn't expected.
There's more happening than you perceive
Interestingly, this event so big that some scenes happen that you may be completely unaware. With four stages, that's natural. Here's "that moment" of the event I only heard about:
Michael Jaschek, Manager Logistics Sourcing & Partners bei MediaMarktSaturn, took a phone from an audience member with him on stage, let it fall and 'accidentally' stepped on it. The point: MediaMarktSaturn cooperates with Uber to offer instant deliveries in less than 90 minutes. The attendee got a replacement for his broken phone delivered to him during the presentation.
Talking about the soft skills Ben Harmanus mentioned: Being a solo traveler at an event like this has its ups and downs. The biggest up: you engage with so many people. The organizers of E-Commerce Berlin Expo announced 11,000 attendees. It was definitely a huge event with any kind of service provider imaginable present. While I did spend some time checking out the expo in general and visiting our partners' booths, my conclusion is that unless you have arranged meetings beforehand, you won't get the most of the expo. For me, the partner dinner organized by maxcluster, mollie and Hyvä was the most important part of this trip to Berlin as it provided the best opportunity to catch up with my e-commerce bubble and a bit beyond that.
Even with four stages simultaneously running presentations, I found that the agenda lacked more B2B oriented presentations. So I'm curious to see if there's a change and what direction E-Commerce Berlin Expo takes next year on 17-18th February 2026 at a new location, Messe Berlin.