Styleintelligence view: 
(down from 5 in 2017)
eCommerce Expo is one of the largest ecommerce events in the UK attracting a very large audience over the two days to Olympia.
The reason we have downgraded this show is due to the simple fact it has shrunk dramatically. Top vendors such as SAP, Manhattan Associates and many other big brands have disappeared from the layout. While this may be good for small to medium sized vendors it also show a certain trend for these larger ex-exhibitors to run their own events where they can spend more and control who is visiting and for what reason.
The 2018 installment of eCommerce Expo was co-located with Technology For Marketing and Ad:Tech (previously located in Truman Brewery in East London).
Apart from a lack of big names it was a reasonable show and it continue to attract a very large audience despite a decline in exhibitor numbers. This was acutely displayed when trying to navigate the staircase up to first floor... there was actually a queue to walk up and/or down.
We arrived at 10am and there was a queue stretching about 50 metres to get into the event. Lukily this moved very fast through bag checks and security.
The queue to get to the upstairs exhibition area
In terms of exhibitors I believe it was the first time we have seen a robot at the show, displayed by OrderWise, the order management system company. They have invested in a shelf lifting robot (AMR), similar to the ones running around in the Amazon warehouses. The reasons for this is that their 3,000 customers are screaming for more automation as Brexit is causing a lot of stress on manual warehouse processes.
OrderWise exhibiting their AMR (autonomous mobile robot) at eCommerce Expo 2018 - see our Goods to Person Robotics 2018 report
Another busy exhibitor was Global-e which have an implementation pipeline representing 40% of their current customer count.
One very popular feature was the speaking sessions. Speakers must have been overjoyed as they all spoke to a full capacity audience and more...
Image of one of the speaking sessions at eCommerce Expo 2018.
In terms of new exciting technology there was not a lot to be excited about. Perhaps one of the more interesting startups was SmartFrame.io.
SmartFrame has produced a clever way of disabling copying of images by embedding code into the images. This cleverly also include screenshotting an image. However, it probably doesnt include taking a picture of your screen with our phone.