Twenty-two people met up last week for the first meeting of the Institute of Ecommerce Glasgow Ecommerce Club. The club met at the City of Glasgow College and were the guests of the Dean of Faculty, Gus Grubb. Several members of staff from the college came along to welcome the visitors.

“We are really pleased to welcome you all. We hope that you can think of the college as the home for this ecommerce initiative” was Gus’s opening remark.

Ann-Maree Morrison, as Clubs Coordinator for the IoE explained that the entire purpose was to help build a community for those involved in online trade. All too often individuals and companies worked in their own information silos without appreciating that there were others out there in the local community who might be able to assist with the technical and business challenges of everyday ecommerce. Rather than regularly reinventing the wheel, these clubs allow peer-to-peer learning along with the frequent sharing and exchange of tips, tricks and pointers to useful resources.

Peter Mowforth provided a short summary of the recent initiatives and developments taking place at the IoE after which the floor was open for what became around half a dozen groups eagerly ‘talking shop’, exchanging contact details and agreeing follow-up 1-2-1 meetings.

“Really great to see so many small, and not so small, local ecommerce businesses all in one place. Everyone had great stories to tell about this unique sector of business” said John Nixon of Scott-Direct. John Bruce of Celtic was keen to stress the value of skills training and keen to see more being done to raise the profile of the subject across Scotland..

Domains expert Tommy Butler said that the event was a much needed new networking group while the team from Archers SleepCentre were keen to get involved in future events.

Other IoE representatives were there including Murray Cormack who runs the North East section had travelled all the way down from Aberdeen to see how things operate in Scotland’s largest city while Emil Stickland was through from the Edinburgh group to share ideas about how the ecommerce sector can help define its specific needs around training, support and infrastructure.

“I was so pleased to see so many female entrepreneurs represented in the room” was a comment from Gillian Crawford - a point echoed by Maddy Green of the College.

Not only was the City of Glasgow College generous in providing a room with AV and public WiFi facilities, the college also provided fabulous catering. Given the colleges past success in winning MasterChef, if anything is guaranteed to bring back ever greater numbers to club events then it was their wonderful and generous provision of excellent food and drink.

The Institute is currently looking for a commercial sponsor to help contribute to the costs of organising and running the events. If you are able to help or have suggestions, please contact info@instituteecommerce.com.

Also, if you are interested in having a speaking slot at the event then, again, please contact us at info@instituteecommerce.com. Please note that the Institute operates a policy of avoiding any speaker who is simply making a commercial sales pitch. Any talk provided has to be commercially agnostic and not biased in favour of any particular company, service or product. All talks should aim to be educational and hopefully there to both inform and inspire those attending. Speakers should try to keep their presentations both informal and within a 10-15 minute time frame.

Check on the InstituteEcommerce.com website for future event details.