GPeC SUMMIT May 2026: Our First Stand, “Stop Firefighting. Start Growing.”

On 26 May we were at GPeC SUMMIT, at the National Theatre of Bucharest, with our first stand at GPeC EXPO. It was GPeC's 21st year, with more than 800 attendees, more than 15 speakers and more than 30 exhibitors, according to the figures published after the event (in Romanian).

Three of us ran the stand: Alexandru-Manuel Carabus, Ștefan Dulca and Andrei Borcea. Below is what we put on our banner and why, the talks that mattered for an online store, and four checks you can run today.

A stand built overnight

GPeC EXPO stands go up the night before the event, between 22:00 and 07:00, after the theatre's last performance. The expo ran from 07:30 to 18:30 in the foyer of the Main Hall, Sala Mare “Ion Caramitru”.

At 06:39 the foyer was still empty. By about 08:30 the stand was ready: the LIQUIDLAB banner, the “Ask us about Hyvä” roll-up and a table with an open laptop.

Three problems on one banner

We put three problems on the banner: “Slow store. Security gaps. Maintenance chaos.” Below them, the main message: “Stop firefighting. Start growing.”

All three show up clearly in the Vitacom project, whose final phase went live in May, a few days before GPeC. Here is what each problem means, with the numbers from the case study.

Photo: GPeC

Slow store

At Vitacom, the server took almost 16 seconds to respond, even though it ran on 8 times more hardware than it needed. One unused module alone generated 9.9 million queries on every product view. After the clean-up, server response dropped to 12 milliseconds, measured with Google PageSpeed Insights on the live store, on a server 8 times smaller. The details are in the Vitacom case study.

Speed shows up directly in sales: a Deloitte study for Google found that a retail site 0.1 seconds faster on mobile saw 8.4% more conversions.

Security gaps

When we took it over, the store ran Magento 2.4.6-p1, unpatched for about two years, with 12 known security vulnerabilities open. The first step was the upgrade to 2.4.6-p13 with every missing patch. Then we retired TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and enforced two-factor authentication.

Maintenance chaos

We found more than 240 third-party modules and 51 custom modules, and every deploy was done by hand. We removed about 180 modules, set up an automated CI/CD pipeline, and extension licence costs dropped by up to 31,500 euros a year.

Photo: GPeC

On stage: 4 talks for anyone selling online

At 10:56 the Main Hall was full. From the agenda, these four were closest to what we do every day:

• Valentin Radu, “Agentic Commerce: The Future Is Not About Better Shovels”: shopping done by AI agents on the customer's behalf.
• Michael Aagaard, “Friction: the Great Post-Click Conversion Killer”: the friction after the click, everything that gets in the customer's way between the ad and the order.
• The “E-Commerce in the New Era of Technology / AI” panel, with Mihai Vînătoru (DWF), Tudor Ciumara (Empria), Andrei Pitiș (Genezio), Alexandru Mihalache (Visa) and Laura Țeposu (Libris).
• Alun Lucas, “Checkout Conversion Killers: How to find and fix them”: the checkout elements that make customers give up.

Photo: GPeC

Two of the four sessions were about what happens after the click, and for good reason. About 7 in 10 carts are abandoned, according to the average calculated by Baymard Institute (70.22%), and 18% of shoppers give up because they are asked to create an account. A checkout with no forced account and with the delivery cost shown early wins some of them back.

What you can check today

• Speed: measure how fast your server responds (TTFB) before you change the theme or the server. At Vitacom, 16 seconds became 12 milliseconds on a server 8 times smaller.
• Security: check your Magento version and the date of your last patch. At Vitacom, two years without patches meant 12 known vulnerabilities left open.
• Maintenance: count the installed modules. Each of the more than 240 third-party modules we found at Vitacom was one more thing that could break on an update.
• Checkout: let customers order without an account. 18% give up when asked to create one.

Update, October 2026: on 13 October we went back to GPeC with a second stand. Instead of a banner with three problems, we brought a board where merchants wrote down their store's biggest problem themselves, 30 cards with eCommerce myths and a massage chair. It is all in our recap of GPeC SUMMIT in October.

Thank you

Thank you to the GPeC team, especially Ioana Anescu, for the organisation and for the help in the days before the event. And thank you to everyone who stopped by the stand.

The opening photo and the ones marked “Photo: GPeC” are by the GPeC photographer. The rest are ours.

Recognise one of the three problems on our banner? Book a free strategy call and we will tell you what is worth fixing first.