The Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition was held this year at the Boston Convention Center from June 15-18th and had a great turnout with both interesting sessions and a packed floor of exhibitors. This year saw 350 exhibitors, 179 expert speakers, and approximately 5,000 attendees.

How to Out Run the Bear

The theme of the conference this year was all about not only surviving the economic storm but rising above and coming out ahead when the storm clears. 

Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock.com kicked off the conference with an interesting keynote, where he led off with an old joke that really captured the strategy behind theme:

Two hikers in the woods; One asks what they should do if they see a bear. "Run" says one hiker. "You can’t outrun a bear" says the first hiker. The other hiker smiles and says "I don’t have to outrun the bear...I just have to outrun you”.

So besides his deep battle with Wall Street, which everyone wanted to hear about, he encouraged retailers to take advantage of the downturn to bolster their team for the future … to outrun the competition, which ultimately means that you outran the bear.

The Best Advice

There were a lot of great tips throughout the sessions on exactly how retailers could ‘outrun the bear’, but I guess the thing that struck me was that for the most part these tips and tricks were back to basics retailing and a proponent of investing in areas that are quick wins or low hanging fruit.  Here are just some random quotes I noted throughout various sessions, but I’m sure there were many more, all with the same theme:

• ‘Ensure the basics are in place’
• ‘Keep it simple’
• ‘Spend wisely when improving your web site … make small changes that produce big results’
• ‘Invest in areas that you can win right now’
• ‘Don’t invest in bleeding edge technology that you don’t fully understand’
• ‘Plan for tomorrow but build for today’
• ‘Nail the basics and avoid bells and whistles’

In the same vein, Lou Weiss, CMO of Vitamin Shoppe, shared an interesting research story that they had conducted.  They did a simple on-site survey of 5000 consumers and asked them what they were there to do … to their surprise fewer than 50% where there to complete an e-commerce transaction.  More interestingly they found that almost 10% of consumers on any given day is there to use the store locator.  He then posed the question to the audience, ‘how many people in the room have devoted any attention or budget to store locator as compared to A/B testing, streamlined checkout or product detail page?’  That’s not to say that the latter items are not important, but make sure you have the basics of what your customers are looking for, especially if implementing these basics are relatively easy and low cost.

More Specifically

Here are some more specific tips from a few sessions along the same lines:

• Continue to leverage web analytics … in other words make sure you’re investing in the right areas.
• Internal site search optimization.
• Increase engagement and site conversion with UGC (User Generated Content).
• Focus on consumer centric strategies.
• Tap into new geographies and segments.
• For Retailers community is still a ways off. Note however, that pure plays are more interested in social networking and community.
• Don’t add extra steps in checkout process …such as forcing customers to register.  23% of US online purchasers abandoned mid-purchase rather than register.
• Make sure your order summary page doesn’t look too much like a confirmation page. One company had an order review page that looked so much like a confirmation page that 20% of buyers made a mistake and didn’t complete the purchase.
• Prevent ‘no-results’ site keyword searches.
• Eliminate content that nobody is using in order to optimize the experience (less distraction, less clutter for the customer, less maintenance by the business).
• Optimize site copy, titles and labels to improve SEO.
• Put key content and functionality on the home page to reduce steps for users.
• The long tail – multi channel retailers attempting to capture the long tail by simply adding items, could be missing the boat.  It may result in prohibitive increased PO and inventory costs as well as customer experience complexity … customers become paralyzed when presented with too many options and do not purchase anything.

You can also check out the 40 Hot Tips for online retailers from IRCE 2009.

More Sources

If you’re looking for more ideas to outrun the bear, I thought Lauren Freeman of the e-tailing group gave an interesting presentation entitled “Stealing from the Small-Leveraging for the Large”. 

If you’ve ever seen any of her presentations before, you know that she does a great job of analyzing sites and highlighting some very good features and functionality that retailers can take advantage of.  In this session, instead of looking at the top Internet Retailers or industry leaders, which we all tend do when examining the competition, she looked at the smaller retailers. 

I liked this idea a lot, because there are a ton of good ideas out there that don’t all come from the major players. Everyone does something well.  I like the idea of looking for those differentiating qualities and seeing how you can apply them to your business.   You don’t have to look just to similar competitors or even the same channel to get these ideas.   I find many of the best strategies on the web are drawn from Retail 101 strategies that have been applied for years in brick & mortar stores, from catalogue strategies, or even the stereo typical department store suit salesman.

The On-Line Channel

There was also plenty of discussion surrounding the fact that the online channel grows in importance despite the weak economic climate.  As a result e-commerce budgets have increased while others are slashed.

comScore provided some interesting data to support this trend.  One that I found particularly interesting is that conversion levels are dropping and shopping cart abandonment is increasing.   This is of course attributable to the fact that 74% are researching on-line before making an off-line purchase.  This may be obvious to everyone following the current e-commerce trends, but sometimes we need to re-state the obvious so that our actions and strategies are aligned.  It wasn’t many years ago that every e-commerce retailer was focused on these metrics, but now there is more focus on understanding the impact of the website on off-line sales … ‘it’s not just a sales channel, it’s a marketing channel and a brand development channel’, Kevin Hillstrom, President, MineThatData stated.

Social Networking

So despite the fact that the trend seems to be to focus on the basics and the easy wins and I even quoted one presenter that indicated ‘community is a ways off for retailers’, I want to talk about one really good session on the topic.   Tom Cox, President and CEO of golfballs.com along with Brian Walker of Forrester Research gave a session entitled ‘To Socialize or Not To Socialize’.

We’ve all heard some stats to illustrate the trend and growth of social networking. Today 50% of US online consumers engage in some form of social networking which equates to about 115 million.  In the next 4-5 years there will probably be about 180 million.  The vast majority are spectators, meaning that only 1 in 5 are actually engaged in writing reviews, creating content, are active in Facebook and/or Twitter, but even at that we can’t ignore such staggering numbers.

So when we think about Social Networking, I think the first thing that comes to mind is Facebook and Twitter. At least that’s what I think of.  We’re not really sure yet if there’s a good place for retail in those forums as there’s a lot of mixed reaction in the industry. This session reminded me that actually, just the basics of shopping is mostly social.  Interacting with a salesperson, going to the mall with a friend, or even discussing a potential purchase at the water cooler at work is entirely social, so of course there are some very good reasons and simpler ways to incorporate social strategies into your e-commerce site.

Here are some of the examples that were discussed during the session, to help you think of some basic ways you can incorporate social aspects into your commerce strategies:

• Customer ratings & reviews has leapt to 82% growth.  Peers love to read other peer reviews. 55% of customers are influenced by these peer reviews in the buying decision, more so even than expert reviews.
• Only 6% have friended a brand on Facebook and only 2% are following a brand on Twitter.
• JetBlue is using Twitter to market deals.
• Home Depot uses Twitter to listen to the market & invite feedback.
• Zappos uses Bookmark & Share functionality that allows customers to share content exceptionally easily.
• Charlotte Rousse is using a co-browsing technique which lets consumers shop and interact with each other on-line through that process.
• Threadless lets users upload images of themselves wearing the product.
• David’s Bridal has a MySpace page and a Facebook page, and they encourage their customers to login using their MySpace or Facebook account.   David’s Bridal is then able to add to their profile data to further segment their customers and market to them.  Just a warning, there’s a fine line here with perceived invasion of privacy.
• FootJoy launched a campaign in 2007 called the “Coolest Pair on the Planet” contest, challenging golfers to create the coolest pair of shoes and let other customers vote on the best pair.  Over 6,371 shoes were designed and they received a total of 332,656 votes.  Here’s the best part … incremental new revenue for July was $12,000, August $10,000 and the total cost was $600 + 80 hours of staff time.
• Not mentioned in this session, but also worth noting is a similar campaign from Wet Seal last year.  “Wet Seal’s Runway” campaign allowed customers to create outfits on-line that were voted on by other customers.  100,000 outfits were created in the first month and they saw 10% incremental revenue.

For Fun

Finally,  I always write down my favorite quotes from these conferences and here they are for this one:

• ““You don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your competitor.”, Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock.com
• “The web <> ecommerce store”, Lou Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer, Vitamin Shoppe … we often refer to the e-commerce store as the web, but the web opportunity is much bigger and more robust than simply the sales and profitability of the e-commerce store.
• “Don’t let the HIPPO drive” … HIPPO = Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.  That’s not to say that the highest paid person’s opinion doesn’t matter, but that person is not typically on their own staffed with all the information needed that exists in the detailed levels.  It is important then that the company is organized such that all relevant expertise and information can be brought together to make the right decisions.
• “Measure everything”, Kurt Peters, Editor in Chief, Internet Retailer