eCommerce Expo - Day 2

Given that I'm making this blog entry well before the end of the expo may give an indicator that I've some free time not attending the seminars. Not that the seminars have finished, more that I've given up attending them... A single word sums it up - disappointed.

Whilst many of today's sessions had multichannel in their title all but one actually had actual multichannel content. Even that session only skimmed the surface. In any case, here's a rundown of the sessions I attended.

First up, "Customer-generated content goes multichannel" with Bazaarvoice and Screwfix. This was moderately interesting, but given that I'd spoken to Bazaarvoice recently nothing particularly new surfaced. It was interesting to hear about the Screwfix experience. They are beginning to use online review content in their offline channels, though didn't indicate whether this was having a positive affect on their trade desk or catalogue sales. More interestingly, their email campaign to incentivize reviews threw up a surprise. Where the subject did not include their win £100 promo they saw 2% more reviews! In terms of uplift, Screwfix have seen a 34% uplift in sales of products with a 2 star or above rating and an overall lift of 32% in sales for products with ratings versus those with no rating. This backs up a statement in a later session featuring Bazaarvoice, "with the proliferation of advertising, reviews are a key differentiator in driving sales".

The next session, "Multichannel: the road to true retail success", didn't start off too confidently. The presenter, Chris Barling of Actinic, telling us he was the John McCain of eCommerce and that many in the room probably knew more about multichannel than he did! It was tempting to walk at that moment, but didn't want to dent his confidence further. Chris' opening slides presented a few top-level facts from recent IBM and MORI surveys on multichannel behaviours and it would have been nice to dig a bit deeper here, but as I know there's only so much you can get from a web trawl before you have to pay good money or let the consultants in to get hold of the detail! Sorry Chris, but it was obvious. The rest of the session was a Chris taking us through a selection of Actinic's SME retailers and how their only using 1 or 2 channels to do business... not a great advert I'm afraid.

The final seminar I attended was the BT Expedite/Mosaic/Wickes presentation on Multichannel integration strategies. As always, John Bovill of Mosaic spoke confidently and heaped praise on the BT Fresca platform. A few good points were how Mosaic recognised that the customer interacts with the brand, not recognising channel. The key was to ensure consistency at every touchpoint. Mosaic's biggest challenge was the cultural move to become customer centric.
The rest of the session was a quick talk from Bazaarvoice (again!) and the customer experience manager from Wickes telling us how they're doing more or less the same as Screwfix. Hat off to Justin Crandall of Bazaarvoice for getting so much airtime for his company!
Again though this was hardly multichannel or the issues we face implementing multi or cross channel retailing.

Before leaving I did get a chance to chat with the guys from Mercado, who indicated they're currently being acquired by Omniture. This could be interesting to see how they compliment each other to improve upon their closed loop analytics and merchandising. I also wonder what will happen with the relationships between Mercado and the other Web Analytics vendors such as Coremetrics?

All in all a disappointing day, I was hoping to see wider coverage of multichannel topics and advice, to name a few

• multichannel fulfilment and inventory mgmt
• how single view of customer enables multichannel
• organizational barriers to cross channel retailing

Whilst I appreciated it was an eCommerce Expo, why tempt the audience with titles if the content isn't there!

eCommerce Expo - Day 1

The day looked like it was going to turn into something of a damp squib as the first seminar I attended was a real let down. Entitled, 'Online shopping cross-border' it was billed as insight from the IMRG on international commerce. Unfortunately James Roper, Chief Exec of IMRG, first slipped up by using the phrase 'it's just another postcode' - destroying any credibility almost immediately. Obviously he's unaware of EU intrastat sales reporting, the varying sales thresholds for tax reporting across the EU countries, the x-border invoicing legislation or that not all Eire addresses have a postcode... Oh dear James. Though none of this mattered as it inevitably turned in to a pitch about the broader IMRG work. The couple of pieces of wheat that could be taken from this were the 'pathfinder' project the IMRG are spearheading. This hopes to provide a x-border working model with the EU commission (more on this would have been great) and the other, imrworld.org - a website containing lots of stats and info on x-border ecommerce.

The next session I chose was a case study, much, much better! Long Tall Sally took us through their approach to selecting Hybris and PortalTech as their ecommerce platform and SI. They kindly presented their lessons learnt;

• using traffic lights to communicate their evaluation results worked well,
  
• don't get hung up on details in the early stages of selection - use the quotation for this,
  
• ensure plenty of time for UAT - don't let downstream slips squeeze it,
  
• don't underestimate content migration,
  
• engage 3rd parties (e.g. Payment services) as early as possible checking and double checking they can meet your timescales.
  

Afterwards I caught up with Andy Piscina, UK Manager for Hybris, who was very upbeat about how brisk business in the UK is going with a couple of significant recent signings.

After a bite of lunch and a catch up with colleagues it was time to see what Tesco had up their sleeve. An excellent presentation from Charlotte Tookey, Tesco.com, and Finlay Clark of Bigmouthmedia. It outlined how their online operation interprets the core principles and
distills them to: Easy to shop and Delivery on time.

To Tesco, SEO is key to their non-food offer as it's not what customers typically know Tesco for. They teamed with bigmouthmedia who helped get them ranking highly through the use of sitemaps, understanding Googles indexing behaviour, hierarchy naming and so on. All of which they bundled up into best practise documentation to utilise across Tesco's numerous microsites. Finlay then gave a heads up on what's next, utilising social networks and growing their community microsites. A great presentation and plenty of food for thought.

The following session was disappointing, probably for the technology vendor as much as the audience. I was hoping to find out how GSI Commerce were being utilised as an enabler to Casual Male's European expansion, instead we were subjected to a pitch from CMs COO and the
GSI guy barely got 10 minutes... A shame.

The final session I attended for the day was Simon Evetts, CTO of Javelin, session on buying or renting your ecommerce platform. A good session, whilst perhaps a little too brief, showed a good level of knowledge of the current marketplace and that with the numerous delivery models it really isn't a clear cut decision. There were also some good tips in there for what to consider when going out to tender. A key point well made was to plan a 3-5yr lifecycle for the platform.

Overall a day of hit and misses, but nothing new there for those that have attended these affairs before.

Tomorrow has more multichannel on the agenda, so it should be interesting.

eCommerce Expo

I'm off to the eCommerce Expo at London Olympia over the next couple of days, where I'm sure there'll be plenty of sales pitches. Though there does appear to be a few multichannel sessions, so I'm hoping to get a feel for what other retailers and tech vendors have achieved and experienced.

Let's hope they focus on the broader issues more so than the recent multichannel summit I attended. Where it felt that the presenters were too focused on just the Internet channel.

I can only hope! Watch this space...