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.