Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) 2016 took place in the world-class city of Chicago, from June 7 to June, 10, 2016. IRCE on the 1st day had covered a broad range of topics in the sessions including mobile ecommerce and marketing automation.
From new retail marketing trends to SEO techniques, IRCE covered the huge range of ecommerce essentials. IRCE 2016 featured:
- 200+ speakers
- More than 10,000 attendees
- Attendees from over 100 countries participated
- 130+ conference sessions
- 600 companies including the top 500 ecommerce retailers in the world
The sessions discussed big challenges in the investments for ecommerce marketing and technology. The big challenge was to find out what to buy, where to buy your resources, and how to buy it. Another issue was how to balance your investment for online marketing with the investment for technology. The CMO and CTO of Living Direct talked about how they founded the balance between the 2 investments. “Though the balance was difficult to achieve”, they said.
Amazon at IRCE 2016
Amazon is the biggest competitor among other companies. The session was about issues including how to compete and cooperate with Amazon especially how to sell in the Amazon marketplace. The final part consists of a very interesting session about what is the future of Amazon.
An audience of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce retailers attended other sessions. The e-business analyst Andy Hoar talked about how B2B ecommerce sales are heading towards $1 trillion by 2020. The vice president of Amazon business talked about how Amazon business works with buyers and sellers. B2B retailers including manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors often face some technology challenges such as very complex products and system in many cases, how they design their websites to make the purchase process much simpler for buyers.
Another session was about how people review several websites. The other session also showed how some of them have designed the websites very well and how some of them haven’t designed. Another session covers how the companies empower their sales representatives with mobile devices that are connected to the following: ecommerce systems, back-end order management and inventory management. Therefore, the sales representative can go out on the field, bring more value to the table, actually help their customers in understanding the product lines, and help them in making the purchases right there.
Demandware at IRCE 2016:
Salesforce announced the acquisition of Demandware during the Internet Retailer Conference 2016, merging Salesforce, which is one of the biggest CRM/ marketing automation companies with one of the biggest ecommerce platforms of Demandware.
The Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) on the 2nd day served up an audience in different ways. An audience heard about successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and also about 20 mistakes they might do using SEO tactics. You assume often that you are doing the correct thing with SEO; however, SEO tactics take a lot of effort to be exhausting. Therefore, you have to concentrate towards SEO.
An audience heard about customers operation and fulfilling the operations. The session was about how to use a fulfillment operation to become a better competitor, and competitors are starting to use them to get the advantage among other competitors.
The session was also about smaller emerging retailers of intermediate size. The session also covered a lot of information about everything in how to be successful in the ecommerce business. One of the most interesting things that the session covered was about how to find funding and what to do with funding when you get it.
There were some great general sessions by Steve Madden on Thursday morning during the 3rd day of the The Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE). Steve Madden is a very innovative ecommerce retailer.
Speakers at IRCE also discussed a growing acceptance of social commerce. Thirty percent of online purchasers would make a purchase from a social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and SnapChat. There were a few sessions that covered how to use an app, Snapchat. “We have to learn how to use Snapchat to sell merchandise in ecommerce”, one of the speakers said at IRCE 2016.
Other sessions were about the process of re-platforming to change the underlying ecommerce software. A lot of retailers are planning to platform their ecommerce software.
Another session covered what did ecommerce retailers learned after 2 years a website has been redesigned? A retailer in the session also talked about how the redesigning of a websites worked out.
The session covered the State of Mobile commerce (mCommerce) in 2016 including trends and lessons from the internet retailer mobile 500 by Katie Evans, a mobile editor for internet retailer.