IRCE 2008 Session Descriptions

In a market that is growing like online retailing, merchants face the challenge of keeping up with competitors while creating ROI. An ROI too high leaves a company with little money for investment to meet competitive conditions but an ROI too low can discourage investors or corporate management. The offline retailing world has broadly used metrics of financial success, such as sales per square foot and same-store sales. But standards are still developing to help online retailers understand the financial metrics of running an online retail operation. This session will help retailers understand a target ROI that will allow them to balance profitability with growth and will examine non-financial metrics that are indicators of a company's profitability. Our speakers this session will examine such measures as marketing spend, technology expenditures, and corporate and G&A spend as a percent of sales; staffing levels in relation to sales; customer acquisition costs; and warehouse, distribution and fulfillment costs in relation to sales. Our speakers will also apply tried-and-true offline metrics to online retailing, including gross margins, net margins and year-over-year sales growth, and discuss how they tell different stories from when they are applied offline.