IRCE 2008 Complete Agenda

Few major retail chains understand the movement of online retailing into the mainstream as well as J.C. Penney. The department store chain ranks No. 12 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide and is well on its way to becoming a $2 billion online merchant this year. As evidenced by its early launch on the Internet—1994—J.C. Penney has been a rapid adopted of new e-commerce strategies. It was among the first to put commerce links into online advertising. It was early in recognizing the importance of women shoppers online, which resulted in attracting a younger clientele. It was one of the first major retailers to optimize its site for broadband. The evidence that those strategies have been successful comes not only from the consistent 25%+ annual growth that JCP.com has enjoyed, but also from the consistent above average scores the company receives in customer satisfaction and intent of web site visitors to buy. Our Keynote Speaker is Mike Boylson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of J.C. Penney. He will discuss why the Internet is so important to J.C. Penney and why its importance will only grow as it becomes a more important part of consumers' lives. He also will talk about how adopting a thorough-going Internet strategy requires constant attention from senior management, how senior management communicates the importance of the Internet throughout an organization and what's next on the e-commerce front for J.C. Penney.

When any market goes mainstream, the big players come in and merely by virtue of their size and resources, they increase the competition. That has the effect of forcing all competitors to do a better job of meeting customers' expectations. It also means that some of the big brands who have not yet established an Internet presence will try to buy their way online. This session will examine what a more mature online retailing industry means to all players. Our speaker will address such issues as the rising level of investment needed to stay competitive, how smaller retailers can find growth in a market dominated by large brand names and what the prospects are for acquisitions as large retailers try to establish or extend their web-based initiatives.

In the past, creating a successful niche retail organization was extremely difficult, requiring a huge investment in real estate, inventory and distribution. But broad consumer acceptance of online buying changed all that by allowing a retailer to aggregate national demand and leverage niche operations over a single selling platform. Our featured speaker heads up a successful niche retailer, No. 165 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, and will discuss how the Internet allowed him to create his business from scratch and how the Internet will change how consumers shop for specialized products.

Redcats USA, one of the largest and most successful catalogers to go online, has experienced a transformation of its business with the rise of the Internet. Redcats USA's CEO will discuss how broad acceptance of the Internet as a consumer buying medium has opened Redcats USA to new customers by pulling in consumers who might not have known Redcats USA before and allowed Redcats USA to broaden its merchandising segments, which results in appealing to even more consumers.

Among the hottest sites on the web are social networking sites. Millions of online consumers participate in some kind of social site and a large portion engage monthly in such activity. In addition, 12% of social site users said in a survey by JupiterResearch that visiting a social site caused them to spend more than they had planned and 29% said they made better decisions as a result of the visit. With consumers reporting those kinds of experiences, retailers and marketers have long suspected social networking sites are fertile ground for finding more customers and selling more product. The challenge has been how to tap into the market. This session will feature the director of global online sales at Dell Inc. who will talk about integrating product content into social sites and what benefits the company has derived as a result. He will be joined by a leading retail analyst who will discuss how retailers should view social sites and what they can get out of participating in them. Our speakers will help online retailers understand the different social sites and the distinct audiences they attract, what some of the sites have done to make e-commerce possible and how to use social sites for marketing without alienating the users.

Video is overrunning retail web sites. Just as with the rest of the Internet, video content has spread rapidly to retail web sites, where it is used to showcase featured products, provide details about how to use a product and create a more engaging shopping experience that results in higher sales. This session will feature two analysts who have viewed hundreds of retail web site videos. They will display their picks for best and provide commentary about why some succeed and others fail.

Just like in any business, there's a logical growth path for online retailers to follow. But unlike most businesses in the past, an e-retailer's growth can take place in a very compressed time period, with big business decisions to make at every step—decisions that if made badly can affect a company's future for years. This session features two small retailers who will talk about such issues as when to upgrade technology or go in different directions with marketing, when to beef up customer service operation and when to step up marketing. They will discuss how the investment climate, business cash flow and the ability to attract and retain the right personnel affected their decisions.

Most small e-commerce companies figure everything out by themselves. But most have problems in common with other retailers and can learn a lot from others' experience. This session will feature a provider of services to small e-commerce companies, who will talk about the problems that he sees throughout his client base and what data sources retailers can tap into to find ideas for improvements. For example, one merchant was able to reduce picking time from 10 minutes to a minute and a half per order. The change cost next to nothing and the idea came as free advice from an MBA class at a local college. He will be joined by a small retailer who will talk specifically about her own experience, what she had to figure out for herself and how she overcame obstacles to success.

One of the easiest ways to launch an e-retailing company is by relying on third-party, all in-one e-commerce platforms. But there are risks with such a strategy, including the fact that a retailer's fate is tied to the platform provider—not always a happy situation. This session will feature a retailer who is on a third-party platform who will discuss how he makes sure the platform performs consistently and his contingencies for when problems arise.

In spite of more than 10 years of growth and some consolidation in the market, the online retailing industry remains wide open and the barriers to entry remain low. In fact, with the right idea and the selection of the right vendors, an e-retailer can operate a web site with virtually no infrastructure of its own. The solution: Outsource everything, from the e-commerce platform to fulfillment and customer service. This session will feature a retailer who has decided to outsource everything to a variety of service providers that he believes offer the best solutions in the categories that they serve. He will discuss why he decided on this approach, how he chose the vendors he uses, how he manages the relationships, how he ensures that his customers are getting the kind of service he wants them to get and what he has chosen to do himself and why.

The Internet has leveled the playing field for small retailers in more ways than one. Not only has the web made it easier for retailers to set up shop, but it also has made it easier for small and mid-sized retailers to source merchandise. With web-based wholesale and closeout distributors, small retailers have hugely greater access to merchandise than they ever did in the pre-web days. No longer must buyers scout out merchandise, travel to sometimes distant locations to view and negotiate for the merchandise, then arrange transportation. Today's wholesalers and closeout specialists operate web sites where retailers can view products and prices, in many cases bid on them and arrange transportation, all from their offices. This session will feature a web-based wholesaler who will help attendees understand the ins and outs of using the web to source products and how to use them most effectively.

No segment of retailing has such an urgent need to re-invent itself as department store chains. Challenged by discounters and boutiques in the offline world and the incredible adoption of the web in the online, department stores must find ways to survive. For some, that means re-thinking the web. Most chains, however, have long established cultures and customs that have served them well until now, so trying to change them is a challenge that must balance the ongoing success of the stores with the opportunities that the web provides. Our speaker this session, a former executive with Sears and Williams-Sonoma, will discuss what an established chain must do to implement a web strategy and what the company can get out of such an initiative.

The notion of breaking down silos in retail operations has almost become a clich in today's market. But it's a clich that still has life in it. One of the most common complaints among executives charged with executing a multi-channel strategy is that the organization is too siloed—too many workers focus on what they do and are not tuned in to how departments need to work together. In addition, since e-retailing is so new, many executives have little idea of how to organize a company to build on the power of online retailing. This session features speakers who will talk about how to identify silos, what incentives it takes to get staffers to work together and how senior executives should think about the problem. It will discuss specific examples of how retailers address the issues— and the results they have achieved. Our speakers, one from an e-commerce outsourcing company and the other a leading e-retailing consultant, have many years of experience with multi-channel retailers and have dealt with the problems of creating successful, integrated organization. They will talk about how to identify organizational problems and steps to solve them.

One thing that the introduction of online selling has done to retail organizations is to throw tried-and-true budgeting practices out the window. A retail chain serious about competing online faces the challenge of allocating budgets away from successful practices that have evolved over 100 years of chain retailing to the more uncertain areas of online operations and marketing. This session will examine how store-based retailers deal with budgeting issues, how they line up the priorities and determine who pays with smaller budgets for online operations, how to create cooperation among departments competing for funding and how to determine whether management has made the right budget decisions.

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.

Sales online continue to grow at double-digit rates; however these revenues are still dwarfed by the dollars being spent in physical stores. Successful multi-channel retailers are not always sure how many dollars the web site influences. In this session, Ken Cassar of Nielsen Online will provide a way to measure the value of a visit to retailers' sites based upon online behavior and purchases made online and offline. Cassar will present proprietary research that will demonstrate:

• The value of multi-channel shoppers, how much they spend and how often they purchase online and in stores.
• The impact of a web site visit upon offline sales, including how frequently shoppers visit a site before a purchase and how much time they spend on the site.
• The profile of the multi-category shopper and how they differ across sites.

Much buzz floats around the Internet these days about Web 2.0. But like web developments of the past, hype is starting to encrust the notion, until today, there are as many definitions of Web 2.0 as there are marketers trying to sell something. Is Web 2.0 a technology? Or is it a set of practices? Or is it both—with one feeding the other? This session will lay out clearly and succinctly what Web 2.0 is and what it means to eretailers. Our speaker, an executive with a leading consulting company, will discuss the consumer aspects of Web 2.0—customer-generated product reviews, consumer-uploaded videos, social networking and so on—as well as the technologies that make such practices practical—Ajax, wireless, broadband, easy photo and video uploading and others. He will then discuss the implications for Web 2.0 among online retailers, what it will take for a retail organization to make best use of Web 2.0 technology and practices and lay out five things every retail executive should know about Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is changing the way not only retailers operate but also search engines. Because Web 2.0 alters the types of content that retailers use on their web sites—and even allows customers to post content to retail sites—it changes the way search engines crawl sites and categorize what they find. This session will examine how online retailers can leverage Web 2.0 to the benefit of their search engine rankings. This session discusses the ins and outs of Web 2.0 by examine the challenges that widgets, podcasts, mash-ups and video, along with programming elements like Ajax and Flash, pose to search engine rankings.

It was only a matter of time before the virtual reality of the Internet became, well, reality. Today, such 3-D virtual world sites as Second Life are attracting a lot of users—Second Life's owner Linden Labs claims as many as 10 million virtual residents—and consequently the attention of retailers and brand marketers. But just as in the early days of online retailing, when market leaders set up web sites with little idea of what they could do for their brands, retailers and marketers have yet to make sense of how having a presence in Second Life will affect their futures. Their approach: It's new, it's attracting participants, let's see what happens. Hotel chain Crowne Plaza, a unit of InterContinental Hotels, has created virtual meeting space on Second Life and it believes that such space changes the dynamics of online meetings from what they would be via webcasts. In addition, the chain is looking for other benefits from Second Life, it just doesn't know what yet. Our first speaker this session will describe Crowne Plaza's experience at Second Life and what might—or might not—be next. He will be joined by an expert who has studied virtual worlds. She will tell retailers what to expect from such sites and what's next.

Customer forums are part of the Web 2.0 trend toward giving customers more voice in the things they are interested in. Drs. Foster & Smith owns and operates The Ferret Store Forums, a community site where members can share anecdotes and photos of their ferrets and ask for advice about caring for ferrets. The company has found the forums to be an important tool in communicating with customers. Our speaker has been the administrator of these forums for four years. She will discuss the benefits of a forum to an e-retailer, how to encourage participation, and how to manage and maintain a forum.

Web 2.0 holds much promise for enriching the online shopping experience and improving the retailer-customer relationship. But it could stop dead if a retailer's platform fails to support the new offerings. The warning signs exist already: even the current web offerings are sometimes too much to handle for many organizations, which suffer from spotty availability, slow response time and inconsistency. This session focuses on the level of complexity involved in developing Web 2.0 applications, from the design phase, through testing to deployment. The complexity is increasing exponentially as web applications become much more composite. More sites rely on bigger building blocks from 3rd parties, which in turn are relying on other building blocks, all delivered straight to the end-user's browser, in real time. And to handle Web 2.0 features, such as rich applications technologies or collaboration utilities, more developers are pushing more code out to the users and relying on end-users' browsers to play a bigger role in delivering the experience to customers. Retailers need to understand that the web experience is no longer under their direct control. The retailer's brand reputation is now in the hands of not only their internal IT department, but also countless third parties and providers, and even in the hands of the most fragile part of the entire ecosystem: their end-users' own machines. This session will examine what could go wrong and help retailers understand how to remedy Web 2.0 problems and how to hold third-party providers accountable for their impact on customer experiences.

This session will present highlights of Internet Retailer's latest research into the largest retail web site, in conjunction with the release of the 2008 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Our speakers will lay out the winners and losers and detail who stands out in browser satisfaction and intent to purchase.

It's one thing for a well established brand to create a successful online business. It's another thing completely for a web-only retailer to do so. Buy.com is one of those onlineonly retailers that has created a successful, profitable online brand. No. 38 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, Buy.com has ridden the ups and downs of the online marketplace, surviving the investment crash by adopting the attitude that, in spite of what investors wanted, consumers wanted to shop online and Buy would be there to fill that need. Today, Buy.com is a $500 million profitable enterprise that appeals to a wide selection of shoppers with 1.5 million SKUs on its site. Always an innovator, Buy.com continues to plow new fields with marketing via social web sites, allowing customers to post video product reviews at Buy.com and introducing web site widgets that allow consumers to sell their own merchandise through Buy.com, which collects a commission on each sale. Our second-day Keynote Speaker will talk about the vision that has brought Buy.com to this point and what it will take for Buy and other online retailers to make further incursions into the mainstream of not just retailing but consumers' lives as well.

The Internet has created retail opportunities that didn't exist before and that were inconceivable before the Internet. For instance, there was no such thing as print-ondemand books before the creation of the web. Now there are several companies that enable authors to upload manuscripts and format them for printing. The books are printed only when a reader buys one. Similarly, in the old days, amateur photographers took their film to local outlets for developing and printing or mailed it to a lab, where they ran the risk of it getting lost in the mail. Today, photographers can not only upload their pictures to numerous photo sites, but they can do all kinds of things with them that they could never have done—or done only for a high cost—in the pre-web world. Our speakers head up two innovative online retailing companies. They will talk about how they came up with the ideas for their sites, what it took to execute them, how they convinced investors that the sites had a future and what areas of expansion they might move into.

As web shopping goes mainstream, the Internet has become important for Skechers, a $1 billion a year footwear manufacturer. Laura Christine will examine why Skechers adopted a web strategy, how it adapted its infrastructure and culture to web selling, what it took to create a site that was profitable from the start, what worked and what didn't as it doubled sales every year for three years, and how it's leveraging its assets to create a high-traffic web site.

The past year has witnessed a sudden shift in media consumption from radio and TV to the web. For instance, the typical 25- to 34-year-old online user spends 15 hours a week online at home vs. 10 hours watching TV, reports JupiterResearch. In addition, among all online users, 30% say they spend less time watching TV and 20 % say they spend less time listening to the radio in order to have more time to go online. That poses new challenges to marketers who now must scrap old ways of thinking about marketing. This session will examine how a retailer today determines where to spend marketing dollars. It will also look at the effects that the shift will have on the costs of advertising online as more marketers try to take advantage of the most popular ways of marketing. And it will look to the future to help retailers understand how the new popularity of web-based marketing will give rise to new ways of marketing.

Widgets are small pieces of code that take up a tiny space on a consumer's desktop. But they can pack a powerful punch if deployed right. Consumers download widgets from a retailer to their desktop. These widgets keep consumers continuously connected to retailers without the consumer having to launch a browser—or even do anything. Retailers download content such as information about sales or special offers to the widgets as often as they like. Consumers get the benefit of being the first to know about deals at their favorite retailers and retailers get the benefit of closer ties to their customers. Our first speaker is an analyst who has studied widgets. He will tell attendees how to determine if a widget makes sense for their business and how to figure out what kind of content customers will respond to. Our second speaker, whose retail company has deployed widgets to hundreds of thousands of desktops, will talk about what it took to create a widget, what it takes to manage the widget, what kinds of content customers respond to, how the company has benefited from its widget deployment and what's next for widgets.

If there's one thing that everyone agrees the Internet has accomplished it is the empowerment of consumers. No technology or process in the past has given consumers the power amplify what they think of a brand. It's a development that all retailers should be aware of. No matter how good your brand, how well you treat your customers, or how outstanding your products, there will always be a customer carping about something. A few years ago, that noise would have been confined to a neighborhood or a social circle. Today's it's on the Internet for everyone to hear. Some retailers have developed ways to manage brand presentation online. This session will feature a provider of technology for managing brands online and a retailer who will discuss how to find out what's being said about you, when the appropriate time is to respond to comments and when to ignore them, how a retailer should respond and how to engage critics so as to turn them into fans.

One of the great promises of the Internet is the ability to target product presentations to individuals. Unlike in stores, where all who walk through the door see the same merchandise in the same displays, online stores can present products to groups of shoppers based on personas. Personas are created on inferences of likes and dislikes that shoppers communicate either through their behavior or by filling out questionnaires. When shoppers return to the site, they see different products, groupings, cross-sells and upsells based on their persona. This session will walk retailers through the benefits that personas bring to online selling, how to identify the different groups that your customers belong to and then how to create effective personas, how to make sure personas remain relevant, how to make sure you're creating enough personas to reflect your customer base but not so many that personas become irrelevant, and how to relate a persona program to marketing.

Almost from the start, retailers perceived that the Internet is an ideal medium for personalizing a shopping experience in ways that can't be done through a catalog or call center or even in the store. But despite that widely held view, the promise is only now beginning to develop. Now, with a greater understanding of the role of both technology and human analysis, some retailers are starting to get personalization right. In fact, the Aberdeen Group reports that already there are best-in-class practitioners of personalization and 91% of them report higher conversion rates and 79% a higher average order value as a result of their personalization efforts. With some leaders documenting success, the pressure on everybody else to improve personalization efforts will only increase. This session will examine the ways that retailers can achieve personalization through cookies, gathering information automatically as the customer shops and through customer registrations, and will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each. It will also help retailers calculate the ROI of each approach and understand what they need from technology and staffing points of view.

YouTube has made online video look so easy. But there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Video marries the soft and hard aspects of online retailing: Videos must be appealing to shoppers and carry the message the retailer wants to communicate. But they also must launch quickly when a shopper clicks on them and stream seamlessly to the shopper's computer. Our speakers use video extensively at their web sites. They will analyze both aspects of online videos and help attendees understand what video can achieve on a web site, the cost, how to create videos and post them without a lot of technical hassle and what retailers must do to ensure that video is delivered effectively.

One of the hottest trends in online retailing is customer reviews. Customers like writing them and customers like reading them. And customers who read reviews are more likely to convert to buyers than those who don't read them. But not all reviews and review programs are created equal. Getting reviews that help your sales is not simply a matter of making the process available. Our first speaker this session will discuss what his company did to encourage customers to write reviews; what it takes to manage reviews to make sure they are fair, accurate and don't contain offensive language and what benefits the company has derived. Our second speaker provides review technology for retail web sites. He will discuss which products are appropriate for reviews and which not and what retailers need to know before they deploy reviews.

Rich media keeps getting richer. What once was considered rich media is pretty standard stuff by today's measure. Enlarge, zoom, pan, rotate have become features that consumers expect on a web site. Meanwhile, leading sites have moved on to the next hot rich media applications. Retail sites have implemented shoe configurators, wardrobing applications, room configurators and other technology that enables customers to build their own products. Other retailers are allowing customer to do their own mash-ups, are hosting video product reviews and finding new ways to make web sites more fun and interactive. This session will look at the new state of rich media and help retailers understand what new rich media is coming and what retailers can do with it.

Criminals are relentless when it comes to finding web site vulnerabilities. Some ISPs report that 30% of traffic to the web sites they host are hacker attempts. This session will outline five things a retailer can do to assure a web site remains safe from hackers. Our speaker, who has broad experience tracking down hackers, will also tell attendees how to make sure their web hosting company has taken and continues to take the appropriate steps to ensure the web site's safety.

It's a law of physics that applies to online payments: Every time a weak spot is patched, the next weakest spot becomes vulnerable. And it's a law that criminals are quick to exploit, meaning that yesterday's payment security measures don't work today. This session will explore some of the most recent payment scams, advise attendees on how to avoid them and discuss what might happen next. It will also look at the cost of security, not just in securing payments information and customer data but also in brand damage if a breach occurs. Our first speaker, executive director of the Merchant Risk Council, is on the forefront of payment fraud-fighting. He will discuss the kinds of fraud council members have encountered recently and what they have done about it. He will be joined by an executive of Cars.com who will discuss how payments and operations departments work together to mitigate fraud.

Retailers may allow customers to pay with whatever method they want, but that doesn't mean retailers can't manage the payment process to their own advantage. From negotiating lower discount rates to directing customers to certain payment methods, retailers can take steps to control their costs of payment. This session will provide strategic insight into techniques and methods of managing the cost of payment acceptance. Our speakers will explore the opportunities to optimize a merchants' payment mix to reduce costs and increase revenue, including alternative payments, electronic checks and emerging payment methods. Our speakers will also review the true costs of interchange and how retailers can manage the impact to their bottom line.

As the Internet matures as a retail outlet, payment options grow with it. No longer confined to credit cards or traditional credit card processors, retailers today face myriad options, from Google Checkout and PayPal Express for card payment processing to alternatives such as Bill Me Later, MyECheck and eBillMe. This session will discuss the business case for going with the alternatives as well as the implementation issues that come with them.

Never before have retailers needed to stay more current than in today's shipping market of vendor consolidation, service improvement, expanding technology and value-added service offerings. This session will detail the new carrier services, capabilities and technology that all online retailers must deal with. It will examine such topics as how to ensure a contract is market competitive and includes the latest discounts and pricing incentives and how industry consolidation affects shipping costs. It will also reveal carriers' pricing techniques and help retailers determine if single- or multi-sourcing is best for their operation, if they have partnered with the right carriers and if they have negotiated the best possible rates for their shipping needs. Our first speaker is the founder of AFMS, a leading carrier negotiation and consulting firm, who will speak about the trends and issues he sees throughout his client base. He will be joined by a retailer who has negotiated the ever-changing carrier market to create a shipping program that has improved his company's profitability.

In the evolution of ordering merchandise from home, delivery times have gotten shorter and shorter, until today, 3- or 4-day delivery is almost standard. But as online retailing becomes more competitive, even that won't be good enough. As soon as one major retailer discovers that low-cost, next-day delivery is a way to stand out online, all others will have to follow suit. And that day is not far off. With ever-more sophisticated pick, pack and ship operations and large retailers able to use their influence to force carriers to deliver faster at less cost, it's a safe bet that next day delivery will be here soon. Our speaker this session represents CDW, one of the leaders in getting orders to customers quickly. He will look at all the factors that retailers will have to master to compete in a market where next day delivery is the norm. Among the topics will be: How to create a super efficient distribution center so orders can be packed and out the door in hours, what package delivery services will have to do to guarantee timely delivery, and how to manage the process to ensure that delivery guarantees are being met.

As consumers adopt online self-service to answer their questions about products, orders and policies, the role of customer service agents changes. They must become much more sophisticated then they were before, possessing intimate familiarity with all aspects of a retailer's business: products, policies, technology and more. The reason: customers are getting their answers online and the ones who call in are those who have complex questions about products, are having trouble navigating the web site or are looking for corporate policies, such as returns information. In addition, consumers are increasingly getting product information in online forums that are unrelated to the retailer whose products may be under discussion at the forum. Agents then get calls from consumers to resolve conflicts between what they learn at a retailer's web site and what they learn in a forum. Today's agents must be experts in every aspect of the business, including corporate background and mission, product information, billing status, shipping status, technical support, and sales skills. This broad skill set was nearly non-existent prior to the e-commerce explosion. This session will examine how the customer service rep's role will continue to evolve and the skill sets that will be crucial to agents' success.

One of the ways that the Internet promises to reduce retailers' operating costs is through self-serve customer service. But while that has been the promise of the Internet right from the start, few retailers have successfully executed a self-service strategy. In many cases, the failure is due to retailers' not understanding what customers want to do themselves and what they want to talk to a rep about. In other cases, the failure is the result of retailers not knowing what kind of information to provide on their web sites. This session will feature an analyst who has studied the state of self-serve customer service. She will discuss what her research has uncovered as to why some self-serve succeeds and some fails and what elements—in web site content and in managing customers' expectations— go into a successful self-serve program. She will be joined by a retailer who has moved a significant portion of customer service questions to the web without diminishing the overall quality of the interaction with the customer. They will discuss how to keep online customer service information up to date, what kind of staffing and management oversight self-serve customer service requires and the role of customer-generated information in self-serve customer service.

Edwin Watts Golf's web site has gone through several versions. The company's first ecommerce web site wildly exceeded expectations and had to be scrapped within a year of launch. Management didn't want to make the same mistake twice, so executives took a methodical approach to the new web site, making sure they understood how customers would use the site and what technology would be required. The later launch has been a huge success and EdwinWattsGolf.com now accounts for a significant portion of Edwin Watts' sales. John Watts, vice president of mail order and Internet sales, will explain in detail how Edwin Watts worked through the process of starting over and how the company has benefited from a thoughtful, thorough web strategy. He will be joined by Rhett Daniel, senior director, WebSphere Commerce Practice at USinternetworking, Edwin Watts' platform provider. Together they will lay out:

• Strategies to overcoming common e-commerce implementation challenges.
• How to gain greater value out of existing technology investments.
• Evaluating and managing outsourced partner relationships.
• Creating a web site that complements a multi-channel strategy.
• How to select the right platform with the right features and functionality customers need for today and tomorrow.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it makes possible marketing, merchandising and business practices that would have been impossible—or at least cost prohibitive—in traditional retailing venues. Often, all a retailer needs is an idea and a staff or freelance developer to realize applications that are wow-inducing and lead to more sales. This session will feature retailers who had an idea for a service or who faced a problem for which there was no solution in the market, and who created their own solution. Our first speaker represents Blue Nile. The online jeweler faced the challenge of helping shoppers sort through thousands of gemstones, each with half a dozen or more features on which to base a decision and each of which could be placed in hundreds of settings. With no off-the-shelf site search technology available, Blue Nile developed its own search technology which has helped catapult Blue Nile into one of the most admired online brands. Next will be Tim Reiland, chairman and CEO of online sheet music and instructional material retailer MusicNotes.com, which in-house created an innovative application that allows shoppers to sample sheet music before buying it, giving musicians not only a preview of the music but an idea if the music is within their abilities. Both will discuss what technology it took to create the application, how the companies determined that it was within their staff's ability, how they had to sell others in the company on the idea and what benefits they have derived, including ROI, from the innovations.

Technology upgrades are a given in e-retailing. Especially as the market becomes more competitive, all retailers will have to stay on top of technological developments. But swapping out any technology system is stressful to begin with, so it makes sense to ensure that any new technology will live up to expectations and deliver what the technology vendor says it will deliver. The only way to guarantee against surprises when you flip the On switch is to test during implementation. Our speaker this session has implemented several e-commerce platforms as his company has grown. He will discuss what he has learned through his implementations, including how to craft a contract that holds a vendor accountable when a problem develops, how to know when a problem is developing, what to do to short-circuit further problems and what to do to prevent such problems from developing in the first place.

The Internet has made consumers more powerful by enabling online communities where they can discuss products, service or lack of, and other aspects of shopping and buying. Now retailers can take advantage of the same power of online communities by connecting with one another and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of a certain technology, tricks to make technology deployments more effective and how to get technology to do more. In addition, online merchants can consult technology-related blogs and participate in vendors user groups to discover unvarnished information about the technology they are considering. In addition to benefiting retailers, such discussions can help alert vendors improve their products if they take part in and learn from the questions and concerns that retailers raise in such forums.

A team of long time e-commerce experts will provide live reviews and makeovers for sites from the audience members. Retailers in the audience will be asked to bring search marketing, user experience, e-commerce strategy and other design questions to this session where experts will view the sites in question and provide answers to fix what ails their web sites. Audience members who volunteer their sites for critique will receive a $25 Starbucks gift card.

One of the keys to a successful web site is organizing product information in such a way that shoppers can find what they're looking for quickly and easily. It's not as easy as it sounds, especially when a retailer's products are complex or change frequently. ShopPBS.com, the e-commerce operation of the Public Broadcasting System, faced just such a challenge as the number of programs that it offered on its web site grew. Finding that shoppers were taking too long to locate the products they wanted, ShopPBS's management took a long, hard look at the product organization and descriptions on its web site and decided that they needed an overhaul. It spent eight months crafting a new design that reduced by 50% the time it took shoppers to locate a product and complete a purchase. Our speaker this session will discuss how ShopPBS identified what it needed to do, the approach it took to solving the problem, the results and what it plans to do next.

Web sites have so many moving parts that redesigning a site is a major undertaking and requires extensive planning. In fact, some retailers start planning as early as 24 months before the relaunch of a site to ensure that they can take all contingencies into account. Our fist speaker in this session represents CPA2Biz Inc., the marketing and technology provider for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which rebuilt the information architecture of its e-commerce site after a detailed review of analytical data revealed where visitors were spending the most time, how they were coming to and exiting the site, and which pages and categories had the most hidden potential. Our speaker headed up the redesign and will lay out in the detail the process of analyzing the design and the site's operations to ensure that all possibilities would be taken into account so the relaunch would go smoothly. Our second speaker has assisted dozens of retailers in redesigns and will provide a planning checklist from Day One to implementation.