IRCE 2009 Complete Agenda

Internet Retailer Editor in Chief Kurt Peters welcome attendees to the 5th annual Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition with a brief state of the market report.

Overstock.com is a survivor. It sailed through one recession and lived through a problematic technology implementation. Today, it is racking up sales growth at three times the rate of the overall market. At the same time, Overstock has narrowed its net loss by 71% and created a huge swing in operating profitability. In addition, the company recognizes that now is the time to invest in marketing and customer acquisition: In Q3, it increased marketing and advertising spending by 35% and started a nationwide mass-media campaign. CEO Patrick Byrne understands that survivors redouble their efforts as the economy shrinks. He will discuss what Overstock is doing to rise above the economic storm and how others can learn from the Overstock experience. He will talk about why the company is increasing marketing as others pull back, the important role new media and social networking play in today's economy, where Overstock is controlling costs that will not affect customers' online experience, and how the company is positioning itself to be stronger than ever when the economy recovers.

With the U.S. economy in flux and most economists speculating this downturn will last through 2009, it's essential for retailers to understand how consumers' spending patterns are evolving and what this means to their businesses. This presentation will provide an overview of changes in consumers' online spending patterns from 2007 through the first half of 2009, survey findings on consumer sentiments regarding the economy and future spending plans, analysis of spending patterns across key product categories and by demographic segments, and more.

Jeff and Bobby Beaver, who founded Zazzle along with their father Robert Beaver, will discuss how the web makes new approaches to retailing possible, how the company created a well-known brand name in a relatively short time and how today's tough economy will prime Zazzle for greater success once the economy improves.

Many retailers approach online retailing with two separate initiatives: One that leverages retail and merchandising expertise and the other that creates a technology infrastructure. But the two are inextricably linked. The challenge comes in finding the intersection point and figuring out how to optimize each without diminishing the other. This session will provide ways for retailers to assess if those two paths are working together.

In these days, e-retailers are spending technology money carefully. But as the holiday season proved, no retailer is immune to the need to constantly upgrade technology. This session will examine in detail five low-cost, technology fixes online retailers can implement as soon as they get back to the office that will have an immediate impact on increasing sales or reducing costs.

Online retailers today examine technology investments with an eye on near-term return. They face myriad technology options and ways to implement technology. Should they buy? Outsource? Use a software-as-a-service option? This session will lay out the pros and cons of the approaches, help retailers understand which works best when and guide retailers through a decision that's right for today's economy and will suit them for the future.

Some retailers believe there's nothing like direct control over their destiny. This session features a retailer who took technology into his own hands. He will explain why he did what he did, what it took to do it and the challenges and benefits of doing things in-house. He will be joined by a technology analyst who will walk attendees through what they need to take into account when they plan to create software and potential pitfalls.

A big trend in technology is software-as-a-service: a vendor delivers the software's functionality over the Internet on an as-needed basis. This relieves the retailer of the need to hire staff and maintain and upgrade the technology. But it also raises such important issues as ensuring the technology is always state of the art and the vendor is financially sound. This session will give retailers tactics for managing the relationship with the vendor and getting the most out of such arrangements.

The browser battles are intensifying, with Google, Microsoft, Firefox and Apple going head-to-head. Now, instead of designing to one standard, web retailers have to anticipate multiple browsers' conflicting requirements. This session will help retailers navigate this combative environment and will explore the significant differences among the major browsers and their impact on web design, development, user experience and performance.

Many retailers are sold on the value of analytics that can tell how consumers use their sites, where they're going and what they're doing—especially important in today's economy. But 82% of users say analytics is poorly understood in their organizations. This session will take retailers deep into understanding analytics—what information is most crucial to chart, what the reports mean and how managers can act on the information. Eric Peterson's lively style energizes a subject people know they should know more about.

As you face new challenges, how do you identify areas where management needs to change its style? Lots of retailers will have to rely on their web sites for growth, but senior management still has a mindset based on the company’s history. This session will examine how to identify where an organization needs to make changes and how to sell changes to top management who may not understand that their management approach is hindering growth.

History is often a guide for company management. But in online retailing, even recent history can be a less-than-accurate guide to the future in today's economy. This session will present the results of a survey that asked e-retailers' biggest challenges, what internal roadblocks are slowing e-commerce initiatives, how much growth they expect in web sales in three years, and more. Online winners had much different answers from laggards.

The retail industry has built up years of metrics that help managers and investors assess financial performance. Same-store sales and sales per square foot are only two of the best known. But most store metrics mean nothing to online retailers. This session will provide retailers with guideposts on the new metrics that online retailers should measure and on how to convert the tried-and-true retail metrics to the online world.

Retailers have talked about knowing how customers shop across channels for years. But in today's economy, it is just as important to understand customers' total experience across channels. Knowing how customers use channels to make purchase decisions and how they rate the experience is increasingly crucial to success. This session will tell retailers the most important metrics, how to tease them out of customer data and what to do with the knowledge.

Customers are showing a strong preference for initiating transactions on the web—even if they are on a catalogers' customer list and receiving mailings. That completely changes how customers interact with retailers and what retailers must do to market their products. This session will examine the new reality for catalog issuers, whether catalogs are the primary marketing vehicle or a secondary vehicle, and how catalog mailers must change their business operations to take most advantage of the new reality.

One of retailers' biggest challenges is finding staff to execute online initiatives. While chain and catalog staff knows retailing, that staff may not know online retailing. This session will describe where in a retail organization management is most likely to find staff who can master online retailing, what training they can do so staff can apply their retail knowledge to web, and new compensation and motivation models that the e-retailing makes necessary.

With Wall Street analysts asking about web sales and Moody's giving more weight to online sales in a assessing creditworthiness, more retailers will have to reveal web sales. But simply stating a number won't tell the story—and may cause harm if investors don't perceive it as high enough. This session will provide financial scenarios, such as how including web sales can cause same-store sales to take a big jump, that can shed light on web sales' importance to a retailer's health.

Because the barriers to entry are low, the web is full of small, inventive merchants who know their business and their customers and have devised innovative ways to sell products. This session will look at specific unique approaches that small retailers have adopted in content, community, personalization, product imagery and other areas and tell retailers how they can apply similar tactics to their own sites. The speaker guarantees at least one idea you can steal for your own operation.

Customer product reviews and retailers' product recommendations have proven their power on web sites. Now some merchants are harnessing both for e-mail, resulting in double-digit increases in click-throughs and purchases. This session will examine what it takes to include those two powerful marketing tools in e-mail to specific customers based on the customer's purchases and other actions.

Customers love to read—and write—reviews. And they buy—or don't buy—based on reviews. But reviews create other benefits for a retailer as well. This session will detail how to create a successful reviews program, how to entice customers to contribute to reviews and to read reviews, how to use reviews in a merchandising strategy and how to mine reviews for insights into improving operations and merchandise selection.

The old approach to site search is to help shoppers find products. But site search can also provide powerful data that retailers can use for other activities. This session will discuss how site search can provide insight into new products to stock, help merchandisers refine product descriptions to get customers to products faster, provide marketers with keywords to optimize search marketing, and increase customer service reps' efficiency.

As competition for consumers' online dollar becomes more fierce, a key to success will be to increase the average ticket. One way to achieve that is to tap into customers' receptivity to product recommendations as they are shopping. This session will cover the science and art of making recommendations—both in what's recommended as well as where the recommendations appear in the process.

Rich media on a retail web site increases customer engagement and boosts conversion rates. But if you have 15 other priorities and your resources or management capacities are limited, should you be spending any of that on rich media? This session will help retailers understand when to invest in rich media, when to resist the rich media push and what they can offer in place of rich media that will make their sites just as engaging.

Improving your site is more important than ever during an economic downturn. Finding where to make improvements is tough—but doesn't have to cost a lot of money. When The Hazelden Foundation wanted to improve its site, it started by asking customers what they liked and disliked. Customers told them—boy, did they tell them! Our speaker will explain why Hazelden took this approach and how it sorted through and prioritized customer comments.

When the economy turns sour, businesses can quickly make small changes that result in big sales boosts or expense reductions. This session will reveal low-cost techniques that Forrester Research uncovered in research with online retailers that will increase conversion rates, boost cross-sell opportunities, help users find products and improve click-through rates. It will also feature a retailer who keeps a close watch on the little things that add up.

Negotiating with service and technology providers is more important today than ever. With online retailers watching every expense, and some vendors worrying about their ability to sustain sales, retailers can gain big savings by taking the right approach. This session will outline what's negotiable, what vendors expect with a negotiated price and how to make sure a vendor isn't giving you a good price because it's struggling and desperate for business.

Search engine marketing is in continual flux. Retailers face new competitors willing to spend large sums to appear high in search results and newcomers who believe they can master search marketing by throwing money at it. Small retailers who plan to survive this economy must find ways to compete without huge budgets. This session will give attendees inside tips on how to manage keyword and natural-language search programs without huge resources.

The rise of social networks—where consumers meet and swap information—has created the biggest online buzz in the past few years. This session will look at what social networks can and can't do for small retailers, the costs of participating and not participating, and how to participate on a budget. Our speakers will lay out the issues that retailers need to take into account when analyzing a social network strategy and analyze the costs and payback.

The old practice of blasting out e-mail week after week is dead. In its place, some retailers have found great success in segmenting their lists. Messages are more targeted and customers receive them less often, so they're less jaded. This session will walk small retailers through how to start a segmentation program, what it costs, how to identify segments, how to find the resources to do it, and the payback.

A year ago the right size for a fulfillment center was one that would allow you to grow as fast as the market would permit. Today, the right size is completely different. Retailers who expect to be around for the long haul will have to adopt a fulfillment strategy that allows them to grow but not get too far ahead of growth. This session will walk attendees through an analysis of how to plan for growth without over-committing.

In today's economy, there are ways to compete with the biggest online retailers without spending tons of money and resources. One way is to find an underserved niche. In this session that wraps up Day One of the track aimed at small retailers, Devon Rifkin will discuss how he identified his niche, how he convinced suppliers he was a serious business, what the Internet allowed him to do that would have been impossible without the Internet and how he grew into an Internet Retailer Top 500 merchant.

When consumer spending is under pressure, brand manufacturers have a huge motivation to strengthen the bond with customers. High-performance athletic apparel manufacturer Under Armour creates content that engages customers—yet keeps them interested in the product—as a key part of its recipe for success in today's market. UnderArmour.com hosts sports-related videos, blogs and information—while selling things, too. Under Armour's vice president of e-commerce will explain what it takes to create and host content at UnderArmour.com that is brand-supportive but not necessarily shopping-focused and how the company has benefited from the initiative.

In its more than dozen years of existence, eBay has evolved with the Internet, from providing millions of entrepreneurs an easy way to start a business to enabling established retailers to extend their reach on the Internet. Now, with a change in leadership, eBay is going through further evolution that the company hopes will attract and engage more consumers and boost revenue for eBay sellers. Stephanie Tilenius, one of the eBay executives in charge of transforming the seller and the consumer experience at eBay, will lay out in detail where eBay is heading and how retailers large and small can take advantage of the new eBay.

Every year, Internet Retailer publishes the Top 500 Guide, ranking North America's largest retail web sites, just before the Internet Retailer Conference. It's a valuable resource that not only details the standings of the largest online retailers but also gives retailers insight into what it takes to create a winning site. This presentation—a stalwart of the Internet Retailer Conference and one of the most anticipated and well attended sessions every year—will preview the Top 500 Guide and highlight the trends that retailers need to know to create winning online strategies in a tough economy.

Many online retailers have built successful businesses on Yahoo, eBay and other all-in-one platforms. They've been a great way for businesses to start up. But they can also be growth engines for retailers with a deeper understanding of what these platforms can do. This session will reveal some of the lesser know but powerful tools that retailers can harness to take their operations to the next level without going to a new system and throwing out the expertise they've acquired along the way.

Finding e-commerce staff is a challenge because a pool of talented people with e-retailing skills does not exist yet. But it is a particular challenge for small online retailers. Small retailers, however, can make their offers attractive if they emphasize the right things—such as an innovative work environment or the ability to get experience in many areas. Our speakers will discuss where they find prospective employees and how they attract and retain talent.

Small retailers are usually adept—out of necessity—at getting free advice. Here's your chance at this conference. In this interactive session, three design experts will provide on-the-spot site critiques for small retailers who will volunteer their sites from the floor. Don't miss this chance to get lively advice on design and usability approaches that could result in increased conversion rates and sales. Even if your site is not selected, you will gain a wealth of information by listening to the critiques of other sites. The only criteria for selection: You must be a small retailer.

Many small retailers have not paid as much attention to meeting payment security standards as they should. But a data breach could destroy a small company, so small retailers are well served by becoming PCI compliant. This session will demystify the card companies' payment data security standards, help retailers understand the cost of failing to comply—not just in card companies' penalties but also in the cost of a data breach—and the cost of implementing the standards.

Small retailers face many challenges as they grow their businesses, but when they look back, many are able to pinpoint a few crucial periods when they overcame a big obstacle and were able to move to the next level of performance. In this session, two small retailers with fast-growing web sites will discuss in detail their biggest challenge as they grew—and how they overcame it.

An uncertain economy means retailers must be efficient in every step of the process. One of the easiest ways to control costs is by making a fulfillment operation more efficient. This session will lay out 10 tips that retailers can implement that will streamline a warehouse and allow them to manage orders quickly and efficiently. And if you don't operate your own fulfillment center, you can ask if your provider is implementing these methods to save you money.

Consumers may be focused on stretching their dollars in this economy, but care for the environment continues to be a leading issue. This session will lay out the ways that fulfillment/distribution operations can go green through such initiatives as using biodegradable or recyclable packaging material, buying boxes made of recycled cardboard, and being more efficient in use of packaging material. Our speakers will apply a dollars-and-cents analysis to green initiatives and demonstrate the payback to a commitment to the environment.

The abrupt closing of a fulfillment provider last year was a wake-up call to online retailers: When your fate is in the hands of a third party, you better be prepared when something happens to that company. This session will examine what an e-retailer needs to do upfront in examining fulfillment providers, how to write a contract that affords maximum protection from a provider's failure, and what to do if your provider suddenly shuts its doors.

There is a lot of confusion about the card companies' PCI—Payment Card Industry—data security standards—how they are to be implemented, who's responsible for implementation and the cost of compliance. Furthermore, some experts contend there are better ways than PCI to fight fraud. This session will examine retailers' responsibilities in PCI compliance, the costs, how effective the standards are and what additions to PCI compliance retailers should be aware of.

No site is safe from attempted hacks by a concerted band of criminals. But there are precautions that retailers can take. Our speakers will discuss how criminals get in, what retailers can do to better secure their sites, legal requirements after a breach and how to negotiate with card companies after a breach. They will also tell attendees how to ensure that they are not just PCI-compliant but also as secure as they can be, as required by best business practices.

Customers return products; and in tough times, returns go up. Retailers who are not paying attention may suddenly find a flood of returned goods in their warehouse and little idea about how to deal with them efficiently. This session will examine the most efficient and least intrusive ways of processing returns, how to analyze the true cost of returns and the best and most efficient ways to realize revenue from returned products.

With sales plateauing and margins shrinking, e-retailers must make better use of call centers. One way to do that is to make sure that your call center staff is the best it can be. Our speakers will discuss how to identify the high performers within an organization, how to recruit them from outside, then how to train them on call center skills as well as product knowledge and reward them for outstanding performance.

Chains and catalogers have built their brands through stores and print media, but online retailers have only their web sites to communicate their brand promise. That creates challenges to brand building. This session will examine how retailers employ design principles such as contrast, repetition and dominance to create a visual experience that is informative and engaging—and that helps build up an online brand.

With unlimited shelf space, online retailers can add all the products they want. But there is a cost to maintaining endless SKUs—in stocking and fulfilling, item set-up and maintenance, purchase order execution and other areas. This session will examine how to determine the maximum number of products an e-retailer should be selling and where retailers can re-engineer processes and add operational systems to enable growth without overextending.

One challenge to operating an e-retail business is understanding all the parts that create a web operation and how they work together. Online retailing is complex and the industry is young enough that there is not a lot of shared knowledge as to what goes where. This session will explain the people, technology and partners that all web sites need and help retailers understand how they work together and the risks of not coordinating them.

In a tough economy, retailers look for new ways to boost sales. One growing approach is to license a retail site's content to another site that sells on behalf of the retailer. That site acquires customers and presents products, but then sends the order to the retail site for processing and fulfillment. This session examines the pros and cons of such an approach, featuring a retailer considering such an arrangement and the operator of one of these affiliate-like sites.

As the result of a Supreme Court decision, more manufacturers are insisting that online retailers not sell below set prices. This trend potentially undercuts the web's attractiveness as a place to find the lowest prices. Our two speakers are retailers—one in favor of minimum pricing policies, the other fighting them in court—and both will explain how they are trying to maximize profits when the law around minimum pricing remains in flux.

With long-standing relationships with chains that can move mountains of merchandise, many manufacturers are reluctant to deal with online merchants. Our speaker this session will detail the obstacles he faced in obtaining merchandise and lay out specifically what he went through to convince manufacturers that he has a viable distribution channel and should get the same access to merchandise that chains get.

Web site designs have reached a point where many sites look very similar. So standing out becomes more crucial than ever. Online-only retailers face a unique challenge in that regard—with no other channel to establish their brand identity, they must do it entirely through their web site. This session will lay out what web-only retailers must keep in mind as they create an identity that allows consumers to know who they are and that connects with shoppers.

Marketers are being pulled in opposite directions by two powerful trends: the emergence of new ways to reach consumers and the ups and downs of the economy. This session will tell retailers how to best reach the constantly connected "anywhere" consumer, while neither over-spending nor under-spending, all the while laying the foundation for a bigger marketing push when the economy improves.

When a customer receives a catalog, searches online on the catalog's name, starts to buy something but then goes to a coupon site for a discount, then comes back and finishes the purchase, which medium gets the credit? Allocating credit for marketing success is complex and the systems for dealing with it are rudimentary at best. Our speakers will discuss the approaches a retailer can take and analyze the pros and cons of each.

When every penny of marketing spend has to be put to maximum use, tracking keywords' profitability becomes more important than ever. And while everyone talks about search marketing's accountability, few really understand the depths to which that accountability can be taken. With the right approach, the profitability—or unprofitability—of every keyword can be tracked. This session will provide retailers with insight into how to manage keywords to profitability.

While retailers have been seeking ways to tap into the marketing power of social sites, results have been spotty. But that won't always be the case. Our first speaker will give retailers insight into how to take advantage of the impact of social sites—without getting too far ahead of the curve. Our second speaker will demonstrate the power of social marketing, describing how the “kniterrati” have tuned into the social media experience with a yarn seller.

Consolidation of the online display advertising industry is creating large ad networks with great reach and targeting technology. Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft all have purchased companies to create one-stop online marketing shops. This session will explain the major networks and the services they offer, show retailers how the networks can help target their marketing, and provide tips on creating a relationship with a network.

Affiliate marketing has become serious business—some affiliates can drive significant sales to their retailer partners. As a result, how retailers manage affiliate partnerships has become an important part of online success. This session will help retailers understand the special treatment they can provide to top affiliates, incentives they can offer to under-performers and what else they must do to get the most out of an affiliate program.

Retail chains must balance online and offline marketing and online and offline buying. Apparel retailer Wet Seal's large retail footprint and hard-to-reach target customer mean 90% of its marketing is multi-channel. This session will explain how Wet Seal balances its marketing campaigns, providing specific examples of multi-channel campaigns that work, and explaining what Wet Seal learned and the best practices it derived from its experience.