Internet Retailer Conference: Agenda & Sessions IR2007

In its first dozens years of existence, e-retailing has been variously perceived as a novelty, a stock craze, a burst balloon and for the last few years as a solid and growing retailing channel—one of several in the modern retailer's multi-channel offerings. Yet, viewing online retailing as just another retailing channel totally misses its enormous potential and the huge impact it is having on the retailing environment worldwide. After covering e-retailing for eight years, Internet Retailer has come to view online retailing as something much more than a mere retail channel. We see it as the agent that triggers the reinvention of retailing. The web is redefining how retailers identify, connect with and serve their customers. It expands their reach to new customer segments and markets. It allows retailers to create detailed profiles of shoppers based on past purchases and tailor merchandising messages that are exquisitely accurate. It gives retailers a host of high-tech marketing and messaging tools and allows them to convey meaningful information about the retailer's merchandise and services as well as lifestyle and other information of special interest to consumers of that merchandise. And in many cases it allows merchants to greatly enhance the product or services they merchandise. In short, the web changes what a retailer is, what a retailer does and how retailing itself is defined. The agenda of the Internet Retailer 2007 Conference & Exhibition explores every aspect of how the web is reinventing retailers and retailing-including new marketing and merchandising methods, the changing competitive landscape and relationships of different sales channels, the new relationship with the retail shopper and the technological innovations that make it all possible.

Internet Retailer is honored to have as its keynote speakers at Internet Retailer 2007 Conference & Exhibition Jim McCann, Founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com, and Reed Hastings, Founder and CEO of Netflix. Both are among the brightest stars in the e-retailing universe because both have used the Internet to redefine what retailers must do to succeed in the markets they serve and in the process both have reinvented their very industries—DVD rentals and flowers.

Jim McCann
Founder & CEO
1-800-Flowers.com

Jim McCann is founder, chairman and CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com, a company he built beginning with a single store in Manhattan in 1985. While he added several other stores and became an early 1-800 telephone merchant, McCann revolutionized the retail floral business and became the world's largest retail florist by taking his company online in 1992. With more than $430 million in online sales, 1-800-Flowers now gets 55% of total sales from the web and is the nation's 35th largest e-retailer, according to the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Today, 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. sells more than flowers—it owns candy maker Fannie May, housewares retailer Plow & Hearth, children's gift retailer Hearth Song and gourmet food, wine and snack retailers. In many ways, 1-800-Flowers exemplifies the retailer of the future by using the Internet as the foundation of a retail business, not as just another channel. Without the Internet, putting together 1-800-Flowers.com would have been much more challenging, requiring real estate investments, printing and mailing expenses and much more personnel. The company has used the Internet to create a major retailing business that allows it to expand into new areas with much smaller investment than would have been required without the Internet. It also has used the Internet to change the way retailers and their customers interact by allowing, for instance, shoppers to customize their purchases and to communicate directly with top management. In his keynote on June 5, Jim McCann will address how, with each acquisition, the company has leveraged its web knowledge to create efficiencies and growth and to expand into new categories. He also will talk about how the Internet changes the fundamental ways that retailers do business and deal with customers. And he will discuss the ways that he sees the Internet further transforming retailing.

Reed Hastings
Founder & CEO
Netflix, Inc

Reed Hastings is chairman and CEO of Netflix Inc., the online DVD rental company he founded in 1999. Netflix is the leading example of how the Internet transforms retailing. A web-only merchant, Netflix now accounts for nearly $1 billion in annual DVD rentals, about 12.5% of the entire market, and ranks No. 21 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Netflix has been so successful that it fought off threats from the likes of Wal-Mart Stores, which turned over its online DVD rental efforts to Netflix in 2005. And it forced market-leader Blockbuster to rethink its store-only model, but because it entered the online market late, its web subscriber base is only a third the size of Netflix's and its stores are struggling. Hastings predicts that up to 10% of video rental stores will close in 2007 because of the online trend, and he expects Netflix's subscriber base will triple to 20 million in a few years. "The larger online gets, the more difficult store-based rental becomes," he says. Being online allows Netflix to do things it could never do offline, like stocking 65,000 titles and giving subscribers access to more than 1 billion customer reviews. Hastings expects the web will continue to change DVD rentals with the advent of video downloading, made possible by more sophisticated compression technology and the spread of broadband Internet access. Netflix will invest $40 million into video on demand in 2007. In his keynote address June 6, Hastings will reveal how the Internet has transformed DVD rentals, lay out what changes he sees coming in how Netflix operates, discuss how Netflix will continue to prosper in an Internet world and talk about what other retailers need to be aware of as the Internet revolution continues.

Listed below are the exact times for each event in the Internet Retailer 2007 Conference & Exhibition. To view full descriptions of each session either click on the "Complete Agenda Page" radio button below or click on the "Session Description" for the desired session.