Quick Thoughts on Internet Retailer

My notebook is full of great notes I jotted down from sessions and discussions I had at Internet Retailer. I will be putting up some posts on various topics and insights from the conference but for now I just wanted to throw out some quick thoughts:

If you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t lose a lot of money–Jim McCann, keynote speaker and founder of 1-800-flowers.com

Jim McCann gave an incredibly interesting keynote address about how he has grown a small flower shop business into a multi-channel, multi-market, business approaching $1 billion in sales. I liked this idea because I think it represents the type of bold entrepreneurial spirit I see in some of our successful Yahoo! store merchants. Often times the merchants seeing the biggest gains are the ones placing the biggest bets. He also talked about thinking like a small company and always innovating.

Venky Shankar gave an informative presentation on metrics that matter for retailers. One statistic he listed was that 70% of people 15-34 are on social networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, etc) and that 40% of those using social networks used them to learn about a brand or product. If the 15-34 year old demographic makes up a sizable portion of your customer base, you may wish to invest some time in SNO (social network optimization). What can you do to connect to these buyers and become an asset or destination for these communities?

Maris Daugherty presented on using trends to influence purchase decisions. She talked about the three main types of shoppers: info seeking, conquerors (those on a mission to buy), and impulse shoppers. How does your site speak to these groups? Do you have original and comprehensive product data (description, specs, buyer’s guides, etc) to be the one source of authoritative information on a product or brand? If not, what are you doing to get there? With conquerors, is your site optimized to allow for the quickest access to a specific product through navigation or landing page targeting for search marketing? If not, how can you remove barriers to a quick and worry-free purchase process. With impulse shoppers, are you cross-selling products in product pages, checkout, packaging products together to drive impulse purchases? There may be (and likely are) stores that have all three types of buyers so the trick here seems to be understanding the percentages, and how each is driving revenue so you can maximize your tactics for the most profitable segment.

I’ll be sure to pass along other observations I found interesting from the show in the coming weeks.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Up next: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions post-conference party report