For those who left early or could not attend this presentation..you missed out on 5 rapid fire presentations by the winners of this first ever contest honoring 5 exhibitors.  SI Forum Exhibitors were asked to submit their best idea for what retailers should be doing to succeed in this economy and prepare for future success. The topics closely followed some of the basic concepts of the Forum’s purpose: Investing in innovation, technological innovations with immediate sales impact and how to react to changing customer behavior among other solutions. The five winners were:

1. BazaarVoice with their exciting new “BrandVoice” program that allows manufacturers to share their customer ratings and reviews with participating retailers for dramatic increases in ratings volume and revenue.
2. richrelevance, who does not require retailers to make an up-front investment in their recommendations platform with a pay for performance business model. For richrelevance, this means they need to deliver the highest-quality product recommendations in order for both the retailer and richrelevance to win.  Skin in the game.
3. SLI Systems with their personalized email marketing program.  They combine site search with information about individual customer preferences and purchasing histories so that e-retailers can create highly targeted, personalized email campaigns.
4. Vcommerce’s solution handles the five personalities retailers should cater to in this economy in order to be profitable: 1) Me First/Me Now — Fulfill Correctly/Fulfill NOW! 2) Won’t Pay Shipping — Cut Back-End Costs to Increase Promotions. 3) Do-it-for-me — Easy Search/Checkout. 4) Do-it-my-way — Customer Experience Management. 5) Social Butterfly — Social Media.
5. OrderMotion boosts repeat buyer behavior to achieve higher average orders with lower costs using OMX,  an industrial-strength order management platform with an intuitively designed visual-interface.

BTW, the refreshments were great! What a conference!