Topics ranged from product listing ads to social engagement to drop shipping, demonstrating – if nothing else – that the online retail industry has a lot of opportunities. Watch these six industry professionals share what they think the trends, challenges and buzz is.

1. Opt-in Processes. According to McDonald almost half of all retailers are hiding their opt-in messages at the bottom of their webpages. There is, he said, a difference between how the top retailers position opt-ins and the rest of the retailers on their websites. Of those on their top retailer list, 92% feature the opt-in throughout their website prominently, compared to only 84% of those not on the list. In addition to making sure that your customers can easily find your opt-in, McDonald recommends considering thinking beyond the traditional opt-ins. For example, follow Moosejaw’s example and include an opt-in on your Facebook page. McDonald said that since 66% of people prefer social sign-up instead of filling out a form, the better customer experience will be found by offering both ways to sign-up.

2. Welcome Emails. Consider all the emails your company sends. Which one was is the most important? McDonald says it just might be your welcome email. Using the example of Tafford Uniforms, he explained that the first welcome email sent to customers generates six times the revenue of a broadcast email. And yet, according to their research 32% of retailers are sending no welcome email at all.

3. Opt-out Alternative. 34% on Silverpop’s top retailers list offer opt-out alternatives. That drops to just 22% for the rest of the retailers. There are a number of alternatives that you can offer in addition to a opt-out including letting subscribers change how often they receive emails, what format they come in, which email address they come to, etc. According to McDonald, often 20-30% of subscribers will stay if you offer them alternatives. Retailers might even consider offering a “snooze” options to their customers like J&P Cycles does. Allowing customers to take a break from newsletters and emails for a month or two would certainly be preferable to them unsubscribing and potentially not signing up again.

Whether you are a top retailer or just getting started, making sure you are doing the above will go a long way in ensuring your email marketing is effective and your customers are happy to hear from you.

As the CMO of eBags, Wilson was able to share with the Shop.org Summit attendees first hand experiences from both eBags and Handbags.com in the session “Social Commerce in the Trenches.” While Facebook is not the only social network out there, with 750 million active users worldwide, it was bound to be the focus.

With users spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, the challenge for retailers becomes losing people. How? A retailer’s website may say “Like us on Facebook.” So the average shopper clicks through to like the page, sees the brand’s page, then notices that today is cousin Megan’s birthday. So the shopper heads over Megan’s page to send birthday wishes, finds a new photo album from a recent vacation and just like that… you’ve lost them. It’s stickier than fly paper.

Handbags.com set out first to understand their customer and then to create a social cycle that would both utilize Facebook’s feature-rich platform and achieve the benefits that every retailer wants. The first thing eBags realized is that handbag shoppers want different things than those shopping for, say, luggage. Handbag shoppers don’t spend as much time looking at reviews. They can decide for themselves if the bag is cute. They just need to know that the zipper isn’t going to fall off. They give a lot of weight to what their friends think of a handbag. On the other hand, none of my friends has ever asked me if I liked their new piece of luggage.

So how do you create a social cycle that keeps that demographic focused on the retail brand or site, and not stuck in Facebook? One tactical example Wilson gave was the social toolbar at the bottom of their website. From there, if you share the website with friends you’ll earn a $25 coupon for every three friends that also sign-up. The key is, you do all that without ever going to the Facebook site. You log in to handbags.com with your Facebook credentials, pull up your favorite Facebook friends, and share the site. And there you’ll be, still on handbags.com, ready to spend your $25 coupon.

That’s not the only Facebook tool on handbags.com that manages to use the network to share, while still keeping the customer on the site. Want to recommend the new Botkier bag to your friends? You can do that from Handbags.com. Want to register for the site with your Facebook account, and not have to fill out a new user form? You can do that on the site. Want to see which of your friends “likes “Handbags.com? No need to go to Facebook, just look at the Handbags.com homepage and look for your friends’ familiar faces.

Regardless of whether Facebook is too sticky for retailers, it’s a key component of social shopping and therefore should not ignored. Thankfully, there are deep social commerce integrations that allow retailers to utilize Facebook’s strengths and keep the retail brand front and center.

As a self-proclaiming geek, I had to follow up with Tradewell on a tactic called link bait – what he referred to as “the new geek sport.” In this video, he explains what the concept is, why it’s important, and shares 12 easy ways to do it.

The fan base of Facebook and Groupon consists of more than just their direct consumers. Retailers have a lot to gain from working with the companies and so were eager, despite the after-parties and their lack of sleep, to learn just how they can leverage both services to attract new customers and build better relationships with current ones.

In the final keynote session at Shop.org’s Summit, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Josh Goldman moderated a discussion with Groupon President and COO Rob Solomon and Facebook VP of Global Sales Mike Murphy, who talked about the opportunities for retailers in social media.

Some retailers are taking advantage of the opportunities, but not all. Goldman presented a slide showing the number of “likes” for retailers on Facebook. Interestingly, he found very few online-only retailers doing particularly well. A “like” he admitted “is absolutely not the scorecard of how well somebody is doing in social, but a like is a powerful thing. A like is not just an endorsement. It opens up a channel, as Mike described, where you can learn about that customer, stay in contact with them, and they’ll even spread your messages to their social group.”

Goldman asked the panel for theories on why online retailers are not doing better, and whether offline merchants will benefit more from social then online retailers.

Solomon referenced the old adage “location, location, location”, explaining both online and offline retailers have to be where the most engaged audience is. He said it was simply crazy not to be on Facebook. For online-only retailers, Solomon advised simply being smart about being on Facebook – for example, finding ways to get their customers to share what they are buying. Facebook isn’t just a place for retailers to engage their customers, it’s a place where retailers can sell products, he said.

Earlier in the session, Murphy had referenced Best Buy as a retailer that has stepped out in the social retail space. Best Buy has their entire catalog on their Facebook page, and now Facebook users can post a specific product to their friends’ news feeds asking if they should buy that product. The top 100 Facebook pages, he shared, have a lot more traffic going to their Facebook page than to their actual website. That may scare pure-play retailers who think this takes away from their own website (and sales), but that doesn’t have to be the case. 1-800-Flowers, for example, has been very successful in using a third party application to allow customers to get through almost the entire checkout process on Facebook, and only making the last click on their own site.

Murphy shared that if someone connects to a brand on Facebook, their friends are:

• 65% more likely to remember the brand
• Twice as likely to visit and “like” that brand
• Four times as likely to buy from that brand

Both panelists agreed that we are only in the first inning of social commerce, and the prospects are wide open. If consumers are four times as likely to buy from a retailer that their friends have “liked” on Facebook, why wouldn’t retailers want to leverage that? So go out there and play ball.

See what companies had to say for yourself.

But don’t take my word for it, hear from the service providers themselves…

In the below clip, session moderator and RichRelevance CEO David Selinger questions how the two retailers tackle tension within the company between channels.

1. Interacting with consumers through social media. Marks & Spencer posts videos, including their ads, on YouTube. In turn, they get feedback from their customers in the form of number of times viewed, likes and comments. Some customers take this to the next level by posting their own video spoofs of the commercials. Here’s one on social media and custard. Aubrey-Cound mentioned that some of the spoofs can be rather racy, so don’t say I didn’t warn you… they may not be safe for work consumption.

2. Using video to bring your products to life. ASOS, like many retailers, presents its products through images. They also, like some retailers, display the products through video. What makes them stand out and earn Tony Stockil’s praise as the retailer best utilizing video is the way they they use it. Specifically, Stockil shared, the catwalk videos that accompany many products allow customers to better see and understand the product. View this dress on their site and click “view catwalk” to see how the dress really fits and flows as it is worn.

3. Bring customers across borders a customized experience. Pixmania impressed on attendees the need to base a cross-border customization from a local’s perspective – that includes language, payment methods, preferred search engines. If you don’t know your customers on a local level, he said, you can’t be a retail leader in that area.

4. Make purchasing easy for your customers, even if they are watching a video. French Connection hosts videos on their YouTube page that show customers how to get specific looks. From these “Youtique” clips, viewers can actually click to view the products. Here’s a 30-second video they posted on how to catch a bouquet. As you watch, links appear on the dress and the clutch so you can purchase them.

While Spencer had both praise and constructive criticism for companies who offered up their sites to his expertise, here are examples of Spencer’s red flags and his suggestions on how to rectify the SEO mistakes.

1. Charmingcharlie.com

Before we even started digging into the websites, Stephan Spencer was ingraining in every attendee the importance of good text links over graphical links. Obviously retailers want to appeal to their visitors, but they also need their websites to appeal to spiders (the programs that crawl websites for indexing on search engines). Spiders understand and give more weight to text links than they do to graphics. Displaying Charming Charlie’s home page, Spencer immediately determined how many text links the page had by selecting all (hitting CTRL + A on a PC), and seeing if the “select all” highlighted bulky graphics or tight-fitting text. In the below screen shot, where the select all command is being used, you can see that only the navigation contains text links. Spencer recommended prominently expanding text links beyond just the navigation.

2. Sonystyle.com

Sony Style had more text links than Charming Charlie, but the examples we looked at didn’t have the text links using the right keywords. Linking generic phrases like “more information” and “explore more” will only help your search rankings if you goal is to be seen by people searching those terms. In the example from Sony’s Laptops page, the only link in the section highlighting the use of big screens through the laptop’s wireless display capability says “Learn more”. If Sony Style wants to be found through search engines for that product advantage, the text in the link needs to reference it. In this example, Spencer suggested linking the title of the blurb, which contains the phrase “Big Screen”.

3. shop.callawaygolf.com

The very first thing Spencer asked after typing the offered url for Callaway into his browser was: why is it shop.callawaygolf.com and not simply callawaygolf.com? While shop.callawaygolf.com (below left) focuses on the retail side of the business, callawaygolf.com (below right) takes visitors through a country selector and into a site focused on information – the brand, the technology, etc. Spencer suggested to the attendee that if the goal of the company is conversion (i.e. revenue), then retail should be the focus of the main url.

4. Char-broil.com

What do you want to rank for? It’s a simple question, and while most retailers can probably answer the question without a moment’s thought, their website may not show that response. Spencer poised this question when Char-Broil’s site was submitted for discussion. Their answer? Grills. Grill or grilling appears at least four times on the home page. Unfortunately, not one of those appearances is a text link. If you want to rank in search engines for “grills”, Spencer advised the attendees, that word has to be on the home page in text form, and in a prominent location.

The above suggestions are great if your company cares about SEO, but what it they don’t think SEO is that important? What if someone at your company claims a text link won’t be as attractive as the graphic they are producing? Consider how quickly the click-thru rates (CTR) drop for search result listings. Spencer shared that the first result in a listing gets a 40% CTR, the second a 10%, the third 9%, and the fourth just 5%. So, if you want that 40%, follow Stephan Spencer’s advice and optimize your site for search.

If you are ready to put the first tool to work, watch “RSS in Plain English” to get started.  Just don’t forget to add the Shop.org Blog RSS Feed.