Shop.org Blog

Last week, Shop.org announced that it is co-producing the inaugural Global E-Commerce Summit, scheduled for October 27-29, in one of my favorite European cities – Amsterdam.
This global event is being organized by the leading e-commerce associations from North America and Europe. Shop.org is launching this event in partnership with the European E-Commerce and Mail Order […]

Greetings
The content team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on our upcoming merchandising workshop and also working hard on putting together the agenda for our Annual Summit.  This is a busy time for Shop.org, and coming right at the nick of time I would like to introduce Artemis Ebneyousef.  She is our new content manager who started on […]

I really enjoyed Patrick Bryne’s keynote last week, and so posted my rapidly scribbled notes.

Here slides from the “Customer Centric Search Marketing” session from the Shop.org Marketing Workshop, Scottsdale, April 2008.

Hi
 First of all I wanted to thank all of our speakers and attendees who spent a few days in beautiful Arizona at our Online Marketing Workshop.  All feedback is welcomed so please drop me a line at joseloffl@shop.org with any thoughts, opinions, and ideas for content moving forward.    I want to make sure that the […]

One of the highlights of the 2008 State of Retailing Online Marketing Report was a warning to online retailers that they should be cautious about investing in advertising on social networking sites. Our survey found that this type of advertising usually costs more than other types such as paid search and isn’t nearly as […]

Shop.org is at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 7-9, for our spring Online Marketing Workshop. It’s beautiful here - 85 degrees and sunny - certainly a nice change from the 47 degrees and rain that I left in Washington, DC (sorry to rub it in).
I’m looking forward to the next few days […]

Here are some select posts about the Jan 22-24 event in Orlando, Florida…
Broad international themes from Shop.org
Zia Daniell Wigder, JupiterResearch
This is the third Shop.org event I’ve attended over the past couple of years – it’s been a lot of fun to see global topics starting to play a key role in this online retail conference.
Acquisition […]

The second keynote of the morning featured Andy Nulman, President and Chief Marketing Officer, Airborne Mobile. To say Andy is enthusiastic would be an understatement. Unlike many speakers, Andy asked everybody to turn their cellphones on and up. His company is in the mobile content delivery business, a ringing cellphone is […]

Day two of the Strategy & Innovation Forum kicked off with a general session by FAO Schwarz CEO Ed Schmults. Ed talked about the challenge of expanding their reach, while protecting their brand.

FAO has been around since 1862. There were two recent bankruptcies in 2002 and 2003. However their direct-to-consumer business is […]

There are not many retailers that have not heard of the long tail (if not go check out Chris Andersen’s book). The final breakout session of the day featured Jack Jia, CEO, Baynote and Brian Elliott, President and CEO, Alibris discussing how the long tail applies to online sales.

Jack Jia from Baynote was first […]

The second panel session of the day discussed the integration of user-generated content (think customer reviews, etc) into internet initiatives. The panel featured: Brian Platter - General Manager, Home Delivery, Peets Coffee and Tea, Carol Snyder - VP Internet Merchandising, Community, & Multichannel QVC.com. Terry Nelson - Director of Marketing, Fair Indigo and Darren […]

The afternoon at the Strategy & Information Forum featured two concurrent tracks. I attended the panel focussed on monetizing Web 2.0. On the panel were: Brett Hurt - Founder and CEO Bazaarvoice, Paul Martino - CEO Aggregate Knowledge, Joe Chung - CEO Allurent, Jim Calhoun - CEO Popular Media and Steve Papa […]

The second keynote of the day featured Bob Myers, SVP QVC.com and Direct Response Marketing, QVC.com. Bob’s talked focussed on the multi-media aspects of QVC’s operations, specifically how they integrate the web and broadcast.

QVC is the second most profitable network, this includes the majors. For Bob, advertising and marketing is somewhat interesting, since […]

The 2008 Strategy & Information Forum kicked off Wednesday morning with a keynote by Andy Sernovitz. Andy is known as the WOMM guy, that’s Word of Mouth Marketing. Andy’s job as the opening keynote was to set the stage for the next two days, so of course the topics were Web 2.0, CGM, and […]

Just an early morning look at the main hall before the opening sessions.

Over the next few days we’ll be blogging from the Strategy & Information Forum. You can follow the blog-action here of course at blog.shop.org. The photogroup is here.

A big thanks to Andy Sernovitz and Greg Peterson for helping out with the blog.

If you plan to post anything to your own blog please use […]

I’m not sure where Larry found the time to speak with me with Strategy & Innovation only two weeks off, but he did.
Podcast here: Shop.org’s Larry Joseloff Discusses Innovation, Orlando, And Organizing The MultiChannel Retail Firm

My topic for the Intermediate Search Strategy session was “natural search,” so for my presentation I focused on a couple of great tools that make your SEO efforts a little bit easier. I also talked about some ways to handle duplicate content (either within your site or or on other sites) and keyword cannibalization (when […]

 Finding the Unexpected in the Long Tail
 Thorough keyword research uncovers surprising topics in every study. It also presents us with numerically supported ratios that challenge our assumptions about our industry (eg. we may think that oversized bikinis are searched 5% as often as string bikinis, but research may show a different numerical relationship; this deeply […]

For almost 15 years, the online retailing industry has been part of the US economy. And, for the most part, our industry has stayed out of politics, which is quite a feat for an industry that will generate a quarter trillion dollars in 2007.
While many online retailers would prefer to continue to go about […]

At the Shop.org merchandising conference in San Diego last week, Leigh Vosler from Sierra Trading Post provided excellent tips for optimizing data feeds.
Link: Leigh Vosler: 22 Tips For Optimizing Comparison Shopping Engine Feeds

I had the pleasure of moderating three roundtables at the Shop.org Marketing Workshop on “Avoiding Analysis Paralysis: Making Sense of the Numbers”. As the founder of Coremetrics, spending over seven years deep in this topic, it was nice to jump back into this subject matter. Of course, we do spend a lot of […]

I really enjoyed the recent Shop.org “First Look” event in Florida – as it is always fun to pick one’s head up from the day to day and speculate about the future.   I was fortunate enough to be part of a panel of presenters who collectively investigated where “things” may be going over the next […]

I received a number of requests for the playlist used at the FirstLook event.  Here it is…

Song

Artist

I Left My Wallet in El Segundo

A Tribe Called Quest

California Girls

The Beach Boys

Surfin’ USA

The Beach Boys

Egg Man

The Beastie Boys

With A Little Help From My Friends

The Beatles

All You Need Is Love

The Beatles

Revolution

The Beatles

Back In The USSR

The Beatles

Get Back

The Beatles

Get Funky

Beatnuts, […]

Shop.org is beginning to design our content and recruit speakers for our Marketing Workshop which takes place April 18 -20, and our Merchandising Workshop which takes place July 18-20.
We want to make sure that we are meeting our member’s needs with our workshops, so please comment with any suggestions for what you would […]

Last week was Shop.org’s Annual Summit in New York. It was a great show…2,200 attendees vs. 1,500 last year. Many new attendees. eCommerce is booming.
I led a panel at the Web 2.0 Boot Camp the first day of the show where we shared new technologies to help online retailers reach a market who are ignoring […]