Blog

September 10th marked the start of this year’s Shop.org Annual Summit in Denver, CO.

The Summit always seems to be the ideal place for online retailers and brands to close the conference season. In addition to the myriad of social activities, the Summit brings industry leaders and innovative players together and allows attendees to gather that one last nugget or exchange that one last idea with fellow retailers before they head for holiday lockdown.

Following is a summary provided by the Shop.org blog on five sessions:

Are you making one of these 4 online marketing mistakes?

With everything that goes on in retail/e-commerce, mistakes are bound to be made.  Luckily, some of the most common ones are easy to fix.  Read about the top 4 mistakes online marketers make, and how they can be remedied here.

Cost-effective tactics to optimize SEO performance

SEO may be one of the most valuable online strategies, right after email, but are you utilizing all the available resources to optimize?  Learn more about it here.

How to be a web analytics hero

Getting the most from your website requires more than just reporting.  You must analyze!  Landing pages, search functions and product details should all be examined.  Learn more here.

Why site speed matters for big time retailers

In life, most people don’t like waiting and the same goes for online shoppers.  Read an interview with Ted Middleton, Vice President of EdgeCast Network, for insights on why your page load times matter and how to keep yours fast here.

H&M: Lessons learned from David Beckham’s Super Bowl ad

I think the title is self-explanatory on this one!  Read about the tactics and strategy H&M used when planning to launch their Super Bowl ad surrounding David Beckham’s underwear line here.

For those of you not familiar with this event or have not attended in the past, this year’s Summit had one of the biggest turnouts recorded and with the Shop.org promise that ‘attendees will acquire valuable strategies and tactics to improve online and multichannel retail business’, you may want to check it out next year. This Summit is confirmed for September 30-October, 2013 in Chicago, IL. We hope to see you there!

Coming to the NRF Innovate11 Conference in San Francisco next week?  Interested in Social Commerce?  Stop by and see us in booth 52.

Or be one of the first 10 to pre-schedule a 15 minute appointment with us at the show, and we’ve got a $50 gift certificate for you from Amazon or Apple.

Send us an email here to schedule your appointment.

The fine print: One gift certificate per company.  For pre-scheduled appointments only.  Qualified retailers only.

Most of the focus on social shopping has been on how stores can build a presence on Facebook and Twitter.  But new research from BIGResearch for Shop.Org suggests this is backwards.  Online stores will likely benefit far more from bringing the social networks of their shoppers into the buying experience within the store.  Here’s why:

[Social networks] are rarely the starting point for shopping per se. When we asked consumers, “Where do you typically start your online shopping? (Check all that apply)”, consumers told us that they are most likely to start their online shopping at merchant Web sites (almost three-quarters), search engines / directories (one third), and catalogs or offline stores (about a quarter) — with social media sites trailing far behind.

So if you want to truly tap into the power of your customer base and the social network of your shoppers to influence purchases, do it ON YOUR SITE.  That’s where real buyers come to do their research.  And that means leveraging tools like Facebook Connect to make all that social data available to shoppers when they’re really in-market.  (TurnTo can make this easy.)

Here’s data from the report, available here. (You must be a Shop.Org member for access.)

TurnTo will be in booth #212 at Shop.Org in Vegas next week.  Come by and see us.  Or shoot us a note at contact@turnto.com and let’s schedule a time to talk while we’re all there.  Oh, and we’re giving away a Kindle!