eCommerce Camp Toronto #3 - Great Job!

Last night was the third eCommerce Camp Toronto event, held at the Elephant and Castle on King Street. The event offered a moderated panel of retailers and shopping experts and a few hours of networking with a variety of people from Toronto, and Canada's eCommerce industry.

The panel was made up of:

•James Connell, Sr. Director, Ecommerce, Digital Marketing and New Media, Roots Canada
•Raffael Sarracini, Ecommerce Development Manager, Adidas Canada
•Stephen Neufeld, Ecommerce Marketing Manager, Lenovo Canada
•Kate Musgrove, Online Consumer and Content Editor at RedFlagDeals.com

What we learned?
The first was that eCommerce Camp has a solid following, offering a strong mix of retailers, platform providers, marketing companies, consultants, and other firms that make up the eCommerce space in Canada. We assume they'll soon outgrow a venue like Elephant and Castle.

Some key take aways from yesterdays event.

1. Strong Holiday Numbers 2009: The entire panel agreed that they planned for the worst but experienced a far better holiday season than anticipated. In the case of Roots, their promotional tactics pushed them right out of inventory on many items. They also agreed that their US website counter parts did not have as great of a November / December. Oddly, we did not hear this from our Clients with US websites and reported great growth in the same time period.
2. Hyper Promotions: Kate reported that many retailers were in "hyper promotions mode" as part of their plan mitigate loss sales over Thanksgiving through Christmas. Economic recovery plans in overdrive have rubbed shoppers the wrong way - email overload being the most annoying.
3. Social Media Use: The panel all had similar feedback on the ways they were using Social Media with their eStores. In general they haven't seen a boost in sales from social links and typically are using Facebook and Twitter for brand awareness and customer service. The group felt that the implementation and integration strategy of "Social" into the shopping experience is something they're still struggling with.
4. Mobile Commerce: The general consensus was that mobile sites today are informational only, allowing shoppers to easily browse ratings and reviews, products, and price but not actually buy online. There wasn't a ton of enthusiasm around mobile commerce with this group - possibly because of a lower number of Canadian consumers using mobile right now.
5. Live Chat - On or Off?: Generally speaking, everyone was in agreement that Live Chat is not bringing the sales results needed to justify keeping it online. Similar to Social Media, the right implementation of Live Chat is most likely the issue (trigger points for chat, vertical considerations for customer service, demographics and languages). Roots has simply turned it off until they work through a strategy.

What we'd like to see?
We really enjoyed the event last night. Here are a few things we'd like to see considered for future:

1. Mid-Market Retailer on the panel. It would be nice to hear from a mid-sized online retailer in Canada (for example: Henry's http://www.henrys.com/) in addition to some of the bigger brands we heard from last night. We feel this would add an interesting dynamic.
2. Canadian Shipping Landscape: It would be great to hear from Canada Post and some of the challenges with shipping within Canada and to the USA.
3. Conversion Tactics: Taking your conversion rates up / abandonment rates down can make a big impact on the bottom line. What are leading Canadian retailers doing in this area? What challenges do they face?

We've already started talking with Chris about speaking and an upcoming event. Great job eCommerce Camp Toronto!