This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition was a great success – thanks to the team at Internet Retailer who worked so hard to pull off an amazing event!

Probably to nobody’s surprise, mobile commerce was a big theme this year. As our recent survey revealed, 80% of retailers haven’t yet tackled the mobile arena, but my guess is that’s going to change quickly in the months to come. Given the early results from some of our customers, it seems clear that having a mobile web site is not just about keeping up with trends, it’s good for business.

SLI had quite a presence at IRCE, with 14 members of our team on the show floor, and we also sponsored drinks on two nights (hopefully you enjoyed a cocktail or two on us). Three of our customers presented, and we saw lots of traffic to our booth. We also had a drawing for a 3-D TV and 3-D DVD Blu-ray player – the winner was Lada Heep, eChannel manager for Thomson Reuters. Congratulations, Lada!

If you were at IRCE 2010, hopefully we had a chance to connect – but if not, feel free to drop us a note if you have any questions or requests. Next stops are eTail East (Aug. 9-12, Baltimore), Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (August 16-20) and Shop.org Annual Summit (Sept. 27-29, Dallas). We hope to see you there!

Earlier this month we moved our North American headquarters into a new space in downtown San Jose. Our new location at 333 W. San Carlos Ave. is bigger, giving us plenty of room to grow. And if the past year is any indication, continued growth seems certain.  (The views aren’t too bad either.)

 As we continue to innovate new site search features and techniques and pursue new markets, demand for our solutions has grown. And so have our sales, marketing, development and customer support teams.

We’re also now fairly central to many of our customers and technology partners located around the Bay Area. Of course, we serve retailers and other Internet sites around the globe – and our UK and New Zealand offices have grown as well.

If you’re in the area, stop by and see us in our new location. And if you’re game, our team will gladly introduce you to the tempting grasshopper appetizers at the nearby Mezcal.

No matter if you’re selling products, services or information online, to be successful, site visitors must be able to quickly and easily find what they came for – or they will leave, often never to return.

Our customer Ciena, a leader in network infrastructure is a good example. The company relies on its website for lead generation, and thus offers a great deal of educational materials on its site – i.e. whitepapers, product data sheets, videos and webinars – all designed to capture the interest of potential clients.

Ciena’s previous site search solution wasn’t resulting in the leads the company needed. They didn’t have visibility into how their visitors were moving through the site after conducting a search and weren’t confident visitors were finding useful information to download. Adding to the problem was the inability for their previous site search solution to integrate with any type of web analytics solution, like Omniture. And the Ciena web marketing team had to spend a great deal of time on special coding whenever there were any changes in the product pages to make sure the site search picked them up.

Ciena turned to us.

SLI worked with Ciena to implement both our Learning Search and Site Champion solutions to improve relevance of search results, as well as create pages optimized for search engines. Our services also easy integrate with analytics platforms like Omniture (and Google Analytics) to provide greater insight into visitor’s web behavior.

Ciena immediately saw results and a marked improvement in online visitor engagement. According to data from their Omniture analytics, in the second half of 2009, 18.5 percent of online visitors who used site search went on to download one or more files, compared to just 4 percent of visitors who entered the site via the home page, and who did not use site search.

In addition, Ciena’s site search results pages have become the number one entryway to the Ciena site. The company has tied 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations directly to these pages. And those registrations go straight into their sales lead funnel. You can read more about their deployment in the recent issue of Target Marketing magazine or via the case study on our site.

On the Internet, great customer service goes a long way toward increasing sales. A useable, easily searchable site is a key component. We are hard at work with our customers daily helping them ensure their site visitors become paying customers and not their competitor’s customers. Please contacts us if you would like to find out more.

We recently conducted a survey of more than 400 e-commerce companies about their plans and activities in mobile commerce (m-commerce). The feedback was intriguing, to say the least. We found that while recent reports are pointing to significant growth in mobile subscriber numbers and an uptick in m-commerce, the majority of online retailers (80%) do not currently have a mobile commerce strategy in place. Yet, 83% of survey takers say between 1-10% of visitors come to their sites from mobile browsers and 12% cite that 11-20% get to their sites through the mobile web. As those numbers are expected to grow rapidly, we believe this represents a significant opportunity, and those of you that are preparing now for the influx of new business the mobile web represents stand to benefit.

The good news is, while many online retailers may be slow to adopt m-commerce, most recognize the opportunity and plan to address it in the near future. Fifty-six percent (56%) believe a mobile commerce strategy is very important or important to their overall business and 38% say it is important for driving sales. The majority (70%) plan to embark on an m-commerce strategy within the next two years. Only 38% believe m-commerce will be important or somewhat important to this year’s holiday campaigns, while 62% say it will not be important. It will be interesting to see the outcome this holiday season.

According to a recent post from Tim Parry of Chief Marketer, those that have yet to embark on a full-fledged m-commerce strategy may consider launching a mobile site now for research instead of focusing all of their efforts on sales. The thinking behind this is that it might help retailers determine the mobile usage patterns of their customers, so specific needs can be met as m-commerce strategies are expanded.

Other SLI m-commerce survey highlights include:

• Seventy-nine percent (79%) say site search is important to a mobile website strategy and 61% are confident site search capabilities on a mobile site will generate additional conversions.
• The top four features online retailers cite as the most important to enhancing the m-commerce experience are navigation (73%), site search (59%), product pages (54%) and product reviews (40%).
• Of companies looking to build their m-commerce sites, 31% will utilize in-house resources, 28% will outsource the work to a third party developer, 36% will use a combination of both in-house and outsourced resources and the remainder are unsure.
• Fifty-one percent (51%) of e-commerce companies do not consider the iPad to be a mobile device (they say iPad users can utilize their current website); yet 31% will direct iPad to their mobile site.
• Only 22% of e-commerce organizations have developed shopping apps for platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry, while 49% are planning on creating apps, but don’t currently have one; and 29% are not planning on creating apps at all.

Thanks to all who participated in our survey. The full results will be made available on our site in the next few weeks. It will be interesting over the coming months to see how retailers respond to the growing m-commerce demand. We are already working with a number of you on adopting a successful m-commerce strategy, and look forward to helping others increase sales through the mobile web in the near future.

We’ve all been busy this week getting ready for IRCE which starts tomorrow in Chicago – and it looks like this year’s event is going to be one of the best yet. Several of our customers and ecommerce technology partners will be there, and we’re looking forward to all that’s in store.  If you’re a retailer, be sure to stop by our booth #301 — we’ll be providing complimentary Site Search Evaluations where our team will look at your site and offer suggestions for how you can improve the site search to create a better user experience (and capture more conversions!).

We’re also holding a drawing for a Samsung 3D TV and 3D Blu-Ray Player – so be sure to drop by our booth and enter to win.

If you haven’t already registered for IRCE, we’re offering a $100 discount on registration fees. To receive the discount simply click here and enter discount code EC02220 and Booth #301.

We hope to see you there.