I have just returned  from the Internet Retailer Conference in San Diego. This is the biggest show that we attend and the one where we have the largest presence. Because the show is fairly close to our office we had a lot of people there – I counted 22. It was fantastic fun seeing current and future customers, and partners and learning about some of the new stuff.

For me this is the third show that I’ve been to in the last 4 weeks, The other two were Ecommerce Expo in Manchester and Online Retailer Road show in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, Australia. A gruelling travel schedule but apart from seeing very little of my family for the last four weeks it has been very rewarding. One overriding theme that I have been getting from the customers I met during my travels is that they are very happy with the service they get from us. I heard from several that we are one of the best vendors that they deal with. It was great to hear this because we put a lot of effort into making our customer service the best it can be and it’s nice to see the evidence that this is working.

With over 500 vendors, multiple streams and workshops I feel like I missed out on a lot of good information at the show. However there were plenty of interesting bits and pieces I did pick up. Here are some of them…

A novel approach to getting answers

George Eberstadt, the founder and president of TurnTo Networks showed me their question and answer service for retailers. The novel thing they do is when someone asks a question about a product an email is sent to people who recently bought the product. They get a great response from this which means people get good answers to their questions in a timely manner. He had some good stats about the uplift they saw for their customers. I can see why this works. I would be likely to answer a question about a product I had just bought in this situation. Sending the question to people who have just bought the product is a great idea. Like most great ideas, it seems pretty obvious once you hear it. but I hadn’t heard it before.

Having the same URL for mobile and the web

Igor Faletski, the founder and CEO of Mobify was telling me about their approach to producing mobile websites. Like others they translate existing pages into mobile optimized pages. Unlike others they use client side JavaScript to do this which means the URL is the same whether you’re on a mobile page or the normal page. This means people aren’t sharing mobile URLs and has a number of other advantages. I thought it was an interesting approach.

Paying people to like you

While I was sitting on the floor eating lunch I was chatting to a couple of reps from a San Diego company whose name I forget (sorry). The interesting thing they told me they are doing for their customers is offering people a discount on some purchases if they “like” the product. I thought this was interesting from a couple of perspectives. The discount may help close the sale in the first place and secondly, by sharing it on facebook they are telling their friends about it. I expect the retailers will be able to maximize the benefit by paying to promote likes on facebook. But what this will force them to do is to try and quantify the value of a like. Something else I hadn’t seen before.

2B searches/quarter on eBay

Chris Payne, VP and Head of eBay North America talked about their strategy to provide infrastructure to retailers of all size, the standard eBay for Mom and Pop retailers, and their new acquisitions Magento and GSI for  medium and large retailers. He shared that in the last quarter there were over 2 billion searches on eBay. That got me thinking – how many searches did we serve across our customers in the last quarter. One of my team looked it up – just over 700 million. We’re working to catch up with them.

Robots

Finally Kiva had a great display showing their robots at work. Who doesn’t like robots?

Next week we’ll be exhibiting at the annual Retail World conference in Sydney, taking place June 27-29. If you’re attending the event, be sure to see us at stand #51, where we’ll be demonstrating our recently announced Conversion Optimizer A/B testing tool for site search, as well as the power our Learning Search site search, navigation and merchandising solutions deliver to online retailers. You can also enter our draw to win an iPad 2.

Be sure to also pick up your conference passport, which allows you to get stamps from participating exhibitors (like us) and be entered to win prizes once your passport is complete. And on June 29 we’ll be exhibiting in the eRetailing and Multi-Channel Retail Day in stand #2 – so you can also catch us there.

We hope to see you there!

Like most of you, we’ve been gearing up for IRCE for months. Well, it’s almost here, and it’s sure to be a great event. We love the opportunity to see familiar faces and meet new people as well – and offer a first-hand view of our Learning Search solutions in action. If you’re attending, please be sure to drop by our booth #405 where you’ll see a demo of our full-service site search, navigation and merchandising product offerings, as well as a new tool we’re unveiling next week (more to come on that soon).

We’re also giving away 3 iPads over the course of the event, so you can enter to be one of the lucky winners. And, as IRCE’s tote bag sponsor, you’ll find inside your bag a special key which opens our treasure chest of prizes – located at our booth – giving you another opportunity to score something nice for yourself.

Have safe travels to sunny San Diego, and we hope to see you next week!

SLI will be at two key industry events over the next couple weeks – if you plan to go to Internet Retailer Web Design or eTail West, come by our booth and see a demo of our learning-based search solutions.

At IRWD (Feb. 14-16 in Orlando) we’ll be at booth #301 (we’re also the event’s lead sponsor), where we’ll be raffling off an iPad on Feb. 16 – enter to win when you visit our booth any time during the event. You can also hear our customer, Carolina Rustica, co-present a session on Feb. 14 at 9:30am on developing a site navigation plan of action.

Also, stop by the “Ask the Expert” table just outside the pre-conference workshop session room on Feb. 14 – our very own Ed Hoffman will be there to answer questions about search and navigation, and other topics related to web site usability.

There’s another iPad ready to be raffled off at eTail West, Feb. 22-25 in Palm Desert, California. Come see us at booth #57 and enter for a chance to win.

As you might know, SLI Systems recently entered the mobile arena with a new solution to help e-retailers quickly and cost-effectively create a mobile website. Next week we’ll be demonstrating our solution at the Mobile Shopping Summit at Bridgewaters in New York City Oct. 25-27. If you’re attending the show, be sure to stop by our booth (booth #14) and learn how to develop and drive your mobile strategies. While you’re at our booth, make sure you enter our drawing for an iPad. Our search and navigation experts will be on-hand to discuss your mobile needs and offer guidance on when and how to create a mobile site to drive more sales.

Be sure to also check out our customer, Ian MacDonald of Century Novelty, who will be presenting with Jeff Pandolfo of Amazon Payments on Tues., 10/26 at 1:20pm on his work with SLI & Amazon in creating his company’s mobile commerce site – “Sealing The Deal Through Mobile With Amazon Payments: Be True To Your Brand As You Streamline The Checkout Experience.”

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!

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.

Your website may have the hottest products on the market, and the most engaging content – but if the site doesn’t have “findability,” potential customers won’t even know you exist. They’ll go to Google or Bing (or other search engines) and search for products or information, and your site won’t turn up on the first page of results.

But if your findability has been fixed, your site will rank high in search, and conversion rates for visitors will improve. Today I’ll be talking more about the keys to findability at the Gilbane Content Management conference in San Francisco. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions” with Sam Mefford of Avalon Consulting and Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC.

One key to improving your site’s findability via organic and paid search is to take a close look at how your current site visitors search on the site, and the language they use. You can use their searching language to adapt your site content (such as product descriptions and keywords) to the way your customers interact. For instance, do people commonly misspell an important search term? If so, that misspelling needs to be built into your site search and your content. Do they often use a generic category term rather than the actual product name (e.g. “MP3 player” vs. “iPod”)? If yes, then you need to incorporate that generic term into your site content. Your customers’ search language can also be useful in identifying the keywords to utilize in SEO and paid search efforts.

Improving findability ties in with site visitors’ increasingly short attention spans when it comes to finding what they need. They spend their days browsing search engines and social networking sites and they have high expectations for being able to quickly track down what they need – and they’ll easily desert any site that doesn’t meet this requirement.

If you’re at the Gilbane conference today, please come check out our discussion – we’ll be speaking at 1:30pm as part of the Customers & Engagement track. And if you’re at the conference this Thursday, I’ll be speaking again as part of a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience.”

SLI has started out the year with exhibiting at two great conferences – Internet Retailer Web Design and eTail. We had a wonderful time and hope all of you who attended have gained valuable knowledge from the speakers and networking with your peers.

At both conferences we had some great prizes we were giving away. We wanted to take a moment to say congratulations to John Du Cane from Dragon Door Publications who won a iPod Nano, John Parrish from Kellyco who won a Flip camera, Christopher Lailey from CanadaFlowers.ca who won a Zune HD, Rob Williams from Printglobe who won a PSP, Debbie Truitt from Professional Supplement Center who won a iPhone and Jeff Stone from Bikesomewhere.com who won a Netbook. We hope you all are enjoying your prizes.

We’d love to see you at future events. Keep your eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by and visit our team at the SLI booth.

SLI Systems is exhibiting at the Ecommerce Expo taking place at Earls Court, London on October 20 – 21, 2009. Ecommerce Expo is in its third year and is the largest ecommerce event in the UK. Entry to the expo is FREE of charge so it’s a fantastic opportunity to catch up with the latest thinking and developments in online retailing and meet the companies who can provide the solutions you’re looking for without spending a penny.

If you’re visiting the expo, stop by SLI’s stand, #514, we have an Acer Netbook (Windows XP, 160GB HDD, 10.1 inch) up for grabs so leave us your business card to go in the draw to win. We’ll also be performing FREE site search reviews at our stand so if you’d like someone on our team to review your site search please click here and we’ll arrange a time.

Osric Powell, Business Development, SLI Systems & Rob McNair, Ecommerce Manager, Tiso UK will be presenting at the Customer Conversion & Retention theatre between 2:45pm – 3:15pm, Wednesday, Oct 21. Please come along to this case study based presentation and learn how Tiso improved their revenues using advanced on-site search.

For more information about this event, visit www.ecommerceexpo.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you there expo!!