Shop.org Annual Summit
We will be exhibiting at the Shop.org Annual Summit next week September 21-23 in Las Vegas. If you will be attending, stop by booth #623. Or, if you haven’t already registered and would like to attend we can offer you a discount of $100 off a full conference pass or a FREE exhibit hall only pass. When registering, enter the code 1332 to received the discount.

Ed Hoffman, VP of Worldwide Field Operations, will be giving a 30 minute presentation in the Big !deas Theater in the exhibit hall. This presentation, Preparing for the Holiday Hurricane – Identifying Trends, will focus on how you can understand what your customers want as well as how to increase the customer experience. Join Ed on Tuesday September 22nd from 2.45 to 3.15 to find out more. Also, SLI along with our partners Certona, ExactTarget, PowerReviews and Acadaca will be giving away a MacBook Air. Visit these participants at their Shop.org booths to receive your entry card.

Shop.org provides keynote presentations by some of the retail industry’s leading companies that can give you great insight on how to better direct your business goals. And they will provide afternoon sessions focusing on specific tactics to improve your ecommerce business with topics such as social marketing, mobile commerce, SEO and more.

For more information on the Shop.org Annual Summit, visit www.shop.org/web/summit09.

LENSER 09 Summit
SLI is a sponsor of next week’s LENSER 09 Summit, September 23-25 in San Rafael, CA. If you will be attending, stop by our table and find out how you can improve your site search with SLI.

Visit www.lenser.com to find out more about how LENSER can help you with your multichannel marketing efforts.

This week we’re making the journey to Foxwoods Resort & Casino, Ledyard, Connecticut for the NEMOA fall conference – September 16th – 18th. The event is focused on “Beating the Odds” and has some of the best minds in the industry teaching online retailers how to win against the tough economy.

We’re sponsoring the Thursday cocktail reception with our partner LENSER so if you’re in the area please come by and have a cocktail on us.

Chris Tucker from SLI Systems is hosting a roundtable on Thursday morning where you can have breakfast and share ideas with other industry peers.  Chris’ table topic is “Creative Uses of Site Search and Navigation”, so if you’re attending the event, please join Chris and friends for breakfast and learn how industry leading online retailers are optimizing their Site Search and Navigation to create the best possible experience for their customers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to “Walk Away a Winner”. To find out more about the event visit.

We hope to see you there!

It delights me to say that I’m convinced after IRCE that E-retailing remains a bright spot in this dark economy and it was fantastic to see people searching for new ways to improve the performance of their websites.We met a lot of enthusiastic online retailers at the show and to those who dropped by our booth I’d like to say thanks for taking the time out to talk to us. If you left your business card behind then you probably went in the drawing to win our prize – an Acer Netbook! Angela Walker from Christian Cinema won the Netbook so I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate her for winning and I hope the netbook is getting plenty of use.

We have also been exhibiting at shows in the UK and the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelming with Internet World and Ecommerce Expo North both exceeding expected attendee numbers. We also gave a Netbook away at Internet World so we’d like to take a moment to recognize Tim Broughton from Confetti. Thanks Tim!

We look forward to seeing everyone at future events all over the world and we’ll do our best to keep you excited by providing new and innovative ways to improve your website.

This year we’ve been exhibiting at some excellent conferences around the world. At many conferences we have telescope drawings to win a Stanley London 30-inch brass telescope. We’d like to take a moment to recognize a couple of our winners this year. From the Internet Retailer Web Design conference in January our winner was Carl Winter, and from the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation conference in February our winner was Andy Carpenter from Vera Bradley. On behalf of the SLI team, we congratulate you and hope you are enjoying the telescopes! Keep an eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by our booth and have a chat with our team.

We will be at the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this week.  To find our more about the event check out http://www.searchmarketingexpo.com.au/.

We’re heading over to Boston this week for the NEMOA Spring Conference. To find out more about this event and what the New England Mail Order Association is all about check out www.nemoa.org.

We’re hosting a round table on Thursday morning (7:45am – 8:45am), come along for breakfast and join the discussion.

We have just released an interview with Jack Love, President and CEO of Vertical Web Media – better known by their brand Internet Retailer.

Jack discusses his career in publishing from starting as a journalist through to Internet Retailer. He talks a lot about the upcoming Internet Retailer show in Boston (June 15-18) which is going to be their biggest and their best. A lot of online retailers I talk to say this is their favorite show. But don’t take my word for it - listen to what Jack has to say about it.

Next week we’re heading down to Phoenix, AZ for the eTail West 2009 conference.

This event  is one of the largest conferences in the ecommerce industry and has an impressive list of speakers as well as a good mix of vendors.

When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks.  As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.

In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.

All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.

Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search  sway-control:

1. Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
   
2. They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
   
3. They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it

SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If  you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.