The eCommerce Innovation Summit, 2018 – powered by the Innovation Enterprise, brings together the senior leaders in ecommerce, sales, marketing and digital space, to discuss about the latest ecommerce strategies and opportunities in the market.
The event kick-started on 20th March at San Francisco and has brought in over 28 speakers and an interactive audience of 100 business executives. The key discussion points this year are:
- Identifying and adopting new digital trends like virtual reality, chatbots, etc.
- Ways to enhance the modern mobile shopping experience.
- Growth of AI applications.
- Cross channel marketing.
- Required skill set of an ecommerce team.
- Ways to build and develop brand credibility.
This year, the event has been co-located with the Chief Marketing Officer Summit, in which discussions are held for multi-channel brand strategy, evolution of social media and ways of survival, and how CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) can be used as a tool to develop brand identity.
The first day at the event was full of learning with key sessions and networking exchanges. Marat Gazlev – Director of SEO, IGN Entertainment, took the opening keynote, wherein he discussed the importance of schema markup for ecommerce sites. He shared some tricks and tips to leverage schema markup to stand out in Google’s search results.
Virginia Hines, Product Director, Yahoo Payment Platform, Yahoo, in her session Opportunities and challenges for eCommerce merchants in the evolving payments industry discussed about rapidly changing payment modes and how merchants need to use a plenty of methods and tools to ensure secure transactions. She discussed about merchant side changes in the Yahoo/Oath Global Payments to enhance the security of online payments and present an opportunity for payment service providers.
Annie Barry – Product Manager, Front End Optimization, Levi Strauss & Co. discussed about how brands can develop a data-driven and brand centric product roadmap using their unique identity. She discussed about sprint planning prioritization methods in her session.
Later, Tanumoy Ghosh – Director, Platform Analytics and Customer Data Science, Customer and Strategy, GAP, took a session on Powering customer experiences through data science, wherein he emphasized the impact of customer experience on a brand’s image, how data science can be used to study each phase of customer’s buying journey and ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Gaurav Agarwal – VP Growth, Molekule in his session Finding your channel mix in a disparate ecosystem said that in the last 3 years, total advertising spends in the US increased by only 20%, whereas digital advertising spends increased by 70% and mobile spend by over 200%. He discussed about the major pitfalls that a brand can commit while choosing an advertising channel mix and how to select the right channel mix for maximizing cost efficiency.
Luke Edson – CRO at Future PLC talked about how to drive qualified consumers to purchase leveraging custom content. He discussed how brands and retailers can build a unique ecommerce approach, which is completely integrated to provide a smooth path to purchase for the consumers.
The event also had an interesting session on the role of AI and machine learning to drive user engagements in ecommerce. Karthik Bala – Head of Data Strategy, Conde Nast, discussed about how publishers can use operational optimization in marketing, personalization and advanced search. He said that AI is shaping the future of shopping with processes like automated inventory planning, dynamic pricing etc.
General Assembly, in association with L’Oréal, conducted a skill assessment test of digital marketing wherein over 20,000 people participated. The session headed by Chief Marketing Officer at General Assembly – Edward Nevraumont, revealed the details of the digital marketing gap to eventually find out about the skills that companies require in order to differentiate themselves in the market.
Chang Li – VP of Technology at Contentful, shared with the audience his experience of building out an ecommerce solution based on headless architecture on the Amazon Cloud leveraging Contentful, for a North American Telco.
Elizabeth Carbone – Lead Product Manager, Hotel Tonight, discussed about ways to grow your shopping revenue across your mobile sites.
The first day at the event was full of informational sessions and the second day will again bring in more knowledge for the ecommerce folks.
Stay tuned to get more details.
