In God we trust – all others bring data!
That is just one of the pearls that Raul Vasquez, CEO of Walmart.com (www.walmart.com), shared with the audience yesterday morning during his opening keynote address at the Shop.org Online Merchandising Workshop ‘08 here in Huntington Beach, California. Raul went on during his hour-plus talk, which by the way was one of the most engaging, insightful and informative keynotes I have heard in a long while, to stress the importance of data in managing your online organization. The last pearl I will share with you being a data lover myself was the importance Raul places on being able to recognize the “signal” from all the noise that sometimes comes with data!
Following Raul was the ever powerful Bryan Eisenberg, Future Now (www.futurenow.com) sharing the Golden Rule of Online Merchandising and then after lunch Carrie Johnson, Forrester Research (www.forresterresearch.com) wowed the crowd with her insightful report on the State of Retail Online Merchandising.
The rest of the afternoon was equally impressive with all the roundtables I mentioned in yesterday’s post (including my fun table!) plus Jay Greenberg of Spencer’s Gifts (www.spencersgifts.com) and Stephanie Pike of Circuit City (www.circuitcity.com) wowed the crowd with their fun TV talk show style of educating the audience with how to “Test Your Way to Site Conversion.” They both shared insightful successes and failures each company has sent from testing things as simple as the color of buttons to overall page designs.
Lastly, and definitely my favorite as this topic is near and dear to my heart, was the panel on how to Make Your Online Merchandising More Nimble by Taking a Page from the Small Retailer. As this is my area of expertise as well, I thought that Nathan Decker of Evogear (www.evogear.com) and Venessa Hoffman of Godian Project (Parent of PlumberSurplus) (www.plumbersurplus.com) and OutdoorPros (www.outdoorpros.com) and Adam Silverman of WetSeal (www.wetseal.com) delivered outstanding information to the crowd. Of all the sessions during the entire day, these folks for the audience fully engaged – and that is hard to do past 5Pm – where the hands were still being raised well after last call.
Finally, the night’s reception and dinner outside under the nearly full moon with an ocean-front view was perhaps one of the more enchanting settings I have seen at such an event. So I say to all of you out there, DO NOT MISS THIS NEXT YEAR!
More to follow on today’s session…
on July 16, 2008 on 4:49 pm
Jay- it was great to see you last night, thanks for supporting the us. I agree that was an awesome setting to have this event, and Vanessa said the content was exceptional.
on July 16, 2008 on 7:24 pm
Jay,
What a great synopsis, oh and you are to kind!