2018 Conference Tracks

With customer expectations getting ever higher in an increasing complex market of channel options an effective marketing strategy has never been more essential for successful Internet Retailing. 

The ‘Marketing & Customer Obsession’ track will help you understand customer-centricity and its role in eCommerce as well as what steps you can take to ensure your SEO remains effective in 2018.  We’ll also focus on how sales and customer engagement can be increased through personalisation, how to drive profitability from social media and how you can achieve real insight and ROI from your customer data. 

With the uncertainty Brexit has created for eCommerce; many retailers are increasingly looking to international markets from growth opportunities.  Although the opportunity is huge; trading internationally is a complex process. 

The ‘International Growth’ track will help you improve your international efforts through effective localisation and enable you to drive customer convenience through efficient international logistics and delivery. We’ll also look at the key international eCommerce challenges and how they can be overcome as well as highlighting which countries offer you the best growth opportunities.  

With the explosive growth of mCommerce retailers have had to accept that their customers are now mobile-first but how can you ensure your business moves to a mobile-first strategy and fully engages the mobile shopper?      

The ‘Mobile-First’ track will address this challenge and show you how you can boost sales through moving from a mobile-friendly focus to a truly mobile-first strategy.  We’ll look at the role of social media through mobile devices and how it has become transactional, improving loyalty through apps and how you can deliver a great mobile shopping experience that keeps customers spending. 

With the options for customer delivery rapidly growing and with some retailers even providing an hourly delivery option; the final mile is fast becoming a key way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.  This crucial track looks at same-day delivery and how you can ensure it enhances customer experience, using tracking effectively to differentiate your offer and what an effective final mile strategy should look like to ensure Black Friday success.  

We’ll also discuss the plethora of new delivery options, how customer convenience in delivery will change by 2020 and assess how drones and robots will be used to offer a world-class delivery experience. 

Customer expectations across retail are rising at a quicker rate than ever before.  Customers want to shop whenever, wherever and however they desire and now expect an increasingly seamless experience across channels. 

The ‘Beyond Channels’ track will help you face this challenge and drive customer engagement through a united and friction-free shopping experience.  The track will help you re-think your stores to engage the seamless shopper, drive ROI from click & collect, capitalise on the single customer -view and create the right internal culture for your staff to achieve a seamless customer mind-set. 

Many retailers are embracing new innovations as a way to maximise engagement and drive market share.  Others are partnering with start-ups or even starting their own innovation labs to ensure they stay ahead of the game.  

This track will look at four of the key innovations that are making the most impact on retail- artificial intelligence, augmented/virtual reality, IoT and voice-activation.  You’ll learn what these innovations really mean for retail and how they can best be used to engage your customers and increase your sales.  We’ll also have a panel on what retail will look like in 2020 to help you form forward-thinking strategies to take back to the office. 

This track looks at two key growth areas for eCommerce; marketplaces and B2B.  The marketplaces session in the morning focuses on helping you understand how to drive and sustain real international growth through a successful marketplace strategy and how you can expand through creating your own marketplace. 

The afternoon sessions focus on the growing importance of b2b.  We’ll look at how a b2b company can successfully transform itself into a digital business, what b2b can learn from b2c eCommerce and how b2b organisations can drive sales through an effective customer-centricity strategy. 

The ‘Operational Excellence’ track focuses on the supply chain, operations and logistics element of internet retailing.  Attend this track to understand how you can use innovation in your warehouse to improve your operational efficiency and how you can best manage 3PL relationships during peak trading to improve customer experiences.

The track also looks at how retailers can work together operationally to drive sales, ensuring your returns policy avoids business disruption and what operational excellence will look like in 2020 and how you can best prepare.