Three Worthwhile (Quick) Reads from Attendees at eTail Boston

Since we’re feeling quite nostalgic for our awesome eTail Boston event, (which only ended two weeks ago but still!) we wanted to peruse the blogs and wise words of our industry peers to see which bits of info they liked best and learned from most notably.

We found a few worthy articles highlighting the info gleaned from the event and are pleased to see how eager and enthusiastic many ecommerce folks are about improving and learning.

This post, from ECommerce Bytes, talks about the presentations from MyBuys and Facebook on the first day of the main conference. The writer, Ina Steiner, pulled out some of his favorite stats and tweets and we happen to dig them too. MyBuys noted that:

– Of the visitors to a retail site, 3% will convert, and only 1% will come back and purchase again.
– Eighty percent of visitors will never return; of the 20% who return, 10% will come back a third time.

During the Facebook presentation, here was a good summary tweet, which ECommerce Bytes picked up on:

DD Nadeau @wxynot : “4 dimensions of Social Marketing: Connect, Engage, Influence & Integrate”, Nicolas Franchet @Facebook #eTailBoston

You can read the full article here.

Another worthwhile read comes to us from Luke Wroblewski, a blogger and technology designer. He called out the panel titled, “Developing A Holistic Mobile Strategy,” featuring Alaska Airlines, StubHub, Etsy, and Mobify. He lists some of his notes from the panel:

– Alaska Airlines (AA): has grown much faster on mobile than assumed. Mobile has doubled even in just the past few months.
– iPhone engagement and usage is off the charts compared to Web at AA. Purchases being made on phones are often last minute (48 hours before).
– Alaska Airlines approaches mobile with a deep sense of humility. It’s like ecommerce 10 years ago. Measure, track, and learn as you go.
– Same average size of orders on iPhone and iPad as desktop on Stubhub. Android users spend less, even though there are more of them.

Read all of Luke’s notes here.

This third article from Choice Stream discusses some of the conversations the proud eTail supporter had with retailers in the exhibit hall. One of the big topics on peoples’ minds was showrooming. One retailer had an interesting response to the concept:

“Showrooming isn’t a threat if your store clerks are empowered to offer discounts on the fly.”

The rest of the post is a bit sponsor-y, but worth a perusal for the recounting of convos that pose good questions.