The exhibit hall, or “Solutions Zone” as it was called at eTail West, was buzzing with activity.
Sure, there were things like mimosa breaks and Xbox tournaments to lure eTail West attendees into the Solutions Zone. But attendees also made the most of their time at eTail West and met with their current and potential new technology vendors out on the show floor.
And speaking of new vendors, there were several first-time exhibitors that, in my mind, stood out… for a good reason. And I say that because I’ve seen many exhibitors come and go since I attended my first eTail West show in 2008.
Let’s face it – for every Certona who has exhibited at eTail West (Did anyone really understand the concept of personalization back in 2008?), there have been at least two buzzword-driven shiny-object selling vendor with some great swag… but that’s it.
Here’s a look at six eTail West 2015 vendors who stood out in the pack.
Bluecore
I consider Sur La Table SVP-Digital Kevin Ertell to be one of the smartest people in ecommerce. So when he’s giving a booth endorsement of your technology, it’s got to be pretty darn good. And it is.
Bluecore co-founder and CEO Fayez Mohamood said it took just two weeks to get Sur La Table up and running with Bluecore’s email trigger service. And all Ertell’s team at Sur La Table needed to do to get Bluecore launched a few weeks before holiday 2014 was a single line of code.
Bluecore makes life easier for merchants like Sur La Table by automating email triggers. The merchant sets up the parameters (such as “send an email in 2 days to all shoppers who searched for ‘Product X’ on our site”), and Bluecore does the rest.
Ertell said Sur La Table saw a significant lift in conversion from Bluecore’s triggered emails during the holiday season – a time that is usually reserved for spray-and-pray email marketing.
CAKE
CAKE, a division of Accelerize Inc., provides a SaaS-based solution to track, attribute and optimize the performance of digital marketing spend, in real-time. Bringing clarity to omnichannel marketing campaigns, CAKE empowers ecommerce merchants with the insight to make intelligent marketing decisions.
While merchants are breaking down their marketing and sales cycles (a sale is a sale is a sale), they still need to know a customer’s path to purchase. CAKE’s analytics dashboard helps merchants determine how their customers buy, and which channels they should focus on.
Attribution is no longer about first touch or last touch, but about the use of all the marketing channels, and how to better optimize them.
Curalate
Social sharing has moved from Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest and Instagram. Curalate’s marketing and analytics suite for the visual web helps brands tell their story through imagery in order to drive consumer engagement, build brand awareness, and form stronger, more meaningful relationships with consumers.
Curalate mines about 20 million to 25 million social media images being shared across social media platforms daily, looks for insights for marketers, and them provides them with a tool to help them better engage with their fans.
A look at the dashboard helps retail marketers understand what products are being shared most, and what consumers are saying about them. So instead of a retailer just knowing they have a fan, the retailer knows what makes that fan a fan. And that knowledge can be used to better create offers via social media.
Jirafe
Analytics dashboards can be tricky, they can leave you guessing, and they can make you look for a needle in a haystack full of numbers.
Jirafe’s dashboard helps merchants sift through tons of data to find out what they really need to know: What products are selling, what products are not selling, and what they need to do to optimize product pages to get a lift in sales.
Jirafe helps merchants keep up with changing customer demands, and ensure loyalty, by giving merchants a combination of analytics-based reporting and business intelligence that can integrate online and POS data as well as cross-channel marketing data.
ShopToMyDoor.com
We’ve seen several reports that state Africa’s economy is rapidly growing, yet it’s not a major destination for cross-border selling. That’s because U.S.-based retailers sell across borders with a caution flag in the air, since countries such as Nigeria have a reputation as a hotbed for fraud.
ShopToMyDoor.com’s mission is twofold: It wants to open up cross-border shopping to customers in African countries, and it wants to decrease U.S.-based retailers’ fear of fraudulent transactions coming from that continent.
Consumers in Africa can register for a ShopToMyDoor.com account and be screened as authorized shoppers. Retailers in the U.S. then become part of ShopToMyDoor.com’s marketplace, and ShopToMyDoor handles the logistics of getting product fulfilled and delivered to customers. ShopToMyDoor also works with the banks to ensure retailers get paid.
TVPage
We’ve been preaching the value of video on product pages, and we’ve seen numbers that show high conversion on product pages with video vs. product pages without videos.
TVPage takes product video to the next level by allowing retailers to use its platform to create their own video page. So as shoppers become more engaged with video, they either click through from the video to the product page, or stay on the video player and discover more about a retailer’s merchandise assortment.
TVPage says its video stores drive new traffic to your ecommerce site using highly optimized video search results. Video store pages are indexed by Google and show up as rich video results when users search. And in the case of retailer Skis.com, its TVPage site ranks higher in Google than its YouTube page does – which is significant, since YouTube is a Google product.