Leading service providers in the eCommerce industry descended on sunny San Diego recently at the annual customer engagement conference hosted by IBM called Amplify. Blue skies, excellent food and an outstanding list of guest speakers helped to produce a great vibe at the popular conference (previously known as Smarter Commerce). Speakers included best-selling author Dr. Jonah Berger, Facebook executive Blake Chandlee and Citi’s global head of emerging platforms, Andres Wolberg-Stok.Held May 11-13, 2015, Amplify focused on four main topics: eCommerce, customer... Category - Industry Events
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Leading service providers in the eCommerce industry descended on sunny San Diego recently at the annual customer engagement conference hosted by IBM called Amplify. Blue skies, excellent food and an outstanding list of guest speakers helped to produce a great vibe at the popular conference (previously known as Smarter Commerce). Speakers included best-selling author Dr. Jonah Berger, Facebook executive Blake Chandlee and Citi’s global head of emerging platforms, Andres Wolberg-Stok.Held May 11-13, 2015, Amplify focused on four main topics: eCommerce, customer... 
The Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition (IRCE) is fast approaching. The largest eCommerce event of its kind brings the most innovative minds in the industry together for lively discussions June 3-4 at Chicago’s McCormick Place West. There are many, many events and presentations to look forward to, but here are the top 10 on our list:1) Access to workshops: Attendees have the opportunity to join workshops where they will get deep into the topics that drive better business practices. Full-day workshops are... 
Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company, released an eCommerce report showing that online retail sales this year are expected to reach $334 billion, which will be around 10 percent of all retail sales in the United States. Forrester reports generate plenty of interest and conversation, which will likely be the case in a few weeks when the eCommerce industry gathers in Chicago at the Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition (IRCE) at the Windy City’s McCormick Place convention center June... 
According to an article that appeared in the May 5, 2014, issue of Forbes, “Wayfair is as much a data miner as it is a retailer. It constantly probes and processes information about its customers to interact with them, anticipate their wishful thinking, personalize their home pages and turn search into a form of entertainment.” And that was the exact message that Wayfair.com CEO and co-founder, Niraj Shah, told attendees at the 2014 Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition in his keynote... 
On June 11, 2014, the 10th annual Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition kicked off in expected style. As in years past, the eCommerce industry’s biggest event delivered in the department of big names and hot topics. John Donahoe, CEO and president of eBay Inc., discussed the wisdom of crowds and the commerce revolution in his keynote speech, titled Connected Commerce: The New Opportunity for Retailers in an Evolving Retail Environment. With 16 years of experience under its belt and a revenue growth... 
Now that the days of Polar vortexes are but a chilly memory, the team at NetSphere Strategies is ready to get out and enjoy our favorite city: Chicago. And considering that thousands of folks from our industry will be heading to the Windy City for IRCE, we’re on a mission to make their experiences fantastic. To do so, we’ve already posted a few blogs that offer up great recommendations for what to do and eat in our hometown. Continuing with that... 
Last year, the team at NetSphere Strategies posted a list of our favorite things to do in Chicago to help IRCE attendees better enjoy their time in the Windy City. As we mentioned in that blog, a good chunk of our team either grew up in Chicago or lives there now. Wanting to yet again extend a few ideas from an insider’s point of view, we updated our list to reflect some of the best sights and sounds happening in Chicago... 
From Jan. 12 through Jan. 15, 2014, about 30,000 people will be in attendance at the National Retail Federation’s annual exposition – Retail's Big Show. The event, which takes place at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, began more than 100 years ago and was once focused solely on brick-and-mortar retailing. This year, however, it might prove difficult to avoid talk of online retail. In fact, Rick J. Caruso’s keynote speech, “Reimagining Main Street – How Brick and Mortar... 
On August 20, 2013, Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing software company, delivered an inspiring keynote presentation at Inbound 2013 in Boston. During his speech, Shah discussed the behavioral shifts that are taking place in our society – and the way that companies go to market. Once upon a time, Shah said, folks answered rotary phones when they rang, despite the fact that without caller ID, they didn’t even know who was calling them. They were... At the 2013 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition at Chicago’s McCormick Place, the NetSphere Strategies team hit the convention floor running. During the three-day event, we covered a lot of ground (an exhibit space of 250,000 square feet, to be exact), all the while, meeting a lot of new, interesting people and discovering a host of cutting-edge tools and technologies. And, we caught some of those experiences on film.
Over the course of the show, we got insight from industry leaders like Cheryl Wellman, the CFO at eCatalog Services, and Dan Schottenfels, vice president at CPI Data Services. No matter who we were talking to at IRCE, each conversation revealed a thought-provoking angle on the direction in which the industry is headed. And we discovered that many attendees were focused on four trends: mobile, analytics, social and cloud.
To offer additional information on those key ideas, we tracked down a few statistics that put their relevance into perspective:
Mobile: By 2014, about 25 billion visits to the Internet Retailer top 500 e-retailers will come from smartphones. – Internet Retailer
Analytics: By applying predictive analytics to Big Data, retailers have the ability to increase operating margins by over 60%. – McKinsey
Social: Social media ad revenues expected to grow to $11 billion dollars by the year 2017. – BIA/Kelsey
Cloud: By 2014, IT organizations in 30% of Global 1000 companies will broker two or more cloud services for internal and external users. – Gartner
Every year, the IRCE, hosted by Internet Retailer, is the eCommerce industry’s biggest – and most comprehensive – trade event. So it makes perfect sense that it would serve as the ideal location for networking and discussing the issues that are affecting eCommerce businesses.
For the team at NetSphere Strategies, IRCE 2013 was a major success. We came, we saw, we eCommerced! But it was the people that we met that truly made it worthwhile, and we’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone that participated in the video and everyone who shared their thoughts and feelings on our dynamic industry.