The past two days I’ve been attending/blogging the Strategy & Innovation Forum, a conference focussed on e-commerce which is hosted by Shop.org. When you get 500+ e-commerce folks in one room, the basic question, “How Does it Sell Stuff?” (props to Scott’s blog).

The photo above is from Andy Nulman’s session on mobile marketing. His message was direct and to the point, just like the message above.

Retailers are notoriously slow to adapt (sound familiar). One speaker joked that retailers always say, “We want to innovate…so, who else is doing this?”

In many of the panels, the major retailers are pushing for as much user-generated-content integration with e-commerce as they can.

While some of the clients we deal with don’t operate large e-commerce systems, some of concepts still apply to product pages on web sites. Here are a few takeaways from the sessions:

- Online/Catalog retailers love online customer reviews because they
1. Provides copywriters with new ways of looking at and describing products
2. Gives them content to put in printed catalogs
3. Provides other customers with alternative uses for products

- PETCO the #1 online pet store now uses customer ratings as the primary sort for all product pages and searches, instead of price, alpha, etc. That’s how customers wanted to see the data.

- QVC measures their sales in $/second. They ship 3.5 items per second.

- QVC is constantly running polls on their site, the polls drive product development and tie-in to product sales. Product-sales linked to online polls have a 20% conversion rate (which is huge for e-commerce).

- QVC operates forums for all their major product lines, the discussion is monitored by 24 full-time internet sales managers. The sales managers review the forums and work with the sales team to modify product descriptions and sales pitches.

- Retailers see higher conversion rates on product pages that have negative reviews. This is not saying that all the reviews for a product are negative, however seeing 1 or 2 negatives along with many positives lets them know the content is not being filtered.