Daily E-Commerce Pulse Report (Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash)

Top 2024 resources on shoptalk

Best shoptalk resource in 2024.
Learn more about shoptalk to improve your e-commerce strategy.

  • Join Elastic Path at Shoptalk 2022 - What’s already been coined “Retail’s Big Reunion” Shoptalk’s 2022 U.S. event takes place March 27-30 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. With travel bans officially lifted, the venue is set to welcome 10,000+ event goers representing 3,000 established brands, startups, tech companies, and more. Currently over 270 speakers, 600 sponsors, and 80 speaker-led sessions are on the show schedule. Attendees will experience the current state and the future of retail from industry frontrunners through networking, breakout sessions, and plenty of time for meet and greet. No longer a buzzword, the Composable Commerce approach is transforming retail experiences for brands of all sizes and business models worldwide. We plan to show you its benefits with live demos and customer testimonials from the people who’ve been there. Composable Commerce Pop-Ups & Events We’ll hit the showroom floor ready to bring digital retail to life featuring home retailer Serena and Lily. Engage in a mobile commerce experience by browsing the lounge with QR-code ready items to learn more about their luxury furnishings and accessories. And there’s more: Fireside Chats – Stop by and chat with Deckers Brands, Pella, and Serena and Lily. You’ll hear firsthand how these leading retailers are embracing a Composable Commerce approach. If you can’t attend live, follow us on LinkedIn to catch the livestream.   Elastic Path Shoptalk Shop – Join us for a mobile self-checkout experience and be entered to win a selection of our customers products. Items will be raffled throughout the event. The more you shop, the more chances you have to win! Pick up a COVID test available from our customer eMed.   Composable Commerce Scavenger Hunt – Get to know our partners in a scavenger hunt by visiting their booths. Complete the hunt and get a prize! Participating vendors include Acquia, Myplanet, Algolia, Amplience, Bloomreach, and more. If you’re looking for less talk and more demo, stop by our booth on Monday and Tuesday for product demos and hear firsthand how we manage partner integrations. We’ll walk you through our product content management capabilities and you’ll see Composable Commerce in action with our partners Contentful and Algolia. Happy Hour On your first night in town, join us for an NCAA elite eight tournament viewing party at the Topgolf venue minutes from Mandalay Bay. Kick back with appetizers, drinks, and big screen TVs or show off your swing at a golf bay. You don’t need to be a pro to participate! Event Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss Each day of the show offers a full schedule of speakers and topics most relevant for today’s retailer. Choose from content tracks around merchandising, marketing, supply chain, packaging, and sustainability. Here are a few highlights to consider: Track 1: Groundbreaking Digital Experiences: Seizing the Livestreaming & Shoppable Video Opportunity – led by Coresight Research, YouTube, and Hot Topic. Livestreaming and shoppable video are two crucial and attainable opportunities to influence today’s shopper. Learn how to leverage both in this session to engage customers and drive conversions.   Track 2: The Regenerative Retailer – led by Whole Foods & RILA. It’s simply not enough for brands to say they are doing less to harm the environment. Today’s consumers want to know what you’re doing to elevate and protect natural resources and be a better steward to the planet.   Track 3: The Sophisticated Supply Chain: Operating a Global Business in Complex Times – led by Colgate-Palmolive, Chalhoub Group, Vera Bradley, and the Sourcing Journal. No surprise that supply chain felt the brunt of a global pandemic. In this session you’ll get a front row view of how top brands navigated these challenges and weathered the storm. And don’t forget to relax! After 10+ hours on your feet take the time to kick back on Tuesday and dress your best for the Whiteout Beach Concert, featuring Flo Rida. A Big Thanks to our Partners Where would we be without our partners? As advocates and practitioners of the Composable Commerce Movement, we’d like to thank all our partners for helping us spread the word. Without you we couldn’t develop and bring to life unique retail experiences for our customers. Together we are changing the face of eCommerce. The Composable Commerce approach provides flexibility, speed, and control as you launch eCommerce capabilities now and as you scale. But don’t take our word for it. Stop by our booth and hear the success stories from leading retailers who’ve embraced the concept. Let’s Talk Composable Commerce We’d love to meet you (or catch up) at this year’s event. Reach out if you’d like to meet up to find out more about Elastic Path and the Composable Commerce Movement.
    Topics: youll, win, join, event, stop, hear, shoptalk, elastic, commerce, composable, brands, retail, partners, path.
  • Shoptalk 2020: How to Get the Most Out of Your Conference Experience - Every year, 8,000+ retail thought leaders, educators, enthusiasts, and exhibitors descend upon the city of Las Vegas, NV. They’re marked…
    Topics: shoptalk, retail, brands, track, sure, attend, sessions, women, industry, marketing, keynotes, session.
  • Shoptalk 2022 Recap: What We Heard and Saw in Vegas - Shoptalk was back in 2022, a four-day event that's has been dubbed the 'biggest retail conference of the year.' Considering the years we all spent in various states of separation, getting back to in-person events was a welcome change of pace. It was full of long-overdue meetings between old friends and colleagues in the industry, a chance to make new connections, and be inspired by the passion, dedication, and ingenuity of the players in the industry.  Elastic Path was in the thick of it, even taking over the Vegas strip. On the show floor, we enjoyed hosting some fireside chats with our fabulous customers Serena & Lily, Pella, and Deckers Brands at our booth. Our customer Serena & Lily shared some of what they are looking to accomplish in creating new customer experiences online. “Part of the fun of design and our brand is putting together a room that feels very you. We want our website to replicate the experience in our design shops, where design advisors help customers through the design process. We don’t currently have that online, so we want to create experiences that allow for that. That is a future goal for us.” Check out the full live stream here   or see how Pella is looking at establish a new direct to consumer model. “As the consumer expectation is shifting and digital is becoming more influential on how a customer learns about our products and ultimately configures and purchases, we want to be on the forefront of that by being one of the first national windows & doors distributors to have that presence and own that space online." Keep an eye out for a few others coming soon. Beyond sharing the stories of our customers, we met and heard from a variety of brands, partners, and thought leaders in the commerce space. This post will run through some key takeaways and predictions about the future of retail that were making waves at Shoptalk 2022.  What We Heard on The Show Floor The excitement on the show floor was palpable. Brands shared their challenges and latest wins, vendors demoed their latest technology, and industry experts predicted the future. Let's dive into a few common themes we heard: Composable Commerce is Here The first was that the Composable Commerce Movement is now firmly established and is here to stay. Brands have recognized the benefits of this approach by leveraging best-of-breed solutions to quickly launch and optimize brand-centric experiences. Learn more about the Composable Commerce Movement here. It is no longer a question of when it will take over as the de-facto commerce approach. Instead, some of the brands still on older monolithic architecture (all-in-one solutions) were trying to get to grips with how they could break free of the restrictions and innovate with new experiences that their customers have come to expect.  Partner-First For Commerce Success The second theme was best-of-breed partners critical to a successful Composable Commerce approach to deliver innovative experiences. These partnerships were heavily represented in two ways, first from the presence of some of our partners like Vue Storefront, Bloomreach, and Amplience championing a headless Composable Commerce approach by showcasing the experiences they were instrumental in delivering.  Along with Elastic Path, we work with our partners are crucial in powering a complete solution, like our new Pre-Composed Solution™ to deliver best-of-breed merchandising & commerce experience management.  And secondly, exciting development backing a Composable Commerce approach was seeing the litany of new technology providers that fill essential gaps in existing commerce technology stacks.  From AI vision powered solutions to create product data to live streaming partners that will be a crucial new channel in the coming years for retail brands to deliver their messages and products in a seamless and frictionless way. I would be remiss not to mention the buzz around the possibilities the Metaverse offers. Though exciting, the consensus was that it was one for the three to five-year vision. Some brands like Forever 21 & Pacsun are already experimenting with NFTs for the Metaverse. Watch this space to see how the strategies shake out and where retail is headed in the Metaverse.  Brands Are Outgrowing Monolithic Solutions A third theme was hearing from numerous brands that they struggle with their existing commerce platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud. To highlight three common complaints: 1. Brands are suffering from complicated catalog management due to the restrictive design of these traditional solutions. If this sounds familiar, learn how Catalog Composer  can help alleviate those ailments with a faster, easier, and infinitely more flexible solution to a core commerce capability. 2. Another common complaint from brands on traditional commerce platforms was the fear of re-platforming. We often heard, "we just re-platformed; we're not ready to do it all over again yet." Thankfully, the answer is it's easier than ever to get started on a Composable Commerce journey. You can replace the pieces causing the most headaches first and follow that up with others at your own pace. We like to call this approach "progressive re-platforming," a solution to start using highly extensible modern technology so your brand can be ready for the rapid and seismic changes the retail space will see soon.  3. The third common complaint we heard was around speed. This problem is twofold, first is the speed of adoption of new channels and experiences. Slow innovation and adoption on traditional monolithic platforms apply to both established cases (like venturing into the B2B space, new geographies, etc.) and innovation with new channels like live-streaming and eventually even into the Metaverse. With a Composable Approach, adopting these new channels is significantly more accessible since new integrations can be delivered in weeks rather than running a complicated months-long project on a monolith.    Get hands on with an Elastic Path Free Trial Start building the commerce experience your unique business demands with a free Elastic Path Commerce Cloud account. Get in touch with us and we will setup a Free Trial store for you for six weeks. Sign up for a free trial The second aspect of the speed complaints is overall site speed. In traditional monolithic architecture, there are limits on the results from site speed optimizations that developers can hope to achieve. The limiting factor is often the monolithic architecture in itself. Fortunately, these performance limits do not exist with a Composable Commerce approach's decoupled architecture. To learn more about how site speed can impact your brand, check out our blog. Key Predictions About The Future Of Commerce Beyond the chatter on the floor, there were more general points of discussion on the future of retail.  1) Stores Are Back!  With much of the world emerging from the pandemic, brick-and-mortar stores are beginning to regain prominence. Some brands like Warby Parker, which started as an online-only glasses shop, now is seeing the positive impact of having physical stores. However, where these stores are delivering value is removed from traditional values like location and access to customers. An interesting theme emerged around the "influencer potential" that people in-store could have. By having store associates be a touchpoint to build the voice and identity of a brand, they can be an instrumental part of telling a brand’s story. Particularly as brand authenticity continues to gain momentum as a central pillar in positioning strategy as it resonates well with today's customers as gen Z becomes a more active part of the overall retail picture.    2) New Customers = New Expectations. Beyond the usual tropes of customers who "want it now," an exciting theme developed around delivering context-relevant solutions—for example, someone looking for a summer dress during the peaks of winter. A search like this signals the current mindset of that buyer. They are looking forward to the near future. Tomorrow's customers expect a buying journey that is relevant to that context and introduces complexity and nuance to strategies brands can adopt to provide such a buyer journey. Whether this spans multiple channels and touches, a Composable Commerce approach is well suited to solve for such complexity by empowering brands to incorporate best-of-breed personalization and content management system (CMS) vendors into their composed solution. 3) Customer Loyalty is Evolving. "Personalization is the new loyalty" was a phrase repeated in multiple sessions. What does that mean? Like the context-relevant buyer journey, providing a frictionless shopping experience relevant to an individual shopper is going to be a vital part of building customer loyalty. As customer expectations evolve, two points: personal relevance and brand authenticity, will be the key drivers of loyalty. As with most hot button issues in the commerce world, plenty of vendors offer personalization solutions that can be incorporated into your brand's Composable Commerce solution.  4) Investors are Focusing on Profits Again.  This new focus will be crucial to the success of any retail brand in the future. It is a significant shift away from recent years, where customer adoption was the main focus, and the high 'burn rates' fuel those adoption numbers being a side note. With profitability coming to the forefront, ensuring that your costs are manageable from an eCommerce perspective will be vital as brands endeavor to deliver customer-centric experiences into the future. Check out our Total Cost of Ownership guide to learn more about using a Composable Commerce approach can help reduce costs compared to traditional monolithic platforms.   Shoptalk was an exciting return to in-person events, packed with enthusiasm and innovative ideas. Is your brand ready for the future of retail?  Chat with us today to see how we can help your brand or see how our Pre-Composed Solutions™ can kick-start your Composable Commerce journey.
    Topics: retail, brands, commerce, recap, approach, experiences, future, customers, customer, brand, shoptalk, saw, composable, heard, vegas.
  • Shoptalk 2022: BigCommerce Joins the Year’s Biggest Retail Reunion - In late March 2022, more than 10,000 retail thought leaders, branded manufacturers, startups, investors, media and analysts descended into the…
    Topics: sessions, bigcommerce, speakers, retail, thrilled, team, learn, ecommerce, reunion, shoptalk, pdf, joins, biggest.
  • Shoptalk 2023 Recap: Key Trends and Learnings - Shoptalk is an annual tradeshow where thousands of retailers come together to discuss the latest trends, technology, and future of retail. Our team was thrilled to attend once again in Las Vegas this year- meeting partners, prospects, and clients to talk about the state of the retail industry and discuss their digital vision and initiatives for the upcoming year. In this blog, I’ll share some of the key trends and learnings from the showfloor. Brands Need More Education On Composable Commerce While the idea of Composable Commerce is becoming more prevalent in discussions  from prospects, partners, and sessions, the understanding of the general concepts of what it entails and the benefits for brands is still lacking. There is a general understanding of headless commerce, from sessions explaining the agility and flexibility to increase speed-to-market and lower TCO. However, there still needs to be more clarity in the market on the difference between headless and Composable Commerce.  In short, Composable Commerce builds upon a headless commerce architecture. We have a Composable Commerce Architecture Guide which explains the nuances and differentiation between the approaches. Get hands on with an Elastic Path Free Trial Start building the commerce experience your unique business demands with a free Elastic Path Commerce Cloud account. Get in touch with us and we will setup a Free Trial store for you for six weeks. Sign up for a free trial Omnichannel Experiences Are Shifting To Unified Commerce The idea of omnichannel experiences is nothing new for retailers. Today’s market requires the flexibility to reach customers across touchpoints and channels whether through mobile, in-person, or in-store. However, the conversation has now shifted from not just reaching the various touchpoints, but to creating a unified experience across channels. What does a unified customer experience look like? It’s more than just creating a seamless experience across touchpoints. It’s understanding the customers and creating experiences that align with their needs. This also looks like making a concerted effort to provide assistance through AI chatboxes and video on your brand’s websites and through mobile. There is a growing expectation for customers to be helped throughout the buying experience and those means are a notable strategy to assist with this.  In the more traditional omnichannel perspective, unified commerce also looks like providing platform support for social selling and curating personalized content that suits their needs. Agile Merchandising Strategies Must Be Implemented As we’ve seen over the last couple of years with a global pandemic, inflation, economic uncertainty and more, a merchandiser’s ability to pivot is a required skill to meet market changes.  Whether you’re weathering the changes between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic shopping patterns or dealing with cultural or socio-economic shifts for consumers, brands need to leverage flexible and agile merchandising strategies to make changes and iterate at speed. That starts with having a deep understanding of the customer through data and by utilizing a platform that will give you the best-in-class digital experiences. Elastic Path’s Show Presence Last but not least, the energy at Shoptalk was impeccable. Meeting hundreds of retailers and chatting it up about how we’re de-risking Composable Commerce for brands was exciting and purposeful. The first day of Shoptalk we announced Integrations Hub. Integrations Hub is a library of no-code, instant–on integrations that reduce the time and cost of implementations so you can get live faster and vastly reduce your TCO. This is a game-changer for some many brands who are concerned about the cost and work to manage a multi-vendor solution. We handle the hosting, management and monitoring. Integrations are enabled so quickly that we even held a competition at the booth challenging people to enable one of our integrations within 5 minutes or less. Our booth also featured our customer Vivrelle, a first-of-a-kind luxury membership club that gives customers the opportunity to borrow luxury handbags, jewelry and accessories. At the booth, we demonstrated how we power their membership business model and enable one-click checkout through our EP Payments solution. We even raffled off one of the Vivrelle luxury handbags to those who participated in our demo.   Overall, Shoptalk was one for the books with many lessons and valuable conversations. It was a great way to get excited about the future of retail. We’re looking forward to attending again in the future.
    Topics: understanding, customers, shoptalk, recap, free, commerce, experience, brands, composable, key, integrations, trends, learnings, unified.
  • Shoptalk: what to know before you go - Get Elastic combed through this year’s Shoptalk schedule to recommend where retailers and brands need to focus their attention.
    Topics: retailers, shoptalk, youre, consumer, day, retailer, retail, track, technology, meetings, know.