A Day @ Ecommerce Expo in London (Olympia)

I spent most of yesterday at the Ecommerce Expo here in London. I was here in London for business in any case and it was a good coincidence that the expo was here at the same time and was only a 15 minute walk from the Millennium & Copthorne office in Kensington.

First thoughts was that it was a small show. Olympia seems to be quite a large venue and we got slightly lost because signage was not very good. We initially went to the wrong hall - as did other people so we did not feel so stupid. (Note to EC&O who runs this exhibition venue, you need to get on search engine marketing - big time. The site is alright - once you find it. And you need a good domain like olympiavenues.co.uk rather than eco.co.uk.)

Anyhow, despite being a "small" show, there was a lot of buzz in the air. The companies there were mostly relevant and you had the anchor exhibitors like Google (huge booth plus the Google Academy "classroom" downstair which was 4 times the size of their booth).

So what did I find interesting to me?

WebCredible - With the recent website relaunch, I would love to run some usability test to compare with the EyeTracking studies we did last year. They seem like a good outfit. Asked them to meet me on Friday as I was leaving that evening. Let's see what happens.

Gomez - Gomez's describes themselves as "a leading provider of on-demand web application experience management solutions, helping the world's top businesses ensure quality web experiences for their customers". Yada yada yada... cutting through the clutter: "Internet performance monitoring service". I had been thinking about using a service like Gomez to monitor my site's performance from the end-user's perspective. Akamai had recommended them as a 3rd party independent monitoring service, and it had been in the back of my mind to call them up. But hey, they were here and did a decent demo. Please call me.

Omniture - OK so we already use them. I have been seeing on my Omniture Dashboard about TouchClarity product and wanted to find out more. Interesting stuff actually. Using information from their tags to tell our servers to deliver targeted content. So it can be simple like providing specific promotions to people coming from specific geographic locations. Or, in theory, marrying that with your CRM to provide personalized customer visits. Anyhow, for M & C, it probably at least 2009 stuff.

SEO Junkies - I had a call from these guys a few weeks ago so did prearrange to meet them. They focus solely on search engine optimization - no pay-per-click, no advertising, no creative. (though their parent company Advantys does some of this agency stuff.). It's a good strategy since SEO is so paramount to eCommerce strategies and is the neglected in favor of PPC. And yes, there are tons of companies offering to optimize PPC campaigns. I stayed away from those (and.. oh.. yeah.. by the way, these PPC optimizer also do SEO on the side... yeah right).

Google - of course I have to pay homage to Google. They shouted a lot about Google Checkout and how "Sellers get free processing on all orders in 2007". There is also a plan in place where for every dollar you spend on Adsense you get ten dollars of free processing value. Something like that. I asked about Google Checkout for my hotels since I am looking at a prepayment product. Alas, Google CheckOut does not service the travel sector as a policy. They are getting a lot of requests.. something like half of their requests are from the Travel sector, but the company policy right now is no travel. Don't know exactly why. Is there a lot of fraud? Is it the "mail order" merchant thing?

There are many free seminar, but they are mostly pitches for the companies that are presenting. That's actually fine, but of the 4 seminars I attended, only 1 was worth the time. It's alright to sell your product, but the delivery and the pitch could be a lot more engaging. I won't mention any names.

It's a two-day event, but one day was enough. We all have work to do!

Joe... Out.