Interesting Insights and Lessons from IRCE 2017 Chicago

This year, we had an exciting and educational experience attending IRCE. We didn’t exhibit, which gave me plenty of time to walk the floor, attend sessions, and listen to the concerns and challenges facing the internet retailer community today. I returned with some fascinating takeaways, which I plan on discussing in more details in future posts.

As a team, we always have to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to how brands perform on Amazon. I thought these metrics in particular were key to understanding how important brand performance on the retail juggernaut is both now and into the future:

That second bubble, that recent research from Bloom revealed that over half of all product searches start on Amazon is important and revealing. When it comes to e-commerce, more and more data is showing that customers are bypassing search engines (namely Google) and going straight to Amazon to start their shopping journey..

As a fun aside, if you’re curious about which product category outperforms all others in the Amazon subscription market, the answer is diapers:

Lastly, for people who follow shopping trends closely, this metric will hardly surprise you. More and more people are shopping on mobile. According to this slide (with 2016 data from ComScore), 80 percent of all Amazon shoppers buy directly from mobile, with 43 percent of them buying exclusively with mobile:

This is a big uptick from only a few years ago. It means that you have to optimize everywhere: mobile and desktop, marketplaces and SEM. It’s a complex world out there and, as my team and I were reminded, it’s not getting any simpler any time soon for even the largest retailers on the web.

As a cloud-based platform, we already know the importance of cross-platform optimization. We also know exactly how to help brands perform on Amazon to increase conversions and market share.

Looking forward to continuing this conversation in our next posts. In the meantime, feel free to email me or contact us directly any time.

Here’s to an exciting 2017.

Alok Jain
Co-Founder and CEO
eZdia