Recap of IRCE: It’s All About Shopability

The energy at IRCE this year was amazing. We had great conversations every day with retailers about how they can leverage IP geolocation technology to enhance their online-and offline-marketing initiatives.

To sum up a key focus area for the coming year in two words…Improve shopability.

It’s all about improving the condition of an online store to make it easy for a customer to locate and purchase products – even for the most novice consumer.

With social media taking the Internet by storm during the last year or so, many retailers found themselves losing focus on the two key ingredients of successful e-tailing: usability and functionality of their websites.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is an excellent avenue to build interest in products and promotions, but everything eventually comes back to the foundation of any etailing venture: your website.

The retailers we spoke with were excited about how our NetAcuity technology can help improve the shopability of their sites, helping to create a more engaging customer experience and making it easier for consumers to find and buy location-relevant products. They were especially impressed with our ability help improve shopability offline as well. As an example, Ace Hardware has used our technology for its online store locator (My Local Ace) and has experienced a 30 to 40 percent increase in foot traffic to its brick-and-mortar franchise locations.

Additionally, retailers are finally seeing the value of hyperlocal geotargeting and realize how essential data accuracy is down to a postcode and/or ZIP code level.

All in all, a very successful show. The feedback from customers and attendees only reconfirms what we’ve been saying for years: Location matters!