What we learned at the London eCommerce Summit

We recently sponsored the London eCommerce Summit hosted by Retail Summits. It was a great event with insightful discussions, networking opportunities, and industry experts sharing their knowledge and experiences.

We learned much about eCommerce's current trends, challenges, and opportunities - and we're sharing them with you here - look!

Here are our key takeaways

Test and learn, test and learn, test and learn

One of the most emphasized concepts during the summit was the importance of test and learn. The value cannot be overstated. But here we are trying to overstate it. Consider it overstated.

Not every initiative will succeed on the first try, and the key to success often lies in rapid experimentation, measurement, and adjustment.

By continually testing different aspects of your online presence, eCommerce brands can optimize user experience, improve conversion rates, and stay ahead.

This goes for all channels, including onsite offers and promotions.

The impact of big changes vs. small changes

A key point around testing was that small changes only make small improvements, while big changes can make big improvements.

You can make small and big changes when testing and optimizing offers, ads, emails, or whatever. It's easy to get stuck on the small changes in the style of the marginal gains approach. But these changes will only ever have a small impact on your results.

An example of a small change is adding urgency to your offer copy:

"Get 10% off if you checkout today"

vs.

"Get 10% off if you checkout right now!"

An example of a big change could be trying a discount vs. a free gift:

"Get 20% off your first order"

vs.

"Get a free fragrance sample pack with your first order"

Regular testing of small changes is important and should be systematic.

Testing big changes can have a much higher impact, and it should be part of your plan to improve your performance over the year.

Different geographies mean operational and cultural differences

There are obvious things you need to think about when entering new markets:

• selling rules and regulations
• data protection and consent legislation and guidelines
• distribution challenges

However, cultural nuances exist in different regions and countries. What works to drive sales in one place might not work in another.

Getting local expertise is vital to make sure you understand each market.

Again, it comes back to testing what works and building a corpus of knowledge for each geography. There are generally bigger differences between countries than between channels.

Be specific about the problems you need to solve

It's easy to admire other retailers' big, expensive programs and think, "If only we could do something like that." But is that really what you need?

Do you need a big, elaborate loyalty program, or do you need to target promotions to improve conversions from first to second purchase?

Where are your biggest abandonment rates in your funnel? What do you need to do to reduce them?

Some simple conversion principles solve a lot of the issues retailers have.

AI can help you - but you need to know how

We hosted the AI panel, and there has been some great back-and-forth about its value so far. It became clear that it can accelerate progress in some areas, but you need to know what those areas are.

The clearest use cases were:

• generating ideas for test and learn
• translating product descriptions for internationalization (but they'll need checking!)
• creating first copy drafts