[Event Recap] Insights and learnings from IRCE 2019, Chicago

Vinculum participated at Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE), one of the biggest eCommerce conferences in Chicago.

Date: 25-28 June 2019
Venue: McCormick Place South, Chicago

With over 130 sessions and 600 top technology solution providers, IRCE saw huge participation of brands, retailers, 3PLs and brand distributors from all over the world.

Vinculum’s Agenda at IRCE 2019

We saw a huge footfall at our booth #1405. Our agenda was to help brands, retailers, 3PLs, and brand distributors with:

• Bulk import of catalog, parsing it through a PIM platform and listing to multiple marketplaces
• Sell and manage orders, inventory, and fulfillment across multiple sales channels
• WMS to automate warehouses (In fact, we got featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WMS, 3 years in a row)
• Payment reconciliation with marketplaces to ensure right payments are received by the brands
• Modules to orchestrate real-time view of inventory and enable omnichannel for brands and retailers
• End-to-end cross border solution to bring brands in the US and outside

IRCE 2019 Review: Hottest Discussion Topics, Top Trends and Key Insights

IRCE’s agenda was intense and full of insightful sessions. Here are some of the hottest discussion topics, top trends and key insights.

The Future of Retail: Digital Retail Innovations

Staying on top of emerging trends and new innovations shaping our industry is essential to drive growth, achieve business goals and remain competitive. The latest innovations that created a lot of buzz at IRCE were:

• New search trends: Voice-controlled shopping assistants (voice search) and visual/AI-based search
• Contactless payments, use of digital currencies and blockchain technology to reduce payment frauds
• Virtual try-on design: Using augmented reality for a confident customer purchase
• Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) in warehouses to manage inventory
• AI-powered chatbots for customer service operations
• Rise of merchandise-free stores

Omnichannel Pursuits: Bridging Bricks and Clicks

Today, customers don’t care about “omnichannel”. They just want a seamless and unified experience that meets their needs. And, to provide that, organizations need to:

• Use customer journey mapping to design differentiated experiences across all customer-facing channels
• Streamline backend technology and processes for friction-free omnichannel engagement
• Build cross-functional innovation teams to minimize conflicting goals and execute an omnichannel strategy
• Use intelligence to analyze customer feedback and set up processes to improve customer experience at all the touchpoints

Supply Chain Management: How to Gain a Competitive Advantage

A streamlined and robust supply chain can help a retailer gain competitive advantage. Here are some of the trends and disrupting retail innovations in supply chain management:

• Leveraging real-time inventory status for delivering customer orders on time
• Collaborating with local online delivery services especially for returns management
• Use of drones to automate and speed up local last-mile order fulfillment
• Warehouse automation to reduce manual errors in managing inventory

Selling on Marketplaces

Many workshops at IRCE and the visitors we met brought up the importance of selling on marketplaces and the challenges that they face while opting for this channel. Our key findings are:

• The largest category for sales online is apparel—27% of apparel sold in the U.S. is sold online
• Large online retailers now launch their own marketplace as a new stream of revenue and collect commissions when they facilitate a sale
• Retailers have started using catalog listings tools (CMS) not just for marketplaces and webshops, but for ad platforms including Google, Facebook and Amazon
• There is an increase in the use of PIM solutions to obtain consistent product information on marketplaces to increase accuracy and remove redundancy

In Summary

The energy at IRCE was incredible. It was great to network with industry peers and make new connections.

We saw an ever rising demand for tech products in retail and eCommerce ecosystem. Digital marketing tools, shipping and fulfillment solutions, cross border services, global payment enablement, and what not!

Regardless of whether or not you attended IRCE this year, we would love to hear from you – especially if you can relate to any of the above topics/challenges.

Make a direct business enquiry. Or, just comment your questions below and we’ll get back to you.