Event Wrap Up: Online Retailer 2010

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Online Retailer purports to bring together retailers, online marketers, entrepreneurs and e-commerce professionals to network, share best practices, develop new business

This years event encompassed a fairly broad spectrum covering all things e-commerce related. There was a decent mix of exhibitors in the main expo hall, including logistics and storage providers as well as the big banks touting their latest "e-commerce friendly" product ranges. The Ideas Theatre ran a series of free talks and seminars over the four day period with more in-depth discussions and workshops being held in the pay-to-access seminar rooms.

We talked to a number of companies at the expo and the general consensus was that they were generally happy with the four day expo. Given the depth of the eCommerce market in Australia, we think the turn out was pretty good. Of course the Australian market doesn't come close to that of the UK or the US but it is good to see that we are, at least trying, with more and more retailers and vendors providing web-based offerings. It would be good to see a little more innovation as nothing we saw seemed to be ground breaking or truly exemplary.

There are a few things however, worth mentioning:

• The Commonwealth Bank offer a basic eCommerce site builder called eVolve, allowing users to take advantage of a series of templates to setup a fairly straight forward eCommerce solution (which might be helpful if you have a limited budget).
• PayPal/eBay are now offering a range of solutions in the Asia Pacific region designed to make online payments easier.
• VeriSign has recently announced that it will be acquired by Symantec which (according to them) will add a few new value adds around their security technology.
• Google are offering a product called Commerce Search, a powerful search tool which takes advantage of the Google search technology and applies it to your eCommerce site. It's expensive though ~$25,000 a year, but if you are big enough (or have a large volume of transactions) then it may be worth your while.