Our top takeaways from eTail Boston 2023

Retail Brew recently had the opportunity to attend eTail Boston, where the four-day conference featured many of the retail industry’s heavy hitters, up-and-comers, and even Boston Red Sox mascot Wally the Green Monster.

ETail is pitched as “the e-commerce and omnichannel conference,” and while those subjects were very much top of mind for attendees and speakers, the event covered much more and underscored many of the challenges facing retailers in 2023.

Here are some of our big takeaways:

Priorities are difficult to balance

The e-commerce retail market is increasingly competitive, and that makes it a challenge to balance things like profitability and growth. Sara Resnick, global head of organic growth and SEO at Shutterstock, said during a keynote panel that it’s valuable for retailers to have “North Star metrics”—a main set of figures that complement each other—to track their growth.

• She said those metrics, particularly in SEO, help the company navigate its priorities and achieve short-term goals in a way that’s realistic. “There’s different metrics for SEO and SEM or email marketing, but how do you kind of bring all of those together so they really complement each other really well?”

Resnick’s fellow panelist, Tony DiPaolo, VP of retail solutions at Manhattan Associates, categorized sustainable growth strategies into two buckets: market expansion strategies and market penetration strategies.

• He explained that omnichannel initiatives that address customer needs fall under market penetration strategies, which can come at odds with expansion strategies that seek to find new customers, such as opening new locations.

“[You have] an existing customer base and you’re thinking about how to enhance our customer experience, but [with] the ultimate goal of creating loyalty,” he said. “And so with market penetration strategies, when you’re addressing the customer experience, [it’s] really about identifying points of friction and addressing those specifically.”

Engagement is key

When people are shopping, they don’t just want to feel like they’re getting something out of the way and simply moving on to the next thing. They want to feel as if the retailer they’re buying from is just as invested, if not more invested, in their shopping journey.

Sue Beckett, SVP of digital marketing and e-commerce at Lovesac, explained during her own session on customer engagement how the company measures customer satisfaction across the business, including fulfillment, digital, and customer service.

• Beckett said since a couch is a purchase people make on an average once every seven years, it’s particularly important for Lovesac to understand how its customer wants their couch set up, what they’re looking to do in the future, and how they want their layout to look.
• And the proof is in the pudding: Lovesac reported a 21.7% YoY increase in sales in Q4, and CEO Shawn Nelson previously told Retail Brew that the company’s omnichannel approach that includes using showrooms to drive customers to complete purchases online helps bridge that gap for the customer.

“If someone’s coming to research us and get to know us better, how are we driving them into a showroom?” Beckett said at eTail. “Even our marketing dollars—a good portion of my digital spend—actually purposefully goes to driving people into a showroom.”

Scaling is a bigger challenge post-pandemic

The common business convention of “time is money” is not really true anymore in a post-pandemic retail landscape, and DTC companies don’t have a lot of time or resources to scale their operations, Matt Mueller, founder and CEO of menswear brand Knot Standard, said during his presentation.

Mueller highlighted a handful companies that raised $100 million or more prior to or early in the pandemic, such as Allbirds and Warby Parker, which helped them buy time as they scaled operations or improved their business models.

• Since before the pandemic, staffing costs have increased 15%–18%, supply costs are up 8.1%, shipping costs peaked at more than 500% in 2021, and the cost of returns increased 213%, he noted in his presentation.

Mueller, an investor himself, said that investors don’t have the confidence or vision for brands, and “if you listen to them and try everything you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

• But putting investors aside, Mueller said it’s important to understand the needs of clients who will ultimately say what they want most out of a retailer’s shopping experience.

“Listen to yourself. Don’t necessarily listen to everybody giving you all the figures of everything that’s already happened,” he said. “But most importantly, that’s really just listening to your clients.”