Before going to eTail East which was this week in DC, we at Baynote were a little concerned that attendance would be down given the economy and the high cost of travel.  Attendance was only slightly down from last year and the enthusiasm was high for both pure-play eTailers as well as with the online people for brick and mortar retailers.

During the Advanced Search Forum, when asked if there were any activities they were doing in 2008 that they intended to scale back in 2009, there was silence.  It seemed that everyone there was still doing anything they could to improve the customer experience and get the right message to the right person. I canvased several people privately and asked them if their high level goals were changing - few described any sort of retrenching, some said efficiency and automation were becoming more important.  The idea of putting the collective intelligence of site visitors to work, as Jack Jia has described it “let the mob run the store”, seemed to make sense to everyone.  It appealed to those trying to do more with less as well as those trying to bring the right social technologies to play on their sites.

Interestingly blogs themselves are still up for grabs regarding how and when and why they should be used.  Barbara Mousigian of CDW commented in the session on Customer Experience, that people were frequently distracted by blogs as the latest shiny object to add to their site.

I asked our CEO Jack what his biggest take-away was from eTail.  He said that businesses still haven’t figured how to create a connection with customers the way business could when mom & pop stores dominated.  They put so-called experts in charge…marketers and merchandizers in the world of eCommerce.  But this isn’t the same and the gap is still great.  Shopping on the web is still, in its essence, a lonely experience.  But what was cool at eTail, was people acknowledged the gap and were actively looking to fill it….not haphazardly with the latest shiny object but with the best practices and technologies already proving themselves in the marketplace.