I’m pleased to be able to announce my small involvement in an interesting new venture to support the development of eCommerce and ‘internet retailing’.
eCommerce is so interesting because it’s the point where marketing and engineering collide – with some vigour - and the challenge to businesses old and new is to align the many traditional skills (marketing, commercial, IT, logistics, buying, contact centres, fulfilment, outsourcing, procurement…) and capabilities in a way that’s relevant to the new, demanding internet customer. While there are many resources for the eCommerce professional they tend to fall into two camps: the online marketing folk (with great resources at e-consultancy, for example, NMA, Revolution, etc) or IT (where software capabilities and services still drive much of the eCommerce agenda).
Mark Pigou, founder of RetailEvents (a trade, conference/exhibition company, specialising in retail, but also branching into other areas – eg Blogging4business) has recognised the opportunity to bring the many professionals together and has created a conference called Internet Retailer. Building from this Mark is also planning to launch a tightly-integrated print magazine and an online service.
Having met Mark and talked through the ideas, I’ve agreed that I’ll be the ‘launch editor’ of the online service, writing a combination of news, analysis, interviews and features at www.internetretailer.info. I’ll be working on this until the conference in September and subject to growth we’ll probably bring on dedicated editorial resource from there. We’ll see, but for the meantime I’m really excited to get "IR" up and running and to tap into the interest and enthusiasm we’ve already received in the pre-launch discussions.
If you have any information you wish to give us please feel free to email editor a-t internetretailer.info with general comments, questions or story ideas (or ‘scoops’ of course!). Please use press@ for announcements and other release information. Embargoes respected, Chatham House rules understood, confidentiality is my middle name so I’m looking forward to hearing from people – the inboxes are up and running!
