Last week the SalesWarp team returned from the Shop.org Summit, held in Seattle, Washington. With sunny, fall weather and multiple delicious meals at downtown restaurants, we all thoroughly enjoyed Shop.org’s 2014 location.

Day 1:

We spent Sunday (all day Sunday) building our booth for the expo hall. From our VP of Sales (see turning the wrench in the photo) to our VP of Marketing and CEO, this was truly a “team-building” event. If you haven’t seen us yet at other shows, this year has been all about SalesWarp bringing “Omni Channel Pain Relief” to each trade show we attend. Besides wearing doctor coats and giving away medicine bottles filled with M&M’s, we’ve been asking retailers to tell us what their pain points are around managing their operations.

After several hours spent Sunday constructing our 20×20 booth, we discovered that Sundays are great in Seattle – it was happy hour all day (at least at Dragonfish sushi restaurant right near the convention center), which was much appreciated after a long, hard day of work!

Day 2:

Monday afternoon kicked off the first day of Shop.org. Decked out in lab coats with pill bottles in hand, the Doctors of Omni Channel Pain Relief were ready to relieve any and all pains retailers were struggling with managing back-end retail operations. We encountered the eager – looking more to relieve their headache pain, the curious – unsure about the legality of what was inside our M&M pill bottles, and the struggling – those retailers who had real pains managing their retail operations.

From left to right: Jody Bruce, Sales Engineer. David Anderson, VP of Marketing. Phil Fiore, VP of Sales. David Potts, CEO. Janna Skinner, Marketing Development Manager.

In contrast to what we heard at the IRCE show in June, many retailers pains at Shop Summit 2014 revolved around product management. Retailers described their product data as being “a mess” after receiving product feeds from hundreds of suppliers in all different formats. Without a streamlined process for standardizing this data, retailers are spending hours cleaning up, standardizing, and authorizing product data to be used on various sales channels.

Another retailer expressed his concern around the scalability of his company’s current process for managing products. With a goal of adding 20K SKUs in 2015, the retailer was looking for a solution that will seamlessly scale with the company and automate product management processes to get products to market quickly.

In the third scenario, a retailer using an ERP system was experiencing the most pain trying to move product data from an ERP system to Magento. Since some ERPs are built to use their own hard-coded eCommerce system, there can be limitations that make getting product data to Magento and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay a real pain.

We also met with a number of online retailers, selling products and drop shipping across third-party online stores, such as Wayfair.com and Bluestembrands.com, as well as through their own channels, Amazon and eBay. As a drop shipper, these retailers need to source order files from different back-end systems used by the third-party retailers. Not only must these retailers retrieve all information around these orders in a streamlined fashion, but they also must fulfill, drop ship, and track all orders. This may require different pick tickets, packing slips, and communication for each order source. For these retailers, consolidated order management and flexible and automated order fulfillment would be the biggest pain relief… Next would be preparing product data in the format required for each third-party online store.

Lucky for these retailers, they stopped at the right booth. We were able to demonstrate multiple ways our solution can solve all of these pain points.

Day 3:

Tuesday was a great day for showing our product videos and meeting new prospects and partners. We gave away multiple prizes to retailers who shared their pains, and met with our partners from FitForCommerce. If you haven’t already heard, SalesWarp is a FitForCommerce Verified Order Management System!

Like at IRCE 2014, we launched 3 new product videos at Shop.org. Take a look at the new video about SalesWarp’s Warehouse Management features:

We attended the Shop.org event that night at the Experience Music Project Museum in downtown Seattle right below the Space Needle. What a way to learn about the Seattle music scene. Did you know Jimi Hendrix came from Seattle? And, check out the guitar tower! It was a very inspiring place.

Day 4:

On the last day of Shop.org, SalesWarp CEO & Founder David Potts was interviewed by Brazilian publisher, the Varejo Show. Can’t wait for our first show in Brazil!

Before the team parted ways, we had one last dinner together at Millers Guild. We decided on smokey tequila paired with a casual 64 oz. steak. It was fantastic!

Before

After

We are looking forward to meeting new faces in January at the NRF’s Retail BIG Show in New York City. See you there!