eCommerce Leadership Dinner: What’s ‘front of mind’ for the eCommerce CEO today?

Tuesday 14 October 2014 marked Spectrum’s first eCommerce Leadership Dinner hosted in partnership with corporate finance firm Ardent Advisors.  An exclusive mix of CEOs, chairmen and investors from the European eCommerce community made for an animated, round table dinner discussion.  Key themes dominating the thinking of today’s eCommerce executive leadership emerged from the evening’s discussion:

  1. The critical importance of effective fulfilment as part of the overall customer experience
  2. The rapid emergence of click-and-collect as a significant enabler in ecommerce
  3.  Mobile enablement now an absolute pre requisite
  4. The need for multi-brand etailers to deliver a significantly enhanced buying experience than the brands do themselves
  5. The emergence of the physical store presence for what had previously been pure play internet retailers
  6. The importance of a curated product offering coupled with specialist content marketing to creating higher margins through exclusive brand partnerships
  7. The use of scale and volume to dominate and profit in otherwise competitive markets
  8. The importance of automated marketing techniques: geographic segmentation, the dynamic pricing of products, and dynamic bidding for digital advertising to extract higher margins

Spectrum and Ardent’s co-hosted eCommerce Leadership Dinners are a quarterly invitation-only forum for peer-level business, networking and strategic discussion.