A lot of the presenters at the eTail East show I attended in Boston last week echoed much of what our most recent eCommerce benchmarks have revealed. On the challenges side of things, retailers were in complete concurrence: consumers’ desires and behaviors across the myriad channels available to them are evolving at a furious rate, and as of today, they are hard-pressed just to keep up. It’s not an enviable position in which to be.

But throughout the sessions, I was encouraged to hear many of the prescriptive recommendations we’ve made at the end of our recent reports, our BOOTstrap recommendations, being put into play. My favorite of which were those that enlisted new technologies to embody an emerging sense of community: using new technologies to not merely “shout ” the same old marketing messages at consumers, but by using them in to facilitate an integral two-way dialog designed to better educate BOTH parties -consumers and retailers alike. Allow me to give an example.

Kelly Cook, SVP of Marketing at DSW, took part in both a panel discussion, and a bit later in the day, her own 35 minute keynote. Within her solo presentation, she featured a lot of video of user-generated content – ways in which the consumer had educated not only fellow shoppers via YouTube product reviews (one such fashionista reviewer had more than 40,000 hits), but also ways in which the consumer has educated the company. In one case, a consumer had a terrible customer experience, posted it online, and within 48 hours had received thousands of views. Because DSW has the necessary infrastructure to monitor their online community, they were able to contact the consumer, make her whole, and due to their rapid and satisfactory response, she voluntarily removed the video before any further brand damage could occur. They never even asked her to.

Here’s the thing: It is innate human behavior for customers to form community around your offering. And it’s great that many retailers are capitalizing upon the existence of these communities, using them as a new opportunity to push out their messages and promotions. However, as we as so often point out, a retailer’s presence in a community is made only that much more effective if it has the ability to listen – and react – as well as promote. It begs the question – Would your brand have been able to know of such an issue and react as quickly? If not, doesn’t that defeat much of the purpose of social commerce?

Cook also talked about using vital shelf space in store “runways ” to feature community-based online content for consumers, opening up the dialog further. And when the company recently opened its Manhattan location on 34^th street, it did something remarkably simple: one random customer received a free pair of shoes every day for the first 34 days the store was open. DSW had more than 1.5 million people on Facebook talking about this promotion – all for about $1500 worth of product cost.

Lisa Kranc (SVP Marketing Customer Satisfaction at AutoZone) had not only a role we recommend every retailer fulfill – that of a single executive tasked with the overall customer experience – but during her portions of a panel discussion, spoke with authority on the importance of keeping the consumer in the center of every cross-channel initiative. Based on their demographic, AutoZone’s overall marketing strategy still relies heavily on such traditional media outlets as radio and television. But when asked how to co-ordinate across all the channels in play, her response was perfect: “If you’re focused on being all about the consumer, it is impossible to get lost. Then your task becomes purely about measuring it. “

Another common theme I heard involved another of our recommendations, the growing need to align the IT organization with the brand promise more closely as channels disappear. During her panel time, Cook implored retailers to “do the unsexy stuff first ” regarding organizational structures, and Phillip Thomson, VP of eCommerce at Fossil devoted much of his presentation, “The eCommerce Channel is Dead in 10 Years ” to the very notion that in most retail organizations, eCommerce currently reports up the wrong person, and is in no position to fulfill the brand’s true mission.

What I didn’t hear a lot about was one of our primary suggestions in last year’s report: the value of examining the eCommerce platform as the basis for all, newly-converged channels. For now at least, that suggestion looms large: “Converging the digital channels onto the eCommerce platform is one way to balance… two somewhat opposing ideals – giving retailers the best opportunity to both provide a differentiated experience, and make sure that this experience translates into purchases…. Recent RSR benchmark reports have called upon the store as being in desperate need of more mobile technologies – both consumer and employee facing. In many ways, mobile represents the only viable hope of equalizing the consumer/retailer in-store relationship, currently off-axis in favor of the customer in every way imaginable. But with 34% of retailers in pilot and another 38% budgeting or planning to make the eCommerce platform the driving engine of not only the store customer experience, but also that of the entire digital customer experience, eCommerce platform providers are looking at a potential groundswell of new activity. “

But we have new eCommerce research coming out, and based on retailers’ honest, in-the-trenches input, we’ll have new recommendations to make this year. And we can only hope they’ll be as publicly validated as previous years’. The survey launches this coming Friday, and we’ll be sure to send out a reminder when it’s ready. We hope you’ll share your experiences!