Imagine Commerce is the premier Magento and eBay Enterprise commerce conference.  It’s always an informative event and it stayed true to form this year. Over 2,400 commerce experts came together in Las Vegas representing merchants, agencies and technology providers across more than 40 countries to network, exchange ideas and build relationships.   Themes throughout the keynotes centered around shrinking the distance to your customers.   That is, gaining insights into customer behavior through touch points in business processes such as multichannel inventory management.

The theme of this year’s event was ‘Unbound Commerce’ – to explore the unlimited possibilities of commerce. “We’re past the inflection point. We no longer need to be afraid of change…We can be unbound.” – Mark Lavelle, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Commerce Technologies, eBay Enterprise

Reimagining retail was the underlying message behind the case study of Rebecca Minkoff, a trendy New York City-based retailer specializing in luxury handbags, accessories, footwear and apparel.  Emily Culp, Senior Vice President of eCommerce and Multichannel Retailing for Rebecca Minkoff, described their development of a responsive design site which integrates with their store.  They changed their  store layout based on consumer feedback and behavior.  In essence, the consumer decides their preference for the level of service they wish to receive.  They’re using technology to remove customer pain points. For example, a customer in a fitting room can request another size electronically from the room.

Alex Cranmer, Vice President for International Military Antiques, Inc. described their effective use of resources and intelligent onsite search which learns over time. Search results based on customer behavior  feed a recommendation engine to automatically recommend products based upon preferences.

Retail cloud based order management was the watchword for the essential component of an effective and growing retailer’s toolset. To learn more, read Commerce Unbound: 5 Takeaways from Imagine Commerce 2015