Friday, June 9, 2017

IRCE 2017 Exhibit Floor Takeaways

In addition to the wonderfully colorful plastic sunglasses, fidget spinners, and rubber duckies, what did we take away from this year's installment of endless vendors discussing their new fangled offerings, add-ons, systems and services?
From a big headed turban wielding genius touting his new BI tool, complexly labeled "Octo Pi" to the 3 cardboard box on demand systems (too-large to bring along this time), to Optimove trying to convince me join their reseller program and visit Tel Aviv next year for the annual User's Group meeting, my head was spinning. One software vendor was passing out music CDROMs of their favorite songstress this year. I don't always pose for simulated action photos with risqué Latin dancers while discussing and considering updating my tax compliance website plugins. Meanwhile two vendors offered a simple system whereby you add a line of code and your website supports on-line chat, operated simply through SMS texting, and playfully leapfrogged each other on pricing.

As usual the endless supply of SEO vendors still held the majority in my opinion. I remember most based on the gimmick they go by. One served up thick and crunchy bacon (around the clock this year). Down the aisle, while another prepared me a double expresso at a booth-sponsored coffee bar, and only 4 or 5 minutes in to speaking with me, I jumped the gun to clarify, "are you a $1000 a month vendor, a $10K/month, or are you only looking for $20k and up per month?".  Most of these vendors require huge marketing budgets, but usually they wait until the end to say, so let's save us both a some precious exhibit floor time and see if there's a budget match sooner rather than later.  Heck, lets do that with all of these vendors -- a symbol or secret handshake vs. fist pump indicating the starting price point.

Now that I think about it, lets go a step further. A symbol on each booth to indicate what the vendor primarily does--Software? Warehouse equipment? SEO Services? On-line shopping cart platform? Website Add-Ons? Analytics?  Of course most vendors say "but I am special, I don't fit into any of those categories" when actually do have a first-and-foremost category, and possibly a secondary category or two.  So a few symbols after their name or booth number could suffice.
IRCE tried before to group all the vendors by what they do, and so we know that does not work.  There is nothing worse than standing across from your fiercest competitors for 3 days straight, and seeing the crowd at their booth (or them watching yours).  Better that each vendor only imagines that all the people must be in another aisle where the grass is greener.
My favorite exhibit this year was a simple poly bagging machine, which let you easily pack and ship drugs or beauty samples into poly bags, pre-labeled ready to ship, and sealed at the touch of your foot after you drop in the product.  Smack dab in the middle of the floor, it sat there like Bilbo Baggins, and when I studied it there was not even a soul in the booth to answer my questions. Now obviously the ProMat show probably has several variations of these, but at IRCE it stood out nicely.  I also thought Shopify did a much better job this year, having a windowed booth with snow machines shooting into the air from high above, rather than that esoteric big black box booth last year, that nobody felt comfortable talking about, before or even after venturing inside.

Now I just have to get through a few months of sales calls from vendors reaching out to me to discuss their results from analyzing my client's web store that I am already working on replacing, and hopefully getting a few calls from vendors I do want to talk to, but I won't clearly know one from the next yet, until they remind me of the gizmo they dropped into my bag as we briefly talked.
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