Key takeaways from the 5th Ecommerce Growth Summit

Today I joined 270 industry professionals at The Eveleigh in Sydney, hosted by Evocative Media. The event was packed with invaluable insights, future strategies, and engaging panels.

My key highlights

🔥 Scaling eCommerce with VUSH and Billini Hosted by Isabella, the conversation with Liana and Kate explored topics such as balancing profit vs. revenue growth, consolidating online and offline data and strategies for growth via new store openings and loyalty programs in 2025.

💼 Growing for Good: Sustainability and innovation in retail with Boody, Convert Digital, and Incognito Art Show. Hosted by Tricia panelists discussed navigating global expansion, 2025 brand strategies (returns and refunds in focus) and managing peak and off-peak sale period transitioning.

📈 Acquire, Retain, Grow: Tried & Tested Strategies for Winning Customers and Keeping Them with The North Face, Outcast and I Love Linen. Hosted by Jess from Evocative Media and featuring Airi, Stephanie and Tyler. Thanks for all the Lexer shout-outs on this panel!

🤖 From Data to Action: Customer insights driving eCommerce strategy. I was thrilled to be part of this tech panel with experts from Style Arcade, Instant and Searchspring. Brogan, Tristan, Kate, Liam Millward and I covered merchandising with data, how to engage high value customers with a CDP, out of stock and overstock challenges and leveraging analytics for growth.

🌐 AI-Powered Marketing: Practical tools for retailers shared by Justin Kabbani 💪🧠 – lots of exciting practical tool ready for everyone to take back to the office and implement straight away!

Tech panel takeaways

Lexer  

So many retailers are still basing decisions on loose data or on a hunch. Bringing all your fragmented data into one place means you can make fact-based decisions. For example, identify your 1-time buyers, understand what they are likely to buy for a second purchase and push that data to a super targeted eDM or Meta campaign.

With BFCM around the corner, it’s important to identify which customers only ever buy during this sale period and suppress your full price customers out of these campaigns so as not to convert them to discount buyers. Also, spend some time after the sale period focusing on a strategy to nurture those customers acquired on BFCM.

Style Arcade 

You can't sell what you don't have, and having the right newness, categories, price points and sizes is essential to running a successful campaign. Collaboration between ecom, marketing, buying, and planning teams is required to align the three pillars of campaign, customer and product, and that starts by giving every team equal access to the same data.

The biggest gap in the industry at the moment is understanding lifetime value through the lens of product, and looking at the impact that buying and planning decisions have on customer loyalty. You don't need software to know that discount/markdown customers never become full-price customers, or that end-of-season swimwear customers aren't going to return any time soon - but being able to precisely quantify these impacts enables new customer-centric KPIs for buying and planning teams.

Instant

The key takeaway here is simple: increase revenue by identifying the shoppers visiting your website. The more retargeting emails you send, the more potential customers you bring back to convert. Focus on high-intent triggers like shoppers revisiting the same product or searching your site multiple times—especially as BFCM approaches. 

While brands continue to invest heavily in Facebook ads, Google ads, and social media campaigns, it’s often difficult to identify these shoppers. Instead of reducing spend on ads, the focus should be on converting these high-intent visitors into tangible revenue.

Searchspring

The landscape for search and merchandising has rapidly evolved over the past few years. Automated and scalable solutions that elevate the right products, to the right shopper, at the right time should now be table stakes. AI Search and Merchandising is now evolving into cutting-edge Generative Discovery. Now is the time for retailers to be delivering a dynamic shopping experience that learns, adapts and personalises each interaction to reduce search abandonment and increase conversions.

Data, data, data should be at the heart of everything. Brands should be fostering a culture of “test and learn” to continuously find incremental improvements on what is going to move the needle when it comes to improving performance, growing conversions and AOV’s. This starts at product title, product type and product image testing on digital channels like Google Shopping and Meta, and expands into AB testing strategies to optimise search, merchandising and personalisation interactions. The best performing brands have built a strong testing culture.

The event was a whirlwind of ideas, connections, and inspiration. Thanks to everyone who made it so memorable!