At the Shop.org conference in Orlando, I had the opportunity to hear keynote speaker Bob Myers, senior vice president of QVC.com. Today, QVC is one of the largest retailers in the world, with net sales for the fiscal year averaging $7 billion.

The company introduces over 1500 products every week: two of its brand leaders are Dell and Bare Essentials. Through the Internet, Myers has helped make those companies’ products successful. In his keynote speech, he spoke about how he made the QVC Web site a crucial part of the company’s overall success.

The QVC model, perfected by Myers, has become one of the most talked-about methods to use in e-commerce. Myers’ model includes polished video clips, which give visitors the ability to watch entire shows that they missed on air. The combination of photographs, customer comments, and video is the mixture that has created so much success for QVC.com.

As a result, QVC has started a trend of adding streaming video to help customers visually see what they are going to buy. Through this technology, the company’s conversion rate has gone up significantly and its Web site now accounts for about 1/7 of total net sales. QVC knows that streaming video has helped its customers connect to the products that they are interested in buying.

Seeing Bob Myers’ keynote speech really got me thinking about how fast Internet technology is growing and how big of a role e-commerce plays in the future of retail. With the ease of watching everything online, e-commerce is the wave of the future.

Retail Management Institute - Santa Clara University
rmi.scu.edu