By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

This week's conference kicked off with a great address by Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock.com. With the theme of "Rising Above - Not Just Surviving the Economic Storm" Patrick talked about life at Overstock, the history of his company, and how he predicted the economic downfall. You heard it right, he predicted the downfall and he has the evidence to prove it and you can read all about it at www.deepcapture.com. So besides his deep battle with Wall Street, he helped laid out some basic rules to follow on how to survive this storm. The two main take-a-ways I took from his talk:

• Control Expenses
• Outsource areas you are not GREAT at

What I find to be most interesting is that at a high level these two options would seem contradictory, but if you think about it they actually correlate very well. While controlling expenses can seem very broad and obvious to most - Patrick made it a point to talk specifically about expenses that effect your balance sheet (capital expenses, payroll, etc.). In a rough and tumble economy it is so important to conserve cash. A good way to conserve cash is to outsource technology that you are not GREAT at (hosting, infrastructure management, etc). Overall some great points, thanks Patrick.

Another great session today was in Track B and the theme was around handling and managing the web, as it continues to gain importance. The two speakers while focusing on different aspects of the web's importance drove home many good points.

Kevin Hillstrom, President, MineThatData focused mainly on asking the audience a series of multiple choice questions that focused on multichannel, social media, email campaigns and more. The questions and audience participation really helped to drive Kevin's point home that each individual business leverages the web in different ways, and that it is important to decide which is best for your company. A great example of this was when he asked about selling through last season's items - depending on if you were store based or catalog based there were two distinct answers. Catalog based companies preferred to direct market in an email showcasing the discounted products, while store-based sites preferred to create sales/outlet categories and market the site.

Lou Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer, Vitamin Shoppe the second presenter, focused on creating a united front across all channels. It was great that he was upfront and admitted that his company "got it." Meaning they understood and made it a priority to roll the direct business in with the stores to create a unified Vitamin Shoppe to their customers no matter what channel they shopped. He brought up a couple great ways to integrate the store channel with the direct channel, and the best part was that they had nothing to do with technology.

• Talk in retailer/catalog terms. Lou shared a story about how this related to Vitamin Shoppe. When he first took responsibility of the web store, he was jumping up and down about the number of products out of stock on the site - with no response or help from the organization. After spending time walking through the brick and mortar stores and realizing that when there were empty shelves in the store the CEO would say "looks like the store is going out of business." Lou took that to heart and started saying "looks like the web store is going out of business," and low and behold he received all the inventory that he could ever want. Good work Lou!
  
  
• The web <> ecommerce store. Help your direct business by talking about how power of the web as a whole - from a branding perspective to driving customers to the brick and mortar stores. For instance Lou and his team asked a simple survey for customers on the site... "What is your main purpose of visiting" and over 50% of the answers were "to locate a store." Amazing! One simple 1-question story can provide so much insight to the entire business.
  
  
• Look at results from a customer point of view not from individual sources. As a web channel we have a tendency to look at results from email performances, PPC performance, organic results, etc. Yet it is important to look at what customers actually purchased and make adjustments accordingly. For example fish oil products sold well today vs. vitamin C - start from this angle and work backwards to find the "why."
  
  

Overall these were two great areas of conversation that helped to open my eyes and think a bit outside the box.

I have only touched on two sessions of the dozens that happened at the show...stand by for more information to follow as it comes hot off the press.