Lauren Freedman is CEO of www.e-tailing.com. Lauren is all about shopping. For example, she can’t live without puddle boots from L.L. Bean. She has worked on over 500 e-commerce projects, and most of them are large projects. She talks about e-commerce trends. She has a merchandising background and she knows how to market to women. She gives the real bio and not her written bio. She says that the excitement back in 1996 was in the creation and innovation of the new projects. Now in 2007 is a time of refinement, let’s do a site audit. Some people are just starting over again and we have come full circle.

Lauren will give an industry perspective that very few people have. She is an industry insider and has her pulse on the e-commerce industry as well as anyone since 1994. Lauren always talks about starting every project by knowing your customer. She talks about “easy reorder,” in the Staples.com and OfficeMax projects and how they design their sites for their client needs.

It is easy to drive unqualified traffic and it can get very expensive. It is more important to convert the existing customers. It is all about the brand for some of the larger players.

Lauren works closely with www.shop.org and has developed the merchandising program, Multichannel Merchant, Loyalty Lab, the www.DMA.org.

She says that shop.org purpose to bring together e-commerce players. The associations face challenges when people were willing to share less and less information as it gotten more competitive. People are more cautious since they are worried about the Wal-Mart knock off effect.

Lauren is in her 9th year of her www.etailing.com “mystery shopping study,” she buys from merchants and returns all the products then rates them. She says that less than 10% of the Google Check Out ecommerce engine is in the marketplace and it is growing. Billmelater and Deferred Payment Plans have a much greater market penetration.

We talk about women. Women want time savings and convenience over price. They are busy and stressed. They want good value. Time and convenience are paramount over price. Lauren gave a perfect example of how she went to Nordstrom’s and fitted a shoe for her daughter. Nordstrom is currently at $500,000,000 million online. And they are looking to make that a double in the next 3-5 years. Lauren says that women buy 70% + of buying products.

Lauren gives away a few very good nuggets in this call especially when we go into the thank you pages and the order confirmation and shipping pages. Lauren is a HOT ticket and her business card is a die cut sale tag. Lauren lives and breathes shopping, I’m happy I’m not paying her shopping bills! Enjoy this podcast..