I was impressed with the traffic at the IRCE 2009 show this week in Boston, especially with the vendor turn out. There had to be over 300 vendors here pushing all kinds of eCommerce technology and products with enthusiasm. The eCommerce platforms were out in force with companies such as Zoovy, Broadvision, CommerceV3, GSI, Magento, Novator, Truition, Venda and VCommerce each with a significant booth presence.
In addition, a long list of payment processing firms such as JetPay, 2000Charge, Instabill, PlanetPayment, eBillMe, Verisign, Merchant E-Solutions, Fidelity Payment, DataCash, Check Paymentech, CheckGateway, RBS Worldpay, Trialpay, and Revolution Money (whew!) represent a partial list (apparently business must be good in that niche with transaction skimming models.) Ad analytics companies, fraud detection products, SEO firms, shipping logistics providers, and branding/creative firms were also prevalent. Heavyweights such as Yahoo, Google, Paypal, and Microsoft (showing off their new Bing search engine) also had a significant presence here.
While $200 is a bit steep to walk the floor (and without access to the keynotes), it was good to see all of the innovation still occurring in the eCommerce world, as well as a chance to talk to some of our partners and customers such as ClearSaleing, TicketNetwork, Telesign, and Zoovy. Floor traffic was heavy at times and light at others, and the general feeling I got from the vendors ranged from so-so to happy.
About 30% of StrikeIron's business comes from eCommerce implementations including address verification for shipping, sales tax rates, identity verification, SMS and IVR notifications, business demographics for customer profiling, and live currency rates all get integrated as part of optimizing eCommerce transactions from companies large and small. This enables our customers to focus more on selling their products rather than worrying about technology infrastructure and data maintenance and updates. So the IRCE event is an important one for us to be a part of and keep tabs on. I'll likely plan for next year as well.
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