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Each year, thousands of eCommerce and retail folks shuffle through the EXPO halls and attend the panel discussions of the Shop.org Annual Summit, one of the best retail conventions of the year. With over 4,000 attendees, 2011 was possibly the biggest Summit to date. The content at Shop.org summit is always packed with great practical tips, advice and the opportunity to network with experts from different fields. You can see a summary of this year’s event, including many of the presentations here.

And after passing out around 500 mini-shopping carts to our booth visitors, watching over 350 people squeeze in to attend The Science of Shopping Cart Optimization panel, and handing over $1,000 for the recovery of our abandoned gold mini-shopping cart, there’s no doubt that it was a big event for us at SeeWhy!

For starters, our very own Charles Nicholls, founder and CSO, made top news on the Shop.org blog with new research on shopping cart abandonment he presented to a full house during The Science of Shopping Cart Optimization panel on Tuesday the 13th. The SeeWhy Conversion Academy research team analyzed more than 600,000 individuals and 250,000 transactions in the largest study of its kind. Charles said “We traditionally think of shopping cart abandonment as being a bad thing. We now know that this is not true. For many buyers, and for many types of purchases, it is an integral part of the buying process.”

You can click here to request an advance copy of the exclusive eBook: The Science of Shopping Cart Abandonment, featuring all the research presented during the panel.

At the Summit, Charles also shared information about how to design and build remarketing campaigns to address the two biggest reasons customers abandon in the first place: price and timing.

Charles was joined by Saks.com Director Andrew Balazs and Build.com VP Brandon Proctor discussing the shopping cart design process and importance of keeping the purchasing process easy.

Andrew presented how he had led a shopping cart optimization project, and the lessons learned from building a prototype.

Build.com is no stranger to shopping cart recovery: Brandon stated that the Build cart recovery campaign generated a 4065% increase in Revenue Per email compared with other campaigns. “Remarketing to shopping cart abandoners is the lowest hanging fruit for online retailers.”

You can down load the slides from Charles, Andre and Brandon’s session here.

And let’s not forget the abandoned shopping cart promotion! We sent folks on a 3-day hunt around the EXPO hall in search of ourabandoned gold mini-shopping cart. The prize — how does $1,000 sound? Well, congratulations to Carolyn Sandvick, Marketing Specialist at the Weyco Group, because that’s what she was rewarded for recovering our abandoned shopping cart.

Carolyn followed the promotion through our Twitter account @SeeWhyInc, and hashtag #RecoverTheSeeWhyGoldCart, both leading her on a wild goose chase, and to the booths of each of our integrated partners and cart promotion sponsors: BlueHornet, Demandware, Epsilon, Emailvision, ExactTarget, Experian Marketing Services, LivePerson, Responsys, and Silverpop, before finally catching up with the cart at [of course] our booth.

Thanks for participating, Carolyn! We hope you enjoy your prize.

And thank you to everyone else who helped out with the event — we’ll see you in Denver next year for the 2012 Shop.org Annual Summit!

Stacy Buchanan
Director of Marketing, SeeWhy