Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

At NRF last week, StorefrontBacktalk did indeed moderate our panel on Merged Channel and it delivered a few surprises.

All of the promised panelists showed up—always a pleasant surprise—and we lucked out with landing a great last-minute end-user panelist, an E-Commerce chief from the Museum of Modern Art. (Any IT leader who wants to complain about the state of software today is always welcome on our panels!).

The panel included Google’s head of retail, John McAteer, Borders’ E-Commerce chief, Kevin Ertell, the corporate development VP at Bill Me Later, Mark Lavelle, Ursula Milan, an E-Commerce manager at the Museum of Modern Art, and the dean of the E-Commerce analytics corp, Jupiter Research’s Patti Freeman Evans.

Topics discussed—OK, argued—included the place of mobile in-store (panel wasn’t a huge fan of it), customer expectations, supply-chain and shared resource hurdles, inventory strategies, compensation options and kiosk tactics.

We recorded the session and turned it into a WebcastBuffet (a way to see text descriptions of all points made during the hour-long session, broken into categories, before you decide which points you’d like to hear) for those interested in browsing the discussion and listening to parts. If you want to listen to the entire discussion, there’s a link there as well for that.