Semantic Web/ e-commerce/SEO networking lunch - post GS1 e-commerce workshop

Networking lunch meeting for meetup members - post GS1 e-commerce training workshop,

Location: TBD the workshop, but Near the training session

The e-commerce Training Workshop itself will illustrate how you can:

- Grow your business

- Reduce your costs

- Deliver a better search experience to your customers/clients

- Improve and enrich your product information across all channels

- Optimize inventory visibility and fulfillment

- Provide smarter analytics to improve relevant user engagement and insights

- Sell safer products and gain consumer trust

- Make your ads richer and easier for users to find

All by leveraging and understanding GS1 standards (and how they are used online). For those of you who have not previously heard of the organization, here are some interesting facts:

GS1 is the organization behind the GTIN or Global Trade Item Number (better known in the U.S. as a UPC), and responsible for creating, encoding and issuing/licensing the number behind the barcode.

- GS1 has 110+ Member Organizations around the world, which support deployments in 150 countries

- More than 2 million companies globally utilize GS1 standards

- More that 5 billion GS1 barcodes are scanned globally per day ( https://goo.gl/NKhZDB) . That is/was more than the total number of Google searches per day up to 2015 and 2016. As per the numbers in this article , https://goo.gl/qSRCJP the number of current Google searches per day may now have reached that)

- GS1 US, facilitates over 300,000 businesses in the US with the adoption and use of GS1 standards, and is the pioneer of the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.) and the Electronic Product Code (EPC®).

o Macy’s just announced (http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?15081) that all of their products will be RFID enabled in 2017: https://goo.gl/VgIY5Z

- The GS1 Web vocabulary ( http://www.gs1.org/gs1-web-vocabulary) is the first formally accepted schema.org External Extension! – the second release is imminent. This has been a component of GS1's SmartSearch initiative, which has involved GS1 working closely with the schema.org community (at W3C and Github), creating a Web-based structured data vocabulary that extends schema.org to support richer product data descriptions.

GS1 Identifiers (GTINs / UPCs, are the connective tissue that helps align physical products with the digital data about them, which is part of the reason that many of the major online search, social and shopping destinations leverage this information/data. It’s also why companies such as Amazon: ( https://goo.gl/FjXKVh) , eBay: https://goo.gl/lfl9gx , Google: https://goo.gl/3A2dj , Rakuten: https://goo.gl/18GJij and others of their ilk have all implemented some rather stringent form of GTIN requirements. However, they also clearly state the benefits to the seller of doing so, while simultaneously stipulating the conditions of the mandate.

An article, just recently published in Internet Retailer, illustrates just how pertinent these numbers are today, and ESPECIALLY so in online commerce today: https://goo.gl/PVaqHd

To gain a better understanding of how to leverage all of this, and of the processes and rules that lie behind this all, make sure to sign up for one of the following GS1 workshops:

- San Diego Workshop, Nov 15, Downtown Hilton, San Diego: https://goo.gl/hUccHb

- San Jose Workshop, Nov 16, Hilton San Jose, https://goo.gl/BsUgBk

Additional informative and helpful information on the topic has been posted by + Bill Slawski (https://plus.google.com/u/0/106515636986325493284) – at these web addresses: https://goo.gl/xHRJJ0 & https://goo.gl/LY4zfA