Recommendations help drive 27.9% holiday sales growth at John Lewis
John Lewis says the new personalised recommendation tool on its website was a key factor in driving a 27.9% increase in sales over Christmas.
The tool, created by RichRelevance, provides customers with recommendations on fashion items by analysing shopping behaviour alongside the relationships between products and product categories.
John Lewis attributes growth to 47% surge in online sales
John Lewis sales rose 11.4% this week compared to the same week in 2010, which it attributes to tremendous growth online.
The British retailer’s website saw 47% increase in sales for the week to January 21.
Argos jumps on the QR code bandwagon with pop-up shop
Argos is the latest retailer to open a QR code pop-up shop in the run-up to Christmas.
In a move similar to the eBay store near Oxford Street and John Lewis' virtual shop window in Brighton, customers will be able to scan the code of a selected item on their smartphone and will then be sent to Argos’ online checkout.
There will be 75 Christmas gift ideas on display at Paddington today and Friday, and then in Waterloo on Wednesday and Thursday.
John Lewis opens virtual QR store
John Lewis has joined the growing list of retailers trialling QR codes with the launch of a virtual shop in Brighton.
All of the retailer's ‘top 30 things to buy for Christmas’ are included in a window display at a branch of Waitrose.
John Lewis launches mobile commerce site
Today sees the launch of John Lewis's first foray into mobile commerce, with the retailer opting for a mobile website rather than a smartphone app.
John Lewis currently gets 100,000 visits every week from mobile users, and is hoping that a better user experience will convert more of these visitors into buyers. I've been trying the new site out...
Q&A: Jonathon Brown, Head of Online at John Lewis
Jonathon Brown is Head of Online at John Lewis, and has played a key role in integrating the website with the rest of the company's operations, as part of its multichannel approach to retail.
Jonathon will be at Econsultancy's JUMP event next month, talking about the multichannel measurement challenge: how to measure success across channels, and the best metrics to use.
We don't want to give too much away before the JUMP presentation, so I've been asking him about some other areas of John Lewis' multichannel strategy...
Express Group turns to selling links, big companies caught buying
How bad is the newspaper business hurting? If the shameless link selling the Express Group is engaging in on its websites is any indication, newspapers have it pretty bad.
The sales team at the Express Group has been sending emails to SEOs promoting the company's "SEO advertorials", which are little more than keyword-rich articles published on Express.co.uk, DailyStar.co.uk and Ok.co.uk that the Express Group is willing to pepper with paid links.
Q&A: Robin Terrell, MD of John Lewis Direct
John Lewis is one retailer which has been a success online over the last few years, experiencing consistent sales growth, and has often been used as an example of a usable website on this blog.
I've been asking John Lewis Direct MD Robin Terrell, one of the keynote speakers at the recent Internet Retailing conference, about the company's approach to e-commerce...
Site review: John Lewis fashion
John Lewis relaunched the fashion section of its website this week, aiming for an extra £70m in clothing sales by 2011.
The retailer, which currently gets just 6% of online sales from fashion items, has added new brands and redesigned in an attempt to make the section more appealing. I've been taking a closer look...
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers - who values usability more?
With the continued growth of online shopping, and with new pureplay
retailers entering the market looking for new opportunities, I would
expect that the biggest players would be leading the way in terms of
customer experience.
With the upcoming Online Fashion 100 event in London that I'll be attending, I have taken a look at some of the biggest players in the fashion industry, both pureplay retailers and high street retailers.
I was particularly interested to look at key areas of their online customer experience to find out:
1) how well some of these brands are are delivering intelligent and meaningful cross-sell and up-sells to drive higher average order values, and...
2) which retailers are potentially losing sales due to a lack of focus on the full customer experience, right through to the end of the checkout process.
