UK fashion chain New Look has seen another fall in profits, announcing a 4.4% drop in sales during the first quarter of 2017.
With the recent news that UK retailers have witnessed a general slowdown in spending growth – New Look’s bad fortune could be put down to wider factors like high inflation or dwindling consumer confidence.
Everyone knows that click and collect is a hugely popular delivery option among shoppers, but it seems that some retailers have failed to adequately prepare for the Christmas rush.
Tesco has already suffered a fulfilment disaster after failing to deliver loads of Black Friday click and collect orders on time.
It’s been another busy month in the world of social media, with several great new campaigns launched and big developments afoot in Zuckerberg’s domain.
Alongside trialling a new ‘buy’ button, Facebook announced second-quarter revenue of $2.91bn, an increase of 61%. Not bad.
And what of these campaigns? Well I’ve detailed several of them below, so go ahead and give them a read.
But just before you do, please note that these examples do not include any information on ROI. I’ve chosen them purely because I find them to be innovative, interesting, or inspiring.
Thanks, you may continue… (or check out these social campaigns from June.)
Almost two-thirds of consumers (63%) have bought products online before collecting them in-store at least once in the past 12 months, while 16% use reserve-and-collect at least once a month.
Overall around a fifth (22%) of consumers said they have never used the service, which is actually a very slight increase compared to 2012 when the figure stood at 20%.
Even so, the data highlights the continuing importance of reserve-and-collect services for multichannel retailers as a sales tool. The Multichannel Retail Survey, conducted using the Toluna survey tool, also found that 50% of respondents had abandoned a purchase online due to unsatisfactory delivery options.
Last week New Look announced a 79% increase in online sales in the three months leading up to June.
Ecommerce currently accounts for 10% of New Look’s overall revenue, but that figure could well increase if online sales continue to show such strong growth.
The increase in online sales is attributed to a number of factors, including a revamped website, upgrades to its iPhone app and an expanded click-and-collect service.
Such a massive boost in sales is obviously worth investigating, so here’s a roundup of some of the factors that New Look gets right on its desktop and mobile platforms. And I’ve also flagged up a few areas that could potentially be improved on.
According to a recent report three quarters of the worlds top brands have Google+ pages, with a combined following of more than 20 million fans.
This is a massive 9,400% increase since December 2011 when only 222,000 people followed them collectively.
But while writing a recent series of posts looking at how some of the world’s top brands use social I noticed that the amount of effort put into their G+ pages massively varies, while user interaction with content and posts is almost non-existent.
So to find out whether this is a common theme, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the UK’s top 20 online retailers use G+ and the levels of engagement that they achieve.
Just to clarify, this post isn’t about the SEO benefits of G+ or the potential for +1s to become more important in future, it’s an evaluation of how brands use G+ and how their fans respond…