Social media is proving to be a double-edged sword for fashion retailers.
While content posted by consumers and influencers to popular social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube has been proven to drive sales, a “snap and send back” trend driven by social media could be costing retailers in the UK billions of pounds in sales annually.
Ecommerce returns are quite the pickle – a slick and free service attracts shoppers, but a high returns rate can knock profitability.
Graham Best is CEO of ReBOUND, a returns management company. This is a day in his life…
On Friday, L.L.Bean, the 106 year-old retailer known for its clothing and outdoor recreational products, announced a radical change to is unique lifetime returns policy, which allowed customers to return products they had purchased even years after purchase.
Ratings and reviews are invaluable for online and in-store sales, web engagement, SEO, customer service, reducing returns, merchandising, marketing, and product development, as we discovered in this previous article.
Customer experience is top of mind for just about every retailer hoping to survive and thrive in today’s incredibly competitive and difficult economic environment.
But while many retailers focus on topics like personalisation and minimising the number of steps in the purchase journey, they shouldn’t forget that an important part of overall customer experience is the post-purchase experience they deliver.
This week’s juicy digital marketing stats include the least engaging brands in the US, excitement about VR, Amazon profits, returns policies, and (altogether now) “much more”.
As usual, it would be remiss of me not to plug Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium, too.
French Connection announced this week that almost a quarter of its sales took place online in 2014.
Ecommerce represents 23% of its total retail revenue, which is 20% up from the previous year and as also reported in InternetRetailing 24% of all orders were fulfilled using its click and collect service. This follows its recent investment in multichannel services, from the website platform to the warehouse.
Lets take a look at French Connection and examine how the retailer can improve its multichannel standing, paying particular attention to delivery, returns, mobile and social customer service.
According to a survey by CollectPlus, 27% of consumers are put off ordering something online in the first place because they do not want the hassle of returning it if it isn’t right.
Therefore the need for online retailers to provide clear and easy to find information on its returns policy as well as making it as hassle-free as possible is integral to customer experience.
After the blowout of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, returns are expected to peak today, as customers change their minds about the presents they have already bought.
So, with returns volumes potentially rising this Christmas, how should retailers handle returns?
Back in the distant past of 2012, our illustrious editor shared his 14 best practice tips for how ecommerce sites should handle online returns.
Upon reading the above linked article you’ll notice that very little in terms of best practice has changed in the intervening years.
The benefits of nailing customer returns are also still the same. Customer satisfaction leads to better retention and higher CLV.
However in the intervening two years since the above publication, how well have some of the top UK ecommerce sites presented their returns information? Let’s take a look…
Ongoing profit from a customer’s lifetime value is generally much higher than any one single transaction.
However in order to achieve higher customer lifetime values (CLV) you need to have some strong customer retention strategies.
If you do this, you’ll also find that it’s much cheaper to retain a loyal customer than it is to constantly acquire new ones. 82% of companies asked in our Cross Channel Marketing report agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.
Customer retention is a must for any business where its goals are for long-term success. Here are some of the ways that you can achieve this.
We’re often looking for examples of good, and not so good, practice in ecommerce for our reports and articles, and there are a few sites you can generally rely on for the former.
One of these in AO.com, formerly Appliances Online. The company was launched 14 years ago and its recent IPO valued it at around £1.6bn.
A key reason behind the company’s growth can be found in its focus on good design and customer experience, as well as a culture of testing and optimisation.
As a result, AO.com contains many examples of ecommerce best practice that others can learn from. Here are just a few…