nickshanagher

Shopkeepers should stop complaining about competition from the internet and look to it for ideas, Sarah Curran, founder of my-wardrobe.com, says in her latest FT column . "I remember vividly a retailers' conference in Dusseldorf, which was filled with many of the UK's leading high street names. The buzzword was 'the customer'. I wondered what their priority was before that," she says provocatively. Ms Curran started her business with a boutique in London's Crouch End. I knew who my customer was, she says, because I was the customer and I knew the retail experience I expected. But moving on-line in 2006 she had to work out how to replace face-to-face contact. On-line retailers have to create "stickiness" so that the experience is engaging. They do this by using aspirational photoshoots, editorial features and video content. The internet and social media offer many exciting ways of doing this. In contrast the high street can "often see...

On-line retailing still requires great customer service, Nick Robertson, chief executive of ASOS, told retail employers at a Skillsmart Retail seminar this week. Set up before the rise of social media (Facebook and Twitter and YouTube), ASOS has expanded internationally on the back of customer demand. It had no plans to launch in Australia but has huge sales there because social media helped shoppers to find ASOS. A key measure of customer satisfaction for on-line businesses is to measure the number of shopper contacts to orders. For ASOS this trends between 25 per cent and 30 per cent (which means a shopper asks a question about every fourth sale). Heavy snow in the UK last year caused this to spike over 40 per cent. Distribution problems caused it to spike over 35 per cent. Customer contact is driven by email. The call centre will only call back if the first two emails fail to solve the problem. Most emails are questions about colours and sizes which are easi...

Most shopper transactions for local shops are under £10, which may be a good thing if the rise of on-line grocery shopping continues. But don't bet on it. In a presentation last November, Laura Wade-Gery of Tesco.com, explained the advantages that has made it the UK's largest on-line retailer, with sales of £1.9billion and profits of £109m in 2008-09. While only 3% of the grocery market is currently on-line, 6.7% of Tesco's grocery sales are through the internet. Using 309 stores nationwide, Tesco.com covers 99% of the UK, which means your home is within a 25 minute drive of their local distribution system. Tesco.com is now so successful it is having to build dotcom only stores to meet demand. Shoppers come to Tesco.com because they know the brand but they stay if it is good at order fulfilment, quality and freshness and on-time delivery. Ms Wade-Gery promises that Tesco.com will continue to innovate, with ideas including: predictive ordering (where it remembers what you...

With a bricks-and-mortar store, where you locate is a big decision, fixed by your capital investment. On-line, location can be changed at the click of a button. I have the opportunity to move to a new space on the betterretailing site that will be launched later this month. The benefits will be that this blog will appear alongside others that will tackle different aspects of strategy and tactics for local retailers, including a new blog by Steve Denham. It is exciting for me and should help readers find even more good stuff, near at hand. I am also looking forward to coaching from Sam on how to make these short items even more useful, such as embedding links. Just as retailers may benefit from a good mix of footfall driving shops near them, so too on the web. Fingers crossed.