60% YOY sales growth achieved with recent retailer!

3 Oct 2016 Dominic Comments Off on 60% YOY sales growth achieved with recent retailer!

One of the things I really enjoy is coming into businesses and identifying just what they are and are not doing to drive forward their E-commerce operation. Every retailer is different and has different dynamic in terms of what they need – not to mention understanding their market, channels they use and technology they utilize. My focus in the early days of working with someone is to understand these before then looking at a strategy which could implement growth.

I have recently worked with 2 retailers with considerable growth in the time I was working with them – one of whom had a 60% Yoy increase in sales and the other experienced a 43% YOY increase in sales. Below are some more details of what was done to drive this growth:

Retailer 1 – 60% YOY Sales growth

Achieving 60% YOY sales increase is no mean achievement and to drive this, a new approach was needed to. Website functionality was a little clunky with a website which challenging in terms of functionality – with key functionality such as product reviews missing. In addition, the backend operational side of trading the website was trading at max capacity with challenges in terms of tracking stock, order tracking and customer support ability to manage orders.

Despite the challenges and missing functionality, the increase in YOY sales actually came from a fairly simple decision – to open up ALL store stock to be available online. This is fairly common challenge for many online retailers – especially of larger bulkier items / household goods – how do you open up your full in store inventory without it affecting the P/L?

With added focus now on the next stage of their E-Commerce setup, I expect the next stage of their web development to focus on a new site, new functionality, focus on conversion improvement and bringing together some of the areas which were more peripheral in their recent E-Commerce setup.

Retailer 2 – 43% YOY Sales growth

This retailer was going through a challenging period in terms of the P/L and what they needed to do to drive the online operation forward. I was able to come in and establish ways to improve both traffic to the site, improve the website tech itself and trading of the site to drive sales forward significantly.

As you can see below all the key metrics have increased significantly with the most important one  – sales – showing 43% YOY growth. The only negative metric was AOV which went down as the new products introduced in the year retailed lower than previous years – understandable as the product mix shifted.

The retailer was in a period of transition in terms of it’s product offering however in addition it had invested in a costly platform at the expense of what I call conversion drivers / badges of authority. They needed to invest in bringing their e-commerce offering up to the same standard or better as their competition. In addition they needed to invest in working with new partners to start driving traffic to the site and getting the brand name out there in the marketplace.

I worked with them to put a 3 month strategy together which addressed the shortfalls – presenting to the board a full strategy including online spend, platform capability, platform gaps, customer database growth, online partners, website functionality, integration of stores and team capabilities.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time here and implementing a strategy which enabled them to grow as well as updating their online offering to bring it more in line with the competition – just look at that 70% improvement in conversion rate and 43% increase YOY in sales.

If you would like to see this kind of growth for your business then call me today!

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