There’s great excitement at Internet Retailing today, with the publication of the Internet Retailing Awards list of commended retailers. Have you made the list? Find out by reading the newsletter story below.
Today we also have news of Mothercare’s performance, a year into its transformation programme, and of Halfords’ plan to turn over £1bn a year by investing in digital. We have figures from CollectPlus illustrating its performance over the last year and we report on the Office for National Statistics retail figures for April – and what they said about online buying. Our guest comment today comes from Michael Ross, chief scientist at eCommera, who considers the need to go beyond business intelligence and to discover decision intelligence, a new kind of approach to ecommerce.
Remember that tickets for the Internet Retailing Awards (more info here) are now available to book. We’ll be bringing the shortlist of award winners to you later this week, so keep watching the site for news.
And a reminder too that it’s catch up time for anyone who missed that vital briefing at Internet Retailing Expo (2013). Presentations and panels from the across the six conferences of the event, the workshops and Innovation TV Studio are now available to view online at InternetRetailingExpo.com.
Webinars
We have an upcoming webinar to let you know about today. On June 18, Gary Lombardo, solutions market lead at Demandware will be joining us, along with Nick Rawlings, marketing director at Lands End, to tell the story of how the US retailer has grown from a catalogue business into a digital commerce business with global operations in North America, Europe and Asia. The event, Global Brand, Local Commerce: Evolution of Lands’ End into a Digital Commerce Powerhouse, will be held at 4pm on June 18 and free to attend. For more information and to register for the event, visit the Demandware webinar page here. More information about our webinar programme is available here.
Jumpstart events
Internet Retailing’s signature JumpStart events offer a chance for retailers to get quickly up to speed on the latest developments in a given area, hearing directly from expert suppliers and identifying and presenting the key questions retailers need to ask when procuring their own systems. Each full-morning event is held in Tower 42, 25 Old Broad Street, London and retailers can register to attend for free here.
On May 29, International and cross border trade is under examination. UK companies are seeing significant growth from trading internationally (outside the EU) and cross border (within the EU) and it’s never been easier to extend your online trading. Presenters at the Jumpstart will highlight the areas of concern, the pitfalls to avoid, as well as new opportunities in an event that will feature leading vendors in areas from multilingual to localisation, from payments to local customs and from logistics to usability.Find out more and register to attend here.
Cross-channel is the subject for the JumpStart event of June 5, where the focus will be on the customer, how they use as many touch points and channels as we’re willing and able to offer and how we combine behavioural data with service values, technology, people and process to deliver for them. Delegates will take away ideas, examples and case studies to extend selling activities beyond the web interface. Find out more and register to attend here.
The customer experience is in focus for the event of June 19, when we’ll be looking at how to provide an enhanced customer experience, not only optimising each channel but also considering how to bridge the experience over time and across channels. Topics will include interaction design, service planning, testing and customer service, delivery and logistics, and extend to how best practice analytics and behavioural tracking can help us towards that elusive ‘single view of the customer’ in order to sell more effectively. Find out more and register to attend here.
Today’s stories
INTERNET RETAILING AWARDS Judges commend UK’s leading multichannel and online retailers
Mothercare moving ‘in the right direction’ as losses narrow and online sales improve
Halfords invests in digital as part of new £1bn sales plan
GUEST COMMENT Business intelligence is dead, long live decision intelligence
CollectPlus transactions top 7.7m a year
One in 10 retail sales took place online in April
