With around 30m customers in 29 countries, Hamburg-based Bonprix – part of the Otto Group – offers fashion for women, men and children in a wide range of styles and sizes, as well as accessories, home textiles and furniture.
It currently operates 21 country and language specific websites with iOS available in six languages and 12 language-specific Android apps. Its apps are transactional and offer a great native shoppin experience.
Its iOS apps achieved full marks for ‘searchandising’ in the IREU Top500 research and allow users to save items for later. They also indicate other stores that are part of the group and asked customers for feedback on the user friendliness of the app – a useful feature for any retailer keen on continually honing its user experience.
The iOS app allows customers to rate and review products along with offering related products based on what has been bought by other customers.
The retailer opened up a UK presence in 2005 and its app offers a clear design with good images, which are zoomable. The whole entry experience can be tailored to who you are – male, female or furniture lover – and like Apple’s app, it keeps the menu buttons to a minimum.
Users can navigate to what they want through the main menus on the landing page of the app, or they can use a pulldown at the top, which expedites the process to some degree. A lot of the menus are text only – listing ‘Womens’, ‘Mens’, ‘New in’ and so on – so that they load really rapidly and get users to where they want to be. The menus then switch to being imaged based, but the pulldown at the top can help refine the display to narrow down what you might be looking for to a few short taps.
Although not instant to load when you first start it up, the app does instantly generate a holding page before the initial menu is delivered. On average, the BonPrix apps take 7s to open, but the German and Swiss offerings are much more rapid. And once the app is open, navigation around it is fast.
The ‘Our Other Shops’ feature in the main menu is a handy way to move on from BonPrix to browse for other things in the Otto Group, but perhaps the most appealing aspect here – and what BonPrix gets so right – is that before transferring you, it tells you that you are leaving the BonPrix app or site and that it is taking your shopping bag with you.
All the sites/apps in the Otto Group are linked and you need one login to access them all plus your transferable bag. This is one of the most interesting features of any of the retailers in the IREU500.
