Snow Valley

I really enjoyed the Internet Retailing conference this year. The highlight for me was the keynote from Robin Terrell at John Lewis Direct.

He gave a very frank insight into the challenges that John Lewis is facing as they try to grow their online sales.

• John Lewis did £327m online sales in 2008, up from £12m in their first year, 2001
• 89% of their online customers also shop instore
• But 60% of people that shop in JL stores don’t buy from their website – Robin and his team want to know why
• Web-only customers spend £Y.  Store only customers spend £Yx4. Customers that use both channels spend £Yx8 – this is why they want to make every customer multi-channel. 
• They see themselves as being midway on the multi-channel journey
• Step 1 was build a decent site
• Step 2 was integrate the channels and they’re doing that now:
• They introduced click & collect, although they call it “deliver to shop for collection” to make it completely clear 
• 38% of customers collecting stuff they’ve bought online will buy something else while they’re in the shop
• 9-10% of their online sales today are click & collect
• From Feb 09 they’ve been allocating online sales to the nearest store to encourage store staff to like the website
• PACT – partner assisted customer transactions involves instore staff helping customers to place orders online using a kiosk. £250,000 sales from this so far.
• The great thing about PACT is that store staff get to like the web AND instore customers that don’t use the JL website are given a lesson on how to use it
• Staff were sent on multi-channel training courses as too many instore staff members were giving the wrong info about the website
• Step 3 will be to expand the brand and create a market-leading multi-channel business
• Robin talked about how JL Direct really had to be a separate department when it started in 2001 or it would have got suffocated – but now they need to integrate
• JL has its own delivery fleet so they’ll be able to copy Ocado etc with 2 hour slots

Robin finished by sharing his personal learnings, which I think we would all agree with:

1. Don’t forget the basics
2. If it ain’t broke you ain’t looking hard enough
3. There are no magic bullets in ecommerce

A great event – thanks to Ian, Emma and Mark for organising it.