On Internet Business

Improving website performance. Long Tall Sally

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Long Tall Sally is a women’s retailer specialising in tall women classed as those above 5ft 8″. The business is a long established high street retailer that started life 31 years ago as a single shop in Chiltern Street, London. Since then the business has grown to become a £15 million business with 60% of all business being transacted through a catalogue or online.

 

At Internet World on Tuesday, Andrew Shapin Long Tall Sally CEO described how a new website was implemented in order to improve conversion, usability and business processes.

 

The background to the change was that the previous platform which was performing reasonably with a conversion rate between 4-5% had become outdated. Thje result of this was that tasks such updating content, changing design, improving the purchase funnel and SEO where difficult and time consuming and this was restricting business growth. Important functionality such as reviews and user generated content were extremely difficult to implement and expansion overseas was impossible.

 

It was therefore decided to create new sites on a new platform. A key requirement was that the new site could be quickly and easily improved and updated (design, merchandising and content) by the internal team.

 

Edigital research were brought in to bench march the old site against the best in class retailers. They conducted end to end customer research using mystery shoppers to create an actionable report showing areas for improvement.

 

Within 12 weeks the new site was specified, designed, built and tested on a Hybris platform.

 

The total cost of the implementation was £ 130 k.

 

Shapin described the success of the new platform. Although specific ROI was quoted, key stats showed major improvement. Average baskets size increased by 20% and conversion increased 28% and visitor numbers also increased. The objective of greater flexibility was also achieved. An example of this was the twice weekly change to the home page design. International sales also increased with US sales of £52,000 last week.

 

The biggest problem encountered was insufficient time was planned for content migration.

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