On Internet Business

Selling More Online – Six Rules from head of John Lewis Online

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling John Lewis Direct has six rules to maximise sales on line which he presented at Internet World, Earls Court, London on 28th April 2009

Walmsley is responsible for the John Lewis website  its sales and marketing. He has previously worked at Yell and Microsoft.

John Lewis was founded in 1929 and is highly unusual in that it is a partnership with 68,000 partners. The internet part of the business was launched in 2001. Today the John Lewis website has 45,000 products online and sales in 2008 of £327 million.

The focus of the presentation was about the key things that can keep an ecommerce business successful also titled “things that aren’t done regularly enough”.

Some other interesting information was given:

• Linens and flowers have a 8-10% conversion rate on the John Lewis web site. Conversion for high value items such as rowing machines is much lower.

• A new John Lewis home page is going live this week.

• Greater detail will be focussed on fashion product pages in future.

“Retail is detail” and it is essential to make “make excellence a habit”.

Where should you spend your time?

1. Evolution not revolution.

Making major changes is a high risk strategy. Improve customer experience in small steps through multivariate testing. John Lewis can test out 10.000 variations over 2 days. They have made major changes some which were counter intuitive that have had a major impact on conversion.

It is about “What are you doing Today to drive conversion ?”. It is about small changes or improvements such as content changes which can improve performance ….Not huge projects. 

2. Listen

On site survey-rolling measures, verbatim are graet but what is needed is actionable feedback.

User testing is not just for big projects. Get users in to test navigation and hierarchy on a small scale basis. Find out the problems from users themselves.

Site analytics. John Lewis uses Omniture. Use analytics to get behavioural information to gain insight to create hypotheses to make changes.

Remove “speed bumps” (conversion blockages). Examples where given of John Lewis privacy statement and language regarding delivery information.In the case of privacy information the result of testing was to change the privacy statement which resulted in more ambiguity but none the less improved conversion.

Understand differences in your customer groups. For example men and women shop very differently.

3.Keep it simple

Value of an incremental increase in conversion across main site can be significant from small changes that keep the process simple.

Will value of resources used to implement some major new widget result in increased conversion?

What best enhances your brand experience ?

The key thing is the smoothness of the shopping experience.

4. Get and keep the right team

Find the right people at the right level that understand the objective. People that are able implement improvements. Ensure you keep these people.

5. Trade

Why do you do what you do and how does it contribute to sales?

Shop-keeping is about selling product not functionality.

Platforms need to be built to support trading.

Pay attention to details.

6.Keep Looking Outside

How often do you check out the competition?

Scan the horizon feeds, email, and twitter.

Talk to innovators.

Future trends

According to Walmlsley, the key trends are :

• Increasing focus on personalising the experience.

How are you improving your targeting. Email targeting, on site targeting?

• Fragmentation of messages.

Conversations rendering classic segmentation and data methods largely redundant.

• Customers are collaborating over what they see where and when diminishing role of push/broadcast targeting.

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