e-commerce conversion boost at John Smedley
By Retail Technology | Tuesday August 19 2014
Britains oldest continuous clothing manufacturer has boosted the conversion from its online store by using e-commerce intelligence
John Smedley, which at 230 years old is one of the world’s oldest clothing manufacturers, is seeing results already from the application of e-commerce intelligence to its online store.
The luxury knitwear brand, which continues to manufacture clothes from its original mill in Derbyshire, has seen the number of products added to basket rise by 11% since it started using Ometria’s e-commerce intelligence platform.
Identifying issues
Analysing data from hundreds of thousands of website visits, the Ometria platform revealed issues in the buying journey that were causing visitors to leave the site without purchasing.
“When compared to the website average, a significant number of visitors from a specific segment were viewing product pages, but not adding those products to
the basket,” explained Bruce Slater, e-commerce manager at John Smedley.
“Further inspection revealed a specific usability issue at product-page level that the team was quickly able to resolve. By addressing these issues, John Smedley increased its add-to-basket conversions.”
Site usability
"Historically speaking - and John Smedley has a lot of history - we've been very good at driving forward our global e-commerce operation, achieving consistently high growth year on year,” commented. “We have excellent customer loyalty online and customer acquisition is equally as strong.”
"However, we realised there was a great opportunity for revenue growth if we increased our conversion rate online - key to which was site usability,” he continued. “With access to this data we were quickly able identify general usability issues for all traffic, as well as those for a specific customer segment, such as those from a certain country or using a particular type of device.”
