Argos Homepage

For the third consecutive year Argos.co.uk remains in 2nd place in the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List, detailing the Top 100 Retail and Travel websites in the UK by site traffic.

The list, now five years old, provides a unique perspective on how the e-retail market leaders are performing in terms of attracting visitors to their websites.

Neil Stewart, Commercial Director at Salmon said, “We have been developing and supporting Argos with their website since 2002.  This high ranking reflects their commitment to deliver a great online customer experience. We look forward to working with them over the next year to deliver innovative and new enhancements to their website that will ensure they stay one of the most successful retailers in the UK.”

Other Salmon customers on the list include:

• Homebase ranked 20 up 5  places
• Boots ranked 26 up 18 places
• Halfords ranked 30 up 17 places

For more information on the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops list go here.

Webcredible’s 2009 eCommerce usability for high street retailers’ report has been updated.  This latest version updates the highly popular ecommerce usability reports of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

The report evaluates the websites of 20 of the UK’s leading high street retailers. Based on Webcredibles experience of usability testing with over 1000 people on a variety of ecommerce sites, they have devised 20 essential guidelines that all ecommerce websites should adhere to, evaluating each site against these guidelines.

Webcredible’s 2009 eCommerce usability for high street retailers’ report has been updated.  This latest version updates the highly popular ecommerce usability reports of 2006, 2007 and 2008.
The report evaluates the websites of 20 of the UK’s leading high street retailers. Based on Webcredibles experience of usability testing with over 1000 people on a variety of ecommerce sites, they have devised 20 essential guidelines that all ecommerce websites should adhere to, evaluating each site against these guidelines.Retail Systems Blog comments on the “biggest improvement” in 2009 being Boots (you can read about Salmon’s work here), which saw its website usability score increase from 64 per cent to 80 per cent, pushing it up to joint fourth in this year’s report from joint 17th place last year.

Last year’s report saw a drastic improvement in the website usability of top UK High Street retailers with an average score of 67.8 per cent.  Salmon customers’ Argos and Boots scored 73% and 80% respectively.

You can download the report for free.

The keynote presentation by Ashley Friedlein at Endeca’s E-Business Forum in April highlights the results of two Salmon projects.  The presentation (available for £150.00 for non e-consultancy members) aims to highlight “what you need to be doing really well online to succeed.”

Kiddicare’s implementation of Power Reviews is again mentioned (I highlighted this in a recent post) as Ashley highlights the very ‘personal’ tags attributed to products.

And also Argos’s ‘Check and Reserve‘ and ‘Text and Take Home’ services are showcased, the former a project that Salmon is so very proud of  managing, delivering and supporting for HRG.

Home Retail Group, the owner of Argos and Homebase (both Salmon eCommerce clients), has reported its annual results for the year to end February 2009.

Many are talking about triple digit growth rates in revenue, which is impressive, but HRG’s numbers illustrate just how far many organisations have to go to genuinely develop their internet offerings into viable or strategic business operations.

Given the group’s strong presence online, details of the company’s internet operations were given prominence in the report.  At Argos:

• The internet accounted for £1.1 billion of Argos sales, up 22% from £900m a year ago.
• The internet is now responsible for 26% of Argos sales, up from 21% in 2008.
• Of this, £700m (17%) of Argos sales were Check & Reserve, up from £500m last year.
• Multi-channel sales — internet or phone orders, or store orders for home delivery — totalled £1.7 billion or 40% of all of Argos sales.
• A series of improvements have been made to Argos‘ Check & Reserve service. Customers can now see real-time stock availability of any product in their two nearest stores and can check availability in a further eight alternative stores; a text message is sent to confirm the reservation number when an online reservation is made and a reminder text is sent at midday on the day the reservation expires.

Homebase’s online offer is less developed than that of Argos but work is on-going to make improvements:

• 5,000 Homebase products can now be bought online.
• Another 11,000 Homebase lines can be viewed online, with the aim of all products ultimately being either viewable or buyable.
• A Stock Check service for browseable lines has been rolled out to all UK stores. Check & Reserve is on trial in 25 stores.
• A further 9,000 Argos products are also now available for home delivery via the Homebase website and there is a “continued transfer of skills” between Argos and Homebase.

We are always careful about promoting the work we do for Argos, but there is a little further information here and here.  But it is clear to see that it is a very successful partnership.

The UK eCommerce community is blooming.  And although I couldn’t be there, I am told you needed no more evidence of this than at Internet Retailing 2008 (IR2008) where networking, buzz & innovation met with ideas, insight and research.  Salmon had three clients presenting in the conference.

The first stream was devoted to discussing the hot topic of providing rich customer experiences – and you can read a session review here. It studied the technical, marketing and operational issues related to rich media.

In this stream, Salmon customer Oliver Bishop, the e-Business Technical Architect from AkzoNobel Decorative Coatings, presented on “Making product choices simpler using RIA technology.”  The latest relaunch of dulux.co.uk has taken advantage of Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology to help customers to choose the colours they love and products that are right for the job.   This is achieved using functionality like Ajax, drag and drop and DHTML extensively within the site to create an interactive scrapbook, moodboard and the ability to upload and decorate photos of their own rooms.  Oliver’s presentation covered how Web 2.0 technologies can enhance the experience for your customers.

Stream two looked at second mover advantage on the web – and focused on the approach taken by retailers who have launched transactional websites only recently; and how they have taken advantage of their second mover position to succeed.

In this 2nd stream, Wendy Derbyshire from Scotts & Stow told delegates how the company had been running nine sites on four different platforms and faced a huge range of legacy issues and a major challenge to consolidate everything into one technical base that could underpin the whole business.  Scotts decided to bite the bullet and embark on a major project (with Salmon and SAFE™ – read the case study) to put in place one infrastructure for the whole business.

And then there was Stream three, which examined the latest trends in multiple channel retailing, i.e. Moving beyond multichannel to true, integrated “cross channel” solutions (is it me or does this makes our 2005 seminar series “eCommere Junkies: Cross Channel Retail” look impressively visionary?).

In this final stream Argos’ presentation looked at “Customer centric multi-channel development“.  There is no doubt Argos is recognised as pioneering new approaches in multi-channel high street retailing, introducing concepts (and delivering them with Salmon’s help) such as in-store reservations via web, phone and text, in-store stock-check and quick-pay kiosks, all tied into the overarching online experience and offline catalogue.

It’s funny.  You can have the biggest booth in the exhibition hall and learn to talk a good game.  But nothing compares to the experience you get from actually living, breathing and delivering state-of-the-art eCommerce.

Right now, it seems, nothing fires up a design debate better than the term ‘Web 2.0′. For every positive argument for features like drag and drop – there is a counter argument relating to conversion rates. For every advocate of a single page checkout – there is the overall Customer Experience to think about. And so it goes on: semantic web, widgets, mashups or folksonomies etc….lets not even go there.

But the debate, and the point at which web design is at today, does mask the simple rule that great web design is (and always has been) about implementing appropriate design – as opposed to doing simply what is technically possible.

Yesterday, two more insightful pieces emerged that might well fan the flames of debate for a while yet, with both pieces sitting on the ‘pragmatic but effective’ side of the fence.

First up e-consultancy reported how Argos is beating their competition with “user friendly web design” (disclosure: this is a design implemented by Salmon). And secondly, Mike Southon (in an FT piece) in reference to Will McInnes (from NixonMcInnes) debates a possibly counter-intuitive suggestion of “having an ugly but effective website.”

What is clear is that if you are investing in web design you need a thorough, detailed, holistic understanding of web 2.0. And because every brand is different, finding out where to draw the line between ‘appropriate’ and ‘possible’ is a smart move indeed.

Salmon customer Argos has launched an online viral campaign.

Although we can’t say we were involved (because we weren’t) Argos is promoting its latest catalogue with a campaign dominated by a giant sweet jar standing over 2 metres tall.

The campaign, which runs until Christmas, will highlight Argos’ range of 18,000 products and drive awareness of argos.co.uk (which we are very much involved in) during the festive period.

Launched today, an interactive 3D giant jar and the film showing the filling of the giant jar can both be found at giantjar.co.uk. Once on the website, users are encouraged to guess the number of Argos products held within the jar. The person with the closest guess, which will be drawn on 20th December, will win all the items in the jar (or £10,000).