Launching Pad

Site and server management can account for too much of the time involved in online retailing.

If 80 percent of the effort — resources, time and budget — of an internally managed e-commerce application is spent just keeping the lights on, that's not winning, says Jamus Driscoll, vice president of marketing for Demandware.

Woburn, Mass.-based Demandware partners with retailers to provide enterprise-class solutions that allow the retailers to focus on merchandising, marketing and customer service.

Our goals and our partners' goals are the same things, Driscoll says. ‘If we do a good job, we get to participate in [their success]. If we don't, we're penalized. We're putting our money where our mouth is ... We don't hand our clients a bunch of CDs and wish them luck. We operate the platform underneath their sites every day.

By freeing up retailers to focus on what they do best, Demandware is seeing its clients make innovations in the online marketplace. Timberland's U.K. site (www.timberlandonline.co.uk), for instance, allows a shopper to build a pair of custom-made shoes or boots, seeing the changes in real time and via multiple views. It's this type of thing where a retailer can be unique, Driscoll says.

Having a cart, for instance, is not a place where a retailer will uniquely stand out. But there are site features, like Timberland U.K.'s boot configurator, that can be a unique expression of the retailer's brand and site experience. We're offering retailers the opportunity to focus on the latter and not the former.

Lifestyle and activewear company lucy launched its website in 1999, melding the in-store and online experiences that see about half of its bricks-and-mortar customers also shopping via the Internet. It doubled its business when it re-launched in 2004, but the company had tapped out its resources by the time it partnered with Demandware last year.

With the latest re-launch, lucy.com made merchandising updates with elevated color swatching at the index page level, recently viewed items on the product detail page and enhanced search capabilities, says web producer Molly Snyder. We also made improvements to the ‘My Account' section, wish list and store locator and adjustments to the checkout flow … with minimal issues. Maintaining product and content on Demandware is very intuitive; our process transition has been good.

lucy had an existing site when it approached Demandware; for Jones Apparel Group, it was a different story. Still, while launching separate e-commerce sites for brands Jones New York, Bandolino, Easy Spirit and Nine West in a span of eight months, Jones Apparel Group was also able to significantly upgrade its customer service.

The sites offer enhancements like Ask the Experts, monthly videos and fashion advice from Lloyd Boston, who provides product picks and shows consumers how to pair them. JNY.com offers the ability to shop by line (collection, sport or signature), category or size, and its ship-from-store feature integrates inventory from each of its outlet locations – helping to move excess merchandise.

The sites also include an as seen in feature, which showcases merchandise that has appeared in advertising or editorial features from top fashion magazines.

The results have been impressive: Since moving to the new platform, traffic for the Jones sites has increased 19 percent and conversion rates are up 28 percent. The average order size is up 2 percent, and net online sales have increased nearly 60 percent.

Rolling out new sites
Jones is systematically working its way through launching dozens of brand-specific sites. Once the initial site was built and the architecture determined, Jones has progressively been able to launch new sites on its own.

What they said is, ‘We want to build a single e-commerce architecture that provided strong site merchandising tools and the ability to leverage the development on one site to accelerate the rollout of new sites,' Driscoll says. By the time they launched the most recent site [Anne Klein], they were able to do it almost completely without our involvement.

That's not to say that Demandware is hands-off: The company has a robust retail practice run by former retailers, which helps its e-commerce partners drive site revenues.

Niche sites targeted to specific customer segments or brands is a trend that will continue, requiring retailers to be able to launch and maintain multiple storefronts.

We're certainly seeing that extend into the online world, Driscoll says. There's a question with retailers of a diminishing returns curve: How many sites are too many, and do the costs justify the incremental return?

Demandware, he says, helps extend retailers further along that curve by removing some of the barriers and cost and headache of managing multiple sites.

Personalized experience
Much of the Internet is about personalization, so it's only natural to foresee the day when that level of individuality is expected in an online shopping experience.

It's not too far out to imagine an environment where consumers have individualized shopping sites, built by feeds from all their favorite retailers, Driscoll says. As consumers, our demand for choice is never going to slow down.

Neither is the need for innovation. Demandware recently launched SiteGenesis, a pre-built, customizable web storefront that helps our clients get to market — to revenue — a lot faster, Driscoll says. SiteGenesis joins RapidLaunch, a program that helps new clients launch a site from concept to selling in 16 weeks, because, Driscoll says, The Internet prizes the swift.