March 23 2007

New Marks & Spencer e-commerce site goes live

Marks and Spencer's new e-commerce site went live this morning. The site has been developed by the company's in-house e-commerce team in partnership with Amazon. It is John Dixon's first public step towards fully integrating the site, telephone ordering service and high street stores after taking up the task in January.

The site is Marks & Spencer's "most comprehensive" store with over 20,000 items from clothing, home and furniture, electricals and flowers and gifts. Jewellery, which is exclusive to the site, has also been added along with lunch ordering for workplace delivery.

From the point-of-view of the customers, the site is easier to navigate, has better pictures and delivery time has been reduced from 7 days to 3-5 days. Delivery is free for orders over £30 and this is set to continue for the foreseeable future.

Navigation has been improved to enable customers to search by category, size and colour, within clothing for example, and to then narrow the search results by a number of options including price. Dynamic imaging has been used to show clothing items in the different colour options available, zoom and alternate views.

Features which have been pioneered by Amazon have also been included in the site - recently viewed items (and the best selling item of 5 pairs of socks), wish list and 1-click settings.

The next phase of the site will see the introduction of streaming video so that the retailer's television ads can be seen online.

The company is currently carrying out a review of its back-end systems with a view to improving integration between the site, store and its telephone-ordering service. A full multi-channel offering is expected to be launched later in the year.

As customer are coming to expect from multi-channel retailers, the new services will include the ability for customers to check the status of an order in any channel regardless of the channel they used to place the order. Customers ordering online will have the option for their purchase to be delivered to their home or for in-store collection.

Marks and Spencer plans to increase online sales from a level "north of £100m" to £250m - Chief Executive Stuart Rose believes that this is achievable in a couple of years.

Emma Herrod