Sales rocket at Shop Direct as boss pledges £50m
SHOP Direct is predicting a record year for sales and profits after unveiling its best-ever Christmas trading.
The Liverpool-based company said like-for-like sales had surged 6% in the seven weeks to Christmas Day as it racked up 82 million sites visits, an 8% rise. Sales on Black Friday were up 64% on 2014 and the group’s three online brands, Very, Littlewoods and VeryExclusive attracted 4.2 million web visits.
The company said it would be continuing to innovate its customer offer and would be investing £50m in personalising its financial services products.
Chief executive Alex Baldock said: “Christmas 2015 was a record-breaker for Shop Direct, and we’re pleased to see our momentum continue to build.
“Received wisdom is that every retailer should be multi-channel. We don’t buy that. We like being a digital pureplay. It allows us to keep things simple and focus our energy on mobile innovation, which has been a big factor in our record peak trading.”
He added: “Looking forward to 2016, we’ll stick to delivering our strategy of making good things easily accessible to more people. In particular, 2016 will be the year of personalisation for Shop Direct. Personalisation is at the heart of making the shopping experience ever easier for our customers, enabled by heavy investment in big data and technology which we expect to make a big impact in 2016.
“Today I’m proud to announce the latest stage of that investment: a new £50m personalisation programme for our Financial Services business, in partnership with IBM, which will bring us ground-breaking new capabilities.
“On the back of a strategy that’s working and a successful peak, we’re now well on track to deliver another record-breaking year of sales and profit.”
Shop Direct said its Very online department store had seen “exceptional” sales growth over the festive period of 17%. On its own Very’s sales are expected to top £1bn this year.
With regard to the £50m personalisation programme, Shop Direct said it will allow it to give customers a more tailored offering when it comes to the way they spread the cost of paying for goods and also the way they manage their accounts.
A spokesman said: “We can remove the offers and functionality that is less relevant to a given customers and present them with options and functionality that we know they want – as an individual.
“The programme will also enable us to continue innovating when it comes to the range of credit products that we offer and the speed at which we can make improvements to the credit journey.”
