Macy's Inc. expects to surpass $1 billion in web sales this year, a 13% rise from 2008, CEO Terry Lundgren said today.
Lundgren, in a keynote address at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas today, also said sales at the company's Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com e-commerce sites influence about $5 billion a year in in-store sales at the Macy's and Bloomingdale's chains. Macy's, No. 23 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, operates more than 800 Macy's stores and about 40 Bloomingdale's stores.
Lundgren did not say what Macy’s 2008 online sales totaled. Internet Retailer has estimated that Macy’s registered $1.04 billion in online sales in 2008, but the retailer has not commented on that estimate.
Underscoring the importance of the web channel, Lundgren said that every dollar spent online at Macys.com influences $5.77 spent in stores within 10 days after an online purchase. He said that multichannel customers spend twice as much as store-only customers, and added: "Progress in multichannel sales is just beginning."
To help further drive web sales and their effect on overall sales, Macy's has invested more than $300 million in recent years in e-commerce. The retailer has built two 600,000-square-foot direct-to-consumer distribution centers in Tennessee and Arizona, Lundgren said.
In other developments, he added, Macy's has deployed an online Finder feature that has tripled conversion rates among shoppers who use it to find the right size and style of apparel products; garnered more than 75,000 followers on Facebook in the two months since it launched a page on the site, and deployed in stores a Search & Send system that lets store clerks search on POS terminals for items not available in-store and immediately ship them to a customer.
Shop.org is the online retailing division of the National Retail Federation, a national retail industry organization.
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