Online retailers count on the holidays to move the needle on sales – but increased traffic also can provide a bigger window on product testing. Lillian Vernon’s web sales are about 40% of sales this year, up from 30% last year, and it’s a percentage president Jonathan Shapiro expects to trend upward as holiday sales spike. That helps make shoppers’ response to new products offered online an increasingly reliable indicator of how they’ll fare in Lillian Vernon’s catalog.
Case in point is a new offering of ride-on toys that Lillian Vernon debuted only on its site last week. At $200 for a NASCAR pedal car and $250 for a child-sized, battery-operated chopper motorcycle, the toys are priced considerably higher than the average item at Lillian Vernon, which is closer to $20 to $25. “Before we devoted the catalog space to these products, we asked the question, will they work for customers in the online venue,” Shapiro says. “If they do, that gives us an indication they might work in the book.” Shapiro adds that if the toys perform well online this holiday, they’ll be considered for catalog space next year.
That’s exactly the experience Lillian Vernon had when it expanded into stationery, another item new to its line, earlier this year, Shapiro says. Debuting initially online, customer response in that channel justified a place in the catalogs, where stationery has been a fixture since fall. “That was a learning experience that took us to this next iteration, the ride-on toys,” he says.
Shapiro adds that a series of improvements to the e-commerce operation at Lillian Vernon this year are helping to drive higher web sales. Among them, he cites an expanded affiliate marketing program with better affiliate incentives, more testing and better targeting of marketing e-mails, and a paid search program that has expanded from a few hundred to about 5,000 keywords since last year.
Back...
