New look and platform help OneStepAhead stay with the competition
A recently redesigned OneStepAhead.com is helping Chelsea & Scott Ltd. do a better job of closing web sales and generating more repeat business.
Web sales for Chelsea & Scott, which owns and operates OneStepAhead.com and is No. 184 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, were essentially flat in 2006, growing by just 3.3% to $46.5 million from $45 million in the prior year.
But sales are on track to grow by 15% this year as a result of the newly designed OneStepAhead.com. The site, which was redesigned by Fry Inc. and runs on Fry’s OCP e-commerce platform, is enabling Chelsea & Scott to conduct A/B testing for the first time and improve the sales conversion rate on OneStepAhead.com by about 8%. “With our previous site and e-commerce platform we were running into roadblocks to the enhancements we wanted to make,” says Internet director Rachel Gutierrez.
With a new look and e-commerce platform, shoppers can now place an order on OneStepAhead.com for shipping on the next day. Previously holiday orders were limited to certain deadlines and shipping options, including two day shipments, because of an outdated batch processing system. “We now have real-time order processing capability,” says Gutierrez. “This will make us more competitive around Halloween and Christmas.”
The new design on OneStepAhead.com, which sells baby and toddler-oriented merchandise such as clothes and strollers, features bigger images, better navigation, and an improved gifts registry. With the older design, the gift registry was mostly used by new shoppers registering for the first time. The redesigned gift registry, however, allows new and repeat users to register for specific events such as birthdays and showers or access a friend’s registry, update a personal profile and view past purchases. “The new gifts registry is more content-oriented,” says Gutierrez.
With a new design, OneStepAhead.com also is adding more video and embedding video links into its e-mail campaigns. One recent product video on OneStepAhead.com detailed the features and functions of a backyard water park. When the link was embedded into an e-mail campaign and broadcast to an audience of 800,000 recipients, the results helped OneStepAhead.com immediately sell almost 50% of the initial inventory of available water park SKUs.
The results also helped Chelsea & Scott formulate additional multi-media plans such as adding more product videos and sound demonstrations on OneStepAhead.com. “We have plans to further test the power of video in creating demand for some of our products,” says Gutierrez.
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