The holiday shopping season is about more than CDs, DVDs, and other stocking stuffers – Q4 is also the biggest selling season for PC and digital consumer electronics maker Hewlett-Packard Co. Pete Appl, CEO and general manager of HP's online arm, HPShopping.com, tells Internet Retailer that this holiday, he's anticipating high double-digit sales growth online for the company over last year. “As opposed to last year when a lot of people were still first-timers online, more people have had a good experience. We expect to see a lot of repeat shoppers as well as a broader set of people who are just more comfortable with making purchases online,” he says.
To get ready for the holidays, HPShopping.com has invested “significantly” in technology to handle increasing traffic to the online store and call center operation, Appl says. For those repeat customers as well as repeat visitors, HP has beefed up site personalization to provide greater visibility into activity or items in which they’d previously expressed interest, as well as product recommendations based on the purchases of other shoppers.
To ease navigation on the site, Appl says HPShopping.com will in the next few weeks unveil significant improvements in navigational capability that will provide shoppers with better guidance on how to find what they want on the site, how to gain a better understanding of product features and – importantly, for a marketer that’s actively promoting not just a slew of new products but product integration – how different HP products work together. One example is digital cameras that coordinate with digital photo printers.
HPShopping.com has streamlined its “configure to order” area that lets consumers design their own set-ups of desktops and notebook computers online. The path into the configure to order area has been shortened, and, once in the area, the configuration process has been simplified. HPShopping.com has also given customers more flexibility to order custom configurations later in December while still guaranteeing delivery by the holiday with functionality that calculates a shipping date based on the particular components the shoppers chooses. That way, a shopper could replace a component in the order that may not be available in time for holiday delivery with another component that is.
“In this season when people are buying gifts, setting expectations is really important. We brought that front and center to the customers. We’re telling them when to expect shipment of the product and then taking it a step further to show people how those estimated shipping dates change, based on the components they are ordering,” says Nikhil Behl, vice president of strategy and planning.
For procrastinators, HPShopping.com also offers a rapid shipping option on in-stock inventory that can deliver an order placed online within as little as 12 hours. For products that are stocked, orders placed by 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time can be delivered by rapid shipping by 10:00 a.m. the following morning, Appl says. The quick turnaround results from a collaboration between HP's shipping partner and its warehouse operation, located in close proximity to expedite fast order picking and shipping.
“That gives us a lot of flexibility, particularly at the holidays when people want to make last-minute purchases, to ensure we can get their purchases to them in time,” Appl adds.
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