Scripps Makes ShopatHomeTV.com its e-commerce anchor
The e-commerce metamorphosis continues at ShopatHomeTV.com, an e-commerce site owned and operated by The E.W. Scripps Co. In June, Shop at Home TV hired Geoff Smith, the former president of e-commerce and new business development at Personal Creations Inc., to be new senior vice president of interactive commerce.
Now ShopatHomeTV.com, which ranks as No. 212 on the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is putting in place the finishing touches on a major site redesign that Scripps began in November. The web store is using new site search applications from Endeca Technologies Inc. and improving guided navigation to reduce the time and steps shoppers need to locate merchandise, Smith says.
Shop at Home TV is also regrouping its product portals and using bigger images to drive traffic to featured merchandise on the home page. The results and other e-commerce metrics will be measured using a new analytics package from Omniture Inc.
Scripps, which in June acquired Shopzilla, a leading online comparison shopping service, for $525 million, is making a significant investment in the Internet and web retailing. With access to about 55 million homes with cable television, Shop at Home TV doesn’t have the TV audience enjoyed by biggest competitors such as Home Shopping Network and QVC, which reach more than 70 million households with TV cable access.
Instead, Scripps and Shop at Home TV are looking to gain ground on the web. Scripps owns or has a sizeable financial stake in several well known lifestyle cable television networks, including Home & Garden Television, Food Network, Do It Yourself Network and Fine Living. Collectively those cable channels reach more than 12 million lifestyle and do-it-yourself viewers, who are also avid Internet users and shoppers.
With a ready base of potential higher income shoppers, Scripps is making ShopatHomeTV.com the mainstay of a retooled e-commerce initiative and building web marketing synergy between ShopatHomeTV.com and the web store of DIY.com and HGTV.com. “The best way to reach all of our combined customers and motivate them to make purchases is on the web,” says Adam Rockmore, senior vice president, marketing and interactive commerce at Shop At Home TV.
The strategy is working, at least for drawing traffic. Scripps says visitors to ShopatHomeTV.com have grown from 300,000 unique monthly visitors to 700,000 unique monthly visitors. In some busy time periods, such as when the web site features popular celebrities such as cook Emeril Lagasse, monthly traffic can spike at more than 1 million unique visitors.
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