Archive for the ‘eCommerce’ Category


Bigger, later, faster, maler & mobiler: a very Shutl Christmas!

Monday, January 16th, 2012

After a manic December, we thought it would be interesting to dive into the data and see what we could learn from this Christmas.


Christmas was surprisingly late, though we weren’t!

  • 51% of all peak shutling happened over a 10-day period (from 14th to 23rd December), with 24% occurring over a frantic 4-day window (from 19th to 22nd December). 2010 happened to be even later / more frantic for Shutl although we suspect that was an anomaly caused by the snow and shoppers not being able to receive their previously ordered shopping.

  • Shoppers bought 2 hours later in the day versus pre-peak, with a seven-fold increase in insomniacs placing online orders between midnight and 3am.

  • Our fastest delivery was an order placed at Oasis on 16th November 2011, delivered in 17mins : 24secs of checking out. This was 41% faster than last year’s quickest (29mins : 24secs), though still some way off Shutl’s 14mins : 59secs world record set in March 2011.  Average ‘Now’ delivery time was 85mins : 01secs.



What separates the sexes?


  • Pre-peak, men accounted for only 36% of Shutl orders on average, however 38 / 40 days leading up to Christmas saw an increased proportion of men using the service. Saturday 17th December saw the first (and only) time male users outnumbered female!
  • Men seemingly have higher expectations than women – or at least perhaps they don’t value their time as highly! Feedback left by female shoppers over the period consistently ranked the Shutl service 4% higher than their male counterparts, scoring it a whopping 96% combined across ‘value for money’, ‘ease of use’, ‘speed of delivery’ & the ‘delivery person’. The greatest variance (150%) was for ‘value for money’, although male perception improved considerably over the Christmas period.



Kindle beats iPad in battle, but Apple is winning the war

  • Consumer electronics accounted for 55% of top 100 products shutl’d.
  • The Kindle was the most popular item Shutl’d, representing 1.6% of all transactions and outselling iPads by almost 2:1.
  • When including iPods, Apple narrowly pips Amazon to the post, accounting for 1.7% of all items shutl’d.



Xmas 2011: bigger, cheaper and mobiler

  • 155% increase in the availability of Shutl (0.5m+ shoppers were offered Shutl this year). This is the combined result of more retailers offering the service and the successful completion of the first phase of our national expansion plan.
  • 2,570% more shoppers chose Shutl versus 2010, driven by increased availability, greater awareness and promotional pricing.
  • The average price paid for Shutl delivery over the holiday period was £5.64, with over 40% of customers receiving their delivery for free.
  • 4,385% growth in the number of people using the Shutl service via a mobile device, with iPads proving to be the most popular (accounting for a whopping 77% of all mobile traffic).




5 Predictions for Xmas 2012

1. 5m+ shoppers will be offered Shutl during peak 2012: With increased coverage and new retailers coming on board, we expect 10x increase in availability of Shutl next year.
2. Majority of deliveries will be free: Having demonstrated this year that offering Shutl for free makes customers more likely to buy (not just choose Shutl) we expect Shutl to become a mainstream promotional tool.
3. Retailers will expand opening hours over Christmas period: Given that shoppers are shopping later, we expect several retailers serving key product categories to remain open much later in the day with some city stores even offering 24/7 delivery…
4. Shutl to me here!: It is clear to all that mobile shopping is not just a fad. We expect innovative retailers to make use of the inherent advantages of mobile and start allowing shoppers to order deliveries to non-home/work locations. i.e. hairdresser, restaurant etc.
5. Sub 10 minute delivery: With more retailers, greater coverage and improved implementations, we believe it is only a matter of time before the 10 minute barrier is broken…

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Everything you never wanted to know about delivery…

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Oh yes, the time of seasonal delivery surveys is upon us!

Don’t worry though, here at the Launchpad we’ve read them all and extracted the most interesting factoids so you don’t have to… and acknowledging that few people gets as turned on by delivery data as we do, marketing Guy has even tarted them up and created a pretty infographic for your delectation!




  1. In 2007, 29 million people received at least one home delivery over the course of the year (58% of the adult population).  By 2010 this had increased by 22% to 35m people (69% of the adult population).1
  2. In 2007, the average online shopper spent £475 over the course of the year, increasing by 44% to £682 in 2010.1
  3. Although the greatest users of home delivery are aged 35-54, the fastest growing age bracket are the 55+.1
  4. 48% of internet shoppers say that they shop online in order to save time.1
  5. 58% of shoppers say they would be more likely to use home delivery if the service was faster or more convenient.1
  6. 22% of shoppers say they would use home delivery more frequently if the charges were lower.1
  7. Almost one in ten people (9%) say they have been put off online shopping this Christmas because of previous problems with delivery.2
  8. At 27%, more than a quarter of all those polled say they had encountered a problem with online Christmas deliveries in the past.2
  9. 61% of people say they blame the retailer if a delivery is late.3
  10. 12% of people say they chose to shop with a competitor after being left waiting for too long.3
  11. 36% of customers say that when made to wait for a delivery they have complained to friends about the company, with 9% posting their complaint online.  Conversely, 32% claimed they would recommend a company for an on-time delivery.3
  12. 26% of shoppers have taken a day’s holiday to wait in for a delivery, at an estimated cost of £177 per person per annum in lost time and wages.3
  13. Almost one in 10 Britons (9%) have taken a day off sick to wait for a delivery.3





Sources:

1 Verdict UK Home Delivery & Fulfilment, November 2011 (sample: 1,944 UK consumer interviews)

2Postcode Anywhere, November 2011 (sample: 1,000 UK consumers)

3 TOA, November 2011 (sample: 1,006 UK consumers

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September is going to be busy…

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

After a long summer, September is synonymous with back to school and knuckling down … and looking at the Shutl calendar, it looks like we’re going to be very busy indeed! Here’s some of the stuff we’re up to:

Retail Systems Multichannel Retail Summit
Tuesday, 13th September 2011 @ The IOD Hub, London
FREE for retailers and consultants

Tom will be joining many leading industry experts to discuss the shortcomings of traditional delivery methods and illustrate how delivery can become a means of improving conversion, increasing AOV and enhancing the shopping experience. He will then share details of Shutl’s first clients, results to date and future plans.








BOOK NOW



Retail IT: Celebrating 10 years in Retail!
 15th September 2011 from 16:00 to 18:30 @ The Fashion and Textile Museum, London
FREE for retailers and partners of Retail IT

Tom Allason (he gets around) will be joining a hostof industry speakers and Retail IT partners to discuss current delivery trends and how these are shaping the future of the industry. He’ll also demonstrate how “putting the rocket into retailing” can deliver long-term, sustainable competitive advantage for retailers of all sizes.
BOOK NOW

The Retail Conference 2011
21st September 2011 @ America Square Conference Centre, London.
FREE for retailers

Now in its 5th year, this event attracts some 300 delegates from the UK’s leading retailers and is consistently oversubscribed. David Tarbuck, Multichannel Development & Operations Manager at Argos, will be sharing best practices in multichannel fulfilment, talking about their partnership with Shutl and the results it has delivered to date. His keynote seminar will look at:

• How such a service is made possible
• What it was like to implement
• What the impact has been on Argos’ business
• What customers are saying about it…

This is a unique opportunity to hear from Argos, the dominant force in UK multi-channel retailing, and discover how they’re innovating to ensure they can meet their customers’ wants and needs in the future. Oh yeah, and Tom will be speaking too… what a slut!
BOOK NOW

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In Celebration of Independent Retailer Month

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Independent retailers are important because they pave the way for the future.  They are the chain stores of the future that fill niches that we never thought needed filling, and now can’t live without!  Hotel Chocolat, The White Company, Specsavers and Wilkinson all started out as independent retailers, and are now a staple on every high street.  Even Clarks, a British Institution that has gone global was once a humble indie store.  In the current economic climate, it is more important than ever to support the stores of the future.  With fashion embracing the home made, ethically sourced, fairly produced and upcycled, independent retailers fit so comfortably with today’s trends and no encouragement should be needed for us to go out and and embrace indie!

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Feedback at Shutl: Why we (really) are only as good as our last delivery

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

It wouldn’t surprise me if the mantra “we’re only as good as our last delivery” were in fact the tagline of the Pony Express – it is as old as the courier industry itself. I’ve always found it more than a little disingenuous for a very simple (and perhaps somewhat pedantic) reason.

In the vast majority of cases the courier company’s client is the sender, not the recipient. The recipient has minimal influence over the courier company effecting their delivery. In most cases, an online shopper only discovers which delivery company their retailer has used when their goods arrive – or when they are instead greeted with a doormat decoration.  You only have to look at what Amazon’s customers say about their primary delivery provide to understand how absurd a notion it is that there is a negative correlation between a disappointing last delivery and the volume of future deliveries.

Forget about our last delivery, we want our first!
A key structural difference between Shutl and a conventional delivery provider is that the decision to use our service (or not) lies with the shopper. If a shopper has had a bad experience with Shutl in the past, it has a direct impact on their likelihood of using our service in the future. Since we are a start-up and virtually all our deliveries are a shopper’s first, we have to work extra hard to persuade the shopper to try us, and then make sure their first Shutl experience leads to a second.

Reviews are essential for us, both as a means of attracting shoppers willing to give our service a go and of ensuring that we provide a high level of service.

Internally, we rate our carriers’ performance using both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Our platform determines whether (or not) a carrier has collected and delivered on-time from the real-time data we take out of our courier partners’ systems. Additionally, we send an email to the consumer asking them to rate the qualitative aspects of their experience including the actual courier performing the delivery. By making these performance factors a key component of future courier selection we incentivise our carriers to perform well.

Externally, we broadcast shoppers’ feedback on our service to Twitter [@shutlfeed] and to www.shutl.co.uk/feedback. Whilst this may not be very unusual in itself, because we actively solicit comments from every customer, we receive a surprisingly high response rate. These reviews are streamed live and un-censored.

The double edged tweet
Despite consistently high levels of customer satisfaction, the volume of deliveries that we do and the nature of our industry (lots of moving parts!) means that there will always be the occasional customer who is left disappointed for one reason or another. With this in mind we have implemented a very basic commenting platform on our feedback page enabling us to engage with our customers and talk them through any problems they may be encountering.

We feel that publicly sharing all our reviews and feedback is the right thing to do for several self-serving reasons:

  • Being open makes us easier to trust: Our view is that the best way to give potential customers an accurate picture of what to expect is to give them a fair picture of what real shoppers think of our service. Further, we believe that the true test of a service’s mettle is how it responds when things don’t go to plan. Being transparent here and showing customers what they can expect enables us to set expectations realistically – and thus making it easier for us to meet them.
  • It keeps us on our toes: There is no better incentive against letting standards slip than the ever-looming possibility of an unhappy customer posting a negative comment on our homepage.
  • It enables us to prevent future problems: By actively soliciting feedback from our customers we are made aware of all kinds of niggles that consumers wouldn’t normally go to the effort of complaining about. Whilst we are small we can respond quickly to these, help iron them out and make our service better for future users.
  • We believe in what we are doing: We know our model works and drives a superior customer experience. Given this we feel our (happy) customers are the most valuable advertisements we have.

Are there any other things you think we could be doing to help us improve our service… and our chances of getting your next delivery?

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Warehouse’s up to the minute fashion…delivered in minutes!

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Warehouse brings up to the minute dresses, tops and accessories to women who love fashion and shop for the hottest trends.  Thanks to Shutl you can now have these in your hands in minutes!


So, how do you Shutl from Warehouse?
Shutling from Warehouse couldn’t be easier. Just follow these simple steps and you’ll be looking great in a matter of minutes.


1. Find the products that you wish to buy online and go to checkout.





2. Click “check your availability” next to the Shutl logo.





3. Enter your postcode.





4. Add your delivery address.





5. Relax. Your delivery will arrive within as little as 90 minutes.





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Skip the queues and be the first to get a Nintendo 3DS with Argos & Shutl!

Friday, March 25th, 2011

Given the demand for this ‘must have’ gadget, queues on the high street are likely to go out the door, round the corner and down the road.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your hands on a 3DS today without wasting your day in a queue?

Good news… like all things worthwhile, the 3DS is stocked within the catalogue of dreams.  Simply reserve the item at a Central London store on Argos.co.uk and then once you have confirmed your order choose to get it Shutl’d to you.

Shutl will deliver it to you within as little as 90 minutes or at a time of your choice from just £4.95.  You could even get it delivered straight to the pub for maximum show-off value.

Here’s how it works:
Shutl delivery is currently available from the following 12 Argos stores:

•  Whitechapel

•  Old Street

•  Holborn

•  New Oxford Street

•  Camden

•  Marble Arch

•  Victoria

•  Kilburn

•  Hammersmith

•  Old Kent Road

•  Kensington

•  Shepherd’s Bush

To place your order just follow these simple steps:
1. Find the Nintendo 3DS on argos.co.uk (by clicking on the “Shop now” button at the bottom of this post) and check local stock .


2. Reserve the item for store pick-up from one of the 12 participating Argos stores.


3. When offered Shutl delivery, click ‘Calculate my quote’.

4. Confirm your delivery postcode and choose your shutl delivery option to get a quote.


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Shutl makes shoppers 48% more profitable to retailers

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I’m told our retailer pitch is a tad long… so thought would distil down to what really matters over a series of blog posts.  This is the 2nd in the series.

Why does profitability matter?

I know this is fairly obvious but worth covering off anyway… Although a newcomer to the industry, I have pretty much gleaned that retail is all about buying low & selling high, whilst creating a shopping experience that justifies the surplus value implicit within the transaction.

It follows then that the more customers converting at the highest possible price, the better…   Afterall, turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

In my previous post I showed how Shutl improves the shopping experience – which, in turn, implicitly increases the likelihood of them returning (topic for future post).  These points alone have the potential to make a significant improvement on a retailer’s bottom line, however we also see Shutl as a means for a retailer to improve the profitability of their customers by increasing both Average Order Value (AOV) and conversion (particularly of higher value purchases).

Measuring Profitability

We have pretty cool data on our retail partners, regarding both their Shutl and non-Shutl orders.

On average over the last 10 months, across all of the retailers we work with, our orders have had an AOV 131% higher (yep, you read it right… 131% higher)  than across their normal (non-Shutl) orders.

Furthermore we have also discovered that our orders are, on average, 37% more likely to convert than the retailer’s normal (non-Shutl) orders.

So that brings us to some pretty interesting maths:

131% increase in AOV x 37% increase in conversion = 48% increase in gross profit

This is obviously very simplistic and assumes a fixed GP across all transactions and only consider transactions where Shutl was available as a delivery option… but you get the picture- these are BIG numbers.  We aim to provide client case studies in due course with a load more detail.

If you’re a retailer and would like a ballpark estimate of just how much of an impact Shutl could make to your bottom line, punch some numbers into the nifty calculator at the bottom of the page.

Why is this?

We don’t have all the answers yet… our view on the increased conversion is that shoppers are more likely to purchase because they don’t need to worry about delivery.  My previous post in the series shows just how unhappy shoppers are with standard delivery.

Perhaps AOV is more likely to be high because it is the larger baskets (size & £) where Shutl’s value proposition is most pronounced (more of a pain to collect yourself combined with the fact that delivery cost is less of an issue).  There is the consideration that where we are offered against ‘click & collect’ our conversion is also enhanced since the customer does not always collect and pay for the item.

I would be the first to admit that there is certainly a question of correlation vs causality here… but higher conversion across these higher profit items is compelling enough.  And when you couple that with increased customer loyalty from an awesome customer experience, you have a pretty compelling value proposition.

Our vision is for Shutl to become a real driver of AOV & conversion and we look forward to being in a position to share data from some of the implementations we are working on at the moment.  Watch this space!

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Shutl makes shoppers 2.4-2.8 x happier

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I’m told our retailer pitch is a tad long… so thought would distil down to what really matters over a series of blog posts.

Why does happiness matter?

Delivery is usually the last step in the customer journey, and therefore the final touch point of a retailer’s brand.  If a retailer wants that customer to keep coming back, they need to make ensure that interaction is a happy one.

We see  Shutl as a key means for a retailer to improve the loyalty of their customers (more on this in a future post), and with this in mind we are dead keen on making shoppers happy.  After all, we have a vested interest in doing so… shoppers must actively choose Shutl over other standard delivery options which are rarely branded.  They are very much our customers too and we must therefore make them happy if we want to keep them coming back.  Normal courier companies do not have this alignment; they treat the retailer as their customer.  Yes, I know the retailer obviously wants happy customers however the alignment is not direct, especially when the retailer is unaware of the shopper satisfaction.

Measuring happiness @Shutl

When I read about the UK government’s plans to measure the happiness of their customers,  it struck me that if the coalition were capable of achieving such an ephemeral ambition, then surely so must we.

Lo and behold… Shutl has a series of satisfaction questions which we send to Shutl shoppers via email as soon as they have received their delivery.  Whilst we do not pretend that it is a good indicator of how happy they are in life, we feel it is a decent indicator of their delivery satisfaction.

34% of Shutl customers have provided feedback since August (when we started asking for it) and that proportion is increasing month on month.

Over the same period, our average satisfaction score has been 94% across Ease of use, Value for money, Speed of delivery & the delivery person.

Since we started asking a Net Promoter Score question in September, Shutl’s NPS has been 80%.   This means that 85% of shoppers are rating themselves a 9-10/10 for the likelihood of them recommending Shutl to a friend or colleague.

There is also a free text field on the feedback form where shoppers can leave general feedback. These comments are posted automatically, live and unedited, onto www.shutl.co.uk, Twitter and Tumblr.

We want our service to be transparent so that shoppers (not just retailers) will want to trust us with their orders.  We want to know if there are problems and what these are so that we can fix them while we are still small and flexible.  In many ways we are fortunate to be starting from scratch so that we can do this from day 1 (well day 150 give/take).

How happy does non-Shutl delivery make shoppers?

Unfortunately we don’t possess like-for-like data from conventional delivery companies… in fact I am not aware of any conventional courier firm that actively requests this feedback from all of their customers, let alone shares it with the rest of the world.  Until such time as conventional courier companies are providing this data,  I thought a good (enough) way of judging satisfaction would be to look across social media channels to see what consumers are saying about normal delivery.

Yes, I am aware that we’re not comparing apples and apples.  Consumers tend to only broadcast extremes of opinion.  Albeit to a lesser extent, the same can be said of consumers that respond to feedback surveys…  My point is that we are aware of the bias, however we believe that we are still talking fruit.

We used Ubervu’s awesome product to analyse what consumers have been saying about their non-Shutl deliveries over the last 30 days.   We took the 10 largest delivery companies – the ones that retailers currently use. We looked only at blog posts, comments, Twitter & Facebook posts that mentioned the name of the delivery company and the term “courier” or “deliver” or “delivery” and then measured the sentiment.   We ended up excluding the Royal Mail because the volume was just too large and we also do not consider them a direct competitor.  We also excluded DHL, UPS & TNT because a lot of conversations were not coming out of UK and Ubervu did not have the means of effectively filtering this out.  The remaining companies we ended up including in the sample were: Home Delivery Network / Yodel, City Link, DPD, Interlink Express, UK Mail & Parcel Force.

I was expecting it to be bad based on my own anecdotal experience… but I had no idea just how bad.  For the month of January, 52% of all comments were negative,   41 % of all the feedback was neutral and only 7% was positive.  If that was a Net Promoter Score it would be negative.  Really negative.  -45% to be precise.

I then tried to equate this sentiment to our satisfaction score.  Assuming a negative to be 25%, neutral 50% and positive 90%, their weighted satisfaction score would be around 39%.  Again this is really best guess since we are not comparing like for like.

Given that I am not exactly a neutral observer, I have put together a pack containing all this data and our (basic) analysis for anyone to play with.

Conclusion

We already know that almost 2/3 shoppers that drop out of checkout cite delivery factors as a reason for not completing their purchase. And those are the shoppers that are considering purchasing online – who is counting the people whose experiences are turning shoppers away from the internet? One can only guess as to the true extent of delivery’s impact upon online retailers.

I don’t know about you but if I were a retailer wanting to improve customer experience & loyalty, ergo sales & profitability, I would look to find ways of making customers happier about delivery. We are not the only company innovating in this space. ByBox & Collect+ have been at it for years. “Click and Collect” (allowing customers to order online and collect in store) has been offered by Argos for the best part of a decade.

As a starting point, I would want to know just how big of a problem this was. Maybe its time to start asking your customers how happy they really are about delivery?

I can suggest an email template for anyone that wants it.  If Dave/Nick are listening, I suggest they don’t send it out at the end of the month…

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Shutl goes mainstream with Magento!

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

A lot of the people we speak to think about Shutl in the context of Argos – our ‘big’ client.  Whilst this is entirely forgivable, it is also somewhat problematic for us for 2 reasons:

1)      Whilst we are very proud of our work with Argos, the implementation is not exactly a poster-child for our service since Shutl is currently only offered to shoppers who have made a reservation from a participating Argos store.

2)      Since Argos is a very very very large retailer, some SMEs are under the impression that implementing Shutl is beyond their means.

Over the last few months we’ve been working with our friends over at POD1 to develop a shiny new Shutl module for Magento, the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform.  The module, which shows off the full capabilities of Shutl, will allow Magento customers (mainly SMEs) to quickly,, easily and cheaply offer Shutl.

If you would like to be one of the first retailers to try out the module, please comment below or drop us an email to: info@shutl.co.uk

(Screenshots below are taken from our demo environment).

About POD1

POD1 are a creative digital agency who specialise in designing beautiful, commercially focused websites that optimise the online customer experience. They have a dedicated ecommerce design team who are all specialists in getting the maximum from the Magento platform.
POD1’s e-Commerce clients include: Uniqlo, Kurt Geiger, Jigsaw, Coast, Links of London and Matthew Williamson to name but a few…

About Magento

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source ecommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, merchandising and content management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate ecommerce solution.  Magento is the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform with 60,000 merchants!

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