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Brief
Barratts Priceless, the UK’s second largest independent shoe retailer with brands including Priceless, Barratts, Discount Shoe Store, Petitfeet, Big Shoe Boutique, Mini Barratts and Love Your Shoes wanted to launch an iPhone Application to coincide with the opening of a new flagship store on Oxford Street.
Strategy
The iPhone Application would support Barratts vision for multi-channel excellence, deliver a virtual shopping experience and encourage customers to explore and interact with their portfolio of branded footwear.
Execution
To deliver the iPhone Application Barratts worked with Salmon and Infogain. Salmon had successfully redeveloped Barratts entire eCommerce platform in 2008 and took advantage of their powerful “customer interaction platform” built on IBM WebSphere Commerce to help Infogain, another Barratts Partner develop the iPhone App.
Currently customers can view Barratts’ entire footwear collection, and search by occasion (weddings/evening dress/casual wear, etc.) or by brand. To capture the imagination, customers can upload images to a changing room where they can mix and match their outfits against the latest show styles. Using inspiration such as a birthstone finder, customers can search and select the appropriate colours and styles in a personalised way.
Ken Platt, Head of eCommerce at Barratts said, “We are currently working with Salmon so that we can offer an even more compelling mobile experience for customers. To do this Salmon will develop more interfaces between Barratts’ in-store POS systems, website, call centre and back office systems. Once this is complete our aim is to allow customers to email, mms and Facebook their outfit choices to friends, and upload their “completed look” to the Barratts website to enter a dedicated “My Barratts Style” online competition. Salmon will also help Barratts implement full commerce capabilities with customers able to purchase online for home delivery or click and collect. Together we are also looking at loyalty recognition and voucher fulfillment with scannable barcodes which will all help us to provide a totally integrated experience for the customer.”
For the next phase of Barratts’ mobile commerce strategy, they will expand the Apps to deliver a more sophisticated mobile commerce experience. Barratts are planning to include click and collect, GPS enabled store finder and targeted SMS marketing and promotions. The Apps and a .mobi site will provide a shopping basket and checkout process.
The iPhone application works by accessing a server containing an extract of Barratts product data. This extract is kept synchronised with the eCommerce website to ensure product details, pricing and stock positions are up-to-date and consistent across channels. To deliver the iPhone application they surface product information using RESTful services (Representational State Transfer) and XML interfaces which support the required integration between Barratts core customer interaction platform (IBM WebSphere Commerce) and specialist search and navigation technology (Omniture).
Results
Barratts now have a rock solid commerce platform in place that supports their ongoing eCommerce needs and mobile needs, and by the end of the year hope to extend their mobile offering to other mobile operating systems including Android, Blackberry and Nokia.
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