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Brief
Halfords is the UK’s leading specialist retailer for automotive parts and accessories, cycling and leisure.
Halfords wanted to launch a new mobile phone platform to serve the rapidly growing number of shoppers who are buying online from their mobiles.
Strategy
The Mobile platform is very intuitive and quick and easy to use. It enhances the retailer’s multi-channel proposition and delivers a unique and compelling mobile shopping experience for its customers, enabling them to pay for orders via their mobile phone. Chris Corbin, Head of Multichannel at Halfords said: “More and more of our customers are accessing our site via mobile and we want them to have the same experience as they have from a computer. Smartphones point to how trends in shopping habits are changing fast.”
Execution
Launched in August 2010, the cutting-edge mobile optimised website makes Halfords one of the first retailers in the UK to deploy their full range of store products to a mobile platform, serving the rapidly growing number of shoppers who are buying online from their mobiles.
Visitors browsing to Halfords.com via any mobile device are now automatically directed to the new mobile platform, where they can search for products, read customer reviews, make product comparisons, locate their nearest store that stocks that product, then choose from Home/Work Delivery, Order & Collect (Free to Store) or Reserve & Collect.
When using the new dotmobile site, customers can choose to pay by credit/debit card or PayPal, the same payment methods supported by Halfords.com. Halfords is the first mass UK retailer to offer PayPal as a mobile payment method.
Salmon have optimised Halfords’ mobile platform and developed it using the same underlying architecture and sales catalogue structures as Halfords.com (IBM WebSphere Commerce). Developing the transactional capability involved complex integration by Salmon between the mobile site, DataCash, and PayPal to offer 3-D Secure. Salmon also integrated the mobile site with Multimap, SAP and Store6.
The site has been cleverly designed to work specifically for mobile phones, the vertical design works well fitting the shape of the phone screen and making it easier to click the right option.
Customers with an iPhone also benefit from the use of CSS, with items shifting on the page according to how the customer chooses to hold their phone (portrait/landscape).
The site also has some unique touches. When browsing, if you select car batteries, you are then asked for your registration or make and model of car and the system automatically finds the right parts for your car.
Results
Since the launch of the dotmobile site, the retailer has seen mobile visitor numbers increase to 8% of Halfords’ dotcom total. Conversion levels have also doubled.
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