Marks & Spencer’s relaunched website suffered a sales decline – could the retailer have succeeded with greater attention to customer needs?

As Marks & Spencer has discovered, the relaunch of an ecommerce website is a risky business and any error can come at a high price.

As Marks & Spencer has discovered, the relaunch of an ecommerce website is a risky business and any error can come at a high price.

Changing consumer behaviour means an ever-growing proportion of sales now comes from online, so the opportunity to invest in a new website should be a cause for celebration.

That has not been the case for M&S, which has faced criticism after its online sales plunged by 8.1% in the first quarter following the launch of its new website, which had been years in the making.

M&S chief executive Marc Bolland denies there is an issue and said the new website is “a journey, not something customers recognise in a morning”.

Is he right? Is M&S’s website relaunch being unfairly singled out for the dip in sales or is performance out of step with ecommerce experience elsewhere?

eNova ecommerce managing consultant Gavin Williams, who worked on the Harvey Nichols website relaunch, accepts it is not uncommon for there to be a drop in sales when a site launches but argues that should only “last a matter of days and not weeks”.

M&S’s decision to move off the Amazon platform came a year after Mothercare did the same. However, the maternity retailers’s online sales surged  18.2% in the quarter after the move, in contrast to the drop off in M&S’s sales.

While it is common that any new website will have teething problems, a good relaunch should iron out any big issues before the site’s grand unveiling to minimise any disruption to sales.

The examples of poor ecommerce launches are easier to identify than the successes. The textbook example is sports clothing retailer Boo.com, which built such a complex website in the 1990s that it rendered it practically unusable.

The website’s lack of usability is now cited as one of the main contributing factors in the company’s collapse following the dotcom boom.

Successful new ecommerce sites spring less readily to mind because their very success is reliant on them being intuitive and representing a seamless transition for the user – which is less headline-grabbing than a bungled launch.

Ed Beard, head of creative strategy at digital agency DigitasLBi, believes that the secret to a good ecommerce launch is not being “too clever”.

He credits John Lewis as being a retailer that has “always improved” its ecommerce offer as a result of being clear about its strategy and brand identity.

Beard argues that when “you go onto the M&S site you are not quite sure if it is a magazine or somewhere to buy a shirt”, whereas John Lewis’s site drives ecommerce sales by quickly leading customers to the product and, when appropriate, clearance Sales rather than a piece of editorial.

Beard says that initiatives including John Lewis’s price-match tool and the work done to create a seamless experience between channels also attracts shoppers.

Attention to detail

As so often in retail, the devil is in the detail. Beard warns against “taking people too far into a world they are not used to” with a new ecommerce site.

And the little details all mount up. For example, by replacing an ‘add to basket’ option with ‘Your bag’, M&S needlessly added to customer confusion, according to Beard.

Practicology chief executive Martin Newman believes retailers are in danger of “alienating or creating an experience that does not work for certain customers” if they do not involve shoppers throughout the process.

He says a successful relaunch should be “a pull and not just a push” and names John Lewis and Waitrose as good examples. He also cites House of Fraser and Ted Baker – both clients of his – as being among those who have managed to address customers’ needs by including them in the redesign process.

So how does a retailer ensure it manages the right mix of testing and customer feedback when preparing the launch of a new ecommerce site?

“It’s a journey, not something customers recognise in a morning”

Marc Bolland, chief executive, Marks & Spencer

Williams recalls his own experience with Harvey Nichols as a “big bang” relaunch, which he believes offers lessons to others about the right approach to take when redeveloping back-end systems and overhauling a website’s user experience.

The department store began by building prototypes at concept stage to test elements that involved the introduction of significant changes.

At that point the ideas were also shared with other interested parties, such as key brands, to make sure merchandising was approached correctly.

Much like M&S, Harvey Nichols decided to put editorial content at the heart of its website and set out to ensure it would complement the user experience rather than potentially get in the way.

Williams accepts some of the work around the content-led approach initially did not strike the right balance between editorial and ecommerce, but the retailer was able to make the necessary adjustments before launch.

Success was gauged by conventional industry metrics including conversion rates and basket size, alongside measures such as content consumption.

Before and after the launch user feedback surveys were conducted to enable tweaks to be made to the website.

Newman agrees that key metrics should be used to benchmark a new site’s conversion rates against previous levels. He adds that bounce rates should also show an improvement by reducing friction points and allowing people to get from A to B more easily.

An example of bad site design would result in customers exiting key landing pages.

Beard says it is “absolutely essential to involve customers in the development as early as you humanly can” and that once the site is at prototype stage, user-testing should indicate where there might be problems.

The establishment of a beta site that can be used by retailers’ most valuable customers for testing in a “real-world” setting is also vital, says Beard.

Debate will continue to rage about the extent and ease of migration of M&S’s customer accounts from the Amazon platform to its new site. An M&S spokesman insists there were no problems with the migration, but that the retailer asked customers to reset passwords to improve security of their accounts.

There were also reports of some stock availability issues, but the spokesman maintains they were ill-founded and that stock levels were not a problem.

Systemic problems?

The proof of whether the new M&S website is fundamentally flawed is still to come. The retailer said that the site should return to growth by the peak trading period. Williams says the next three months will be crucial and if the issues persist then “problems are more likely to be systemic”.

When discussing the retailer’s £150m investment in its website, M&S multichannel boss Laura Wade-Gery said she wanted to emulate businesses such as Apple and Google by adopting a philosophy of “if it’s not going to work, fail fast and move on”.

M&S does appear in the eyes of many to have failed fast with the first iteration of its relaunched website.

The question now is how quickly it can move on and whether it can place the customer more firmly at the heart of its new proposition.

Newman believes there is always a danger that brands and retailers think they know better than customers.

The pressure is on M&S to show in the next few months that it really does know how its customers want to shop online.