Classic brand Start-rite Shoes has built incremental sales with a transactional website that also gives its retail partners access to multichannel services.

Stocked in retailers including John Lewis and Russell & Bromley, the shoe manufacturer thinks that it can expand onto the web without cannibalising its retail partners’ sales because it will attract a different kind of shopper who buys children’s shoes online.

Start-rite has added videos and other tools to the site for customers who want to measure their children’s feet themselves, including a piece of software called Click’n’Fit that claims to be able to accurately work out a child’s shoe size from a photo of their foot.

What’s also clever about the site is that it acts as a portal for Start-rite’s 400 retail stockists to order shoes for customers while they are in-store, if their chosen purchase is not in stock. Start-rite’s technology supplier PrimaNet has been able to utilise its existing central warehouse, staff and systems to build the new channel.

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