ISPO Event in Munich with the Webtogs Team

Gareth    Clothing, eCommerce, General Outdoor    

The other week James, Phil (that’s me), Colin, and Rich hot-tailed it over to the ISPO show in Munich to get a real feel for the size of the outdoor industry and meet a lot of new brands that we wanted to sign up to the site and shop. James will probably do a follow up post to this soon, but from my perspective, the main thing that struck me was the sheer size of the thing. The exhibition centre itself was about 15x that of the NEC in Birmingham and it took us the whole day to go through 3 of the 21 halls!

There was a huge number of brands present all showcasing their entire range and I’m amazed by how many products there actually are out there and what a small % of them we actually stock right now. I think if we had unlimited cash we would have bought up everything there including the really cute kid’s walking boots!

We’ve signed some top brands for that event that will go live later this year and started to pre-order the gear. Even my favourite ones are now ready to go live… of which I think Merrell went live on monday…

Key Highlights for me:

• A taxi driver taking us down some dodgy country back roads in the middle of nowhere late one night
• Living the high life in the 1* hotel Jame had booked us all into – and we had to share a room with bunk beds!
• James drinking a good 8 steins of 2 pint beers and feeling a bit worse for wear on the morning of our flight
• Signing our new brands and having some great team strategy meetings after having missed our initial flight.

I’ve put some photos below from the event and you can see the full set here on Flickr

Webtogs in the weekend Telegraph

Gareth    Clothing, eCommerce    

Sorry it’s been a while since any of us posted on here – we’ve had the most manic couple of months known to man. Our traffic and sales projections for all of 2008 were beaten a week ago and we’ve been rapidly scaling things up to cope with all the extra orders. It’s been an amazing ride so far and this year looks set to be one hell of a steep, yet fun curve.

Over the weekend we got a sudden spike in traffic and then heard that Webtogs has been featured in a full page spread in the Telegraph – hurray! I can’t find a link to the online version yet (maybe they haven’t put it live yet) so here’s the scanned in article (click on it to see a larger version)

Our Zero hassle, eco-friendly, easy-to-use site messages came across really well and we’re chuffed to bits. Who would have thought that a small campfire chat last year would result in so much so soon…Onward!

The Future of eCommerce – where next?

Gareth    eCommerce    

I’ve been part of the eCommerce space for nine years now and I’ve loved every minute of it, seeing the first online merchants go live, the first price comparison engine launch in the UK (shopgenie -> Kelkoo UK), and research and review sites gaining a foothold.

There has been many challenges from badly designed sites, delivery screw-ups, and security concerns – all still present today but with many more people “getting it”.

The industry itself has continued to grow and expand as more web-savvy customers come along, start spending more, and feel more confident buying all manner of more expensive goods from clothing to cars. In the UK, sales are up 36% on last year and generating over 4 billion pounds per month, with apparel accounting for nearly 15% of that (figures and graph from Forrester Research):

So the question for me is – “what is the ecommerce world going to do over the next few years and how can Webtogs take advantage of it?”. In answer to this, I’ve listed a few trends I’m watching in particular and considering how to relate these to the business:

1. Social Bookmarking & Sharing of Products – we’ve seen examples of this at places like Kaboodle where users clip things they’ve seen on the web and then can share those lists and discuss them with others. In theory, we could offer this functionality to people who wanted to produce shareable lists of outdoor adventure gear, although the jury is still out on how many people use this type of feature on a regular basis.
2. Virtual Dressing Rooms – which is getting very Boo.com like but also makes sense. Sites like Zafu let you tell it your size and then it shows a 3d model of you and issues personalised recommendations. Could work perhaps for outdoor clothing.
3. User Generated Content – There’s lots of research around showing how ecommerce reviews help people make buying decisions that translates into a conversion rate uplift – and this can be standard reviews, product videos (hundreds on youtube), and even q/a sessions. Of course, I have to mention Crowdstorm at this point but also James has mentioned the Reevoo boys too who provide this sort of content.
4. Getting the Basics Right – which is probably the most important of them all, from having the ability to contact a physical person in multiple ways (email, skype, phone, live online chat), having a really usable and enjoyable site, and a smooth checkout process.
5. Better Delivery Options – whilst not as exciting, have a lot of future innovations coming up which should really make this a better experience. Night time deliveries, ability to pick-up products from multiple drop off points and return them, paying a membership fee each year to get exclusive delivery options, and being able to choose times within 30 minute windows.

These are probably the top five that interest me right now, all of which can be expanded in much more detail than I’ve listed above. One things for sure – finally ecommerce is innovating again and if you don’t move fast – you’ll be left behind!