At the recent Lengow Day 17 in Paris I was able to talk to Sean McKee, Director of Ecommerce and Customer Experience at Schuh. Sean has been at Schuh for a decade and so brings a ton of experience covering both changes within the company and in the ecommerce arena in general.
Schuh reported a turnover of £280.9m in the year to end of January 2017 and, since the first Schuh store opened in 1981, they have grown to over 100 UK High Street stores. They also have a maturing business in Ireland and are expanding to Germany. The online segment of their business is trending at around 18-19% of their overall business but Sean says that does depend upon how you count ‘online’ when you have a true omni-channel offering.
What’s also interesting to note is that some of the changes they’ve put into the business in recent years saw sales rise 5.3% with pretax profits growing 9.3% to £16.6m. Schuh are a ‘large retailer’ in every sense of the word.
Schuh, with any years of experience selling online, have some valuable insights to share. For instance how do to integrate a shop real estate with your website? Will social ever work or are the “early days” of social actually all we can expect? What are the interesting benefits of live chat and what difference does video chat compared to text chat make?
One of the great things about learning from a large retailer is that they’ve done the experiments, made the mistakes and discovered some of the very best practices available to retailers for 2017 and beyond. So whether your website is large or small, watch the video below to learn from Schuh and decide which lessons you can apply to your business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=musD45XpBGc
