Demandware has been selected by Hotel Chocolat, the chocolate gifts and luxury present retailer, to support its digital growth. Demandware will provide a unified digital commerce platform that offers features and enhancements, such as responsive design so that Hotel Chocolat can cater for mobile consumers and deliver an easy gifting experience.
“We want our customers to be able to shop anywhere and at any time,” explained Melissa Shackleton, head of commercial at Hotel Chocolat. “We started as a pure online business and have a strong heritage in mail marketing so know that an interaction offline can prompt a transaction online. As a result, making mobile and tablets work more effectively with Demandware Commerce Cloud, will be a huge benefit and provide a massive growth opportunity for Hotel Chocolat.”
Hotel Chocolat was established in 1987 with the aim of making a healthier and more satisfying cocoa hit that contains more cocoa and less sugar. It started selling chocolates online in 1993 and now has 85 stores and a mail order business. In 2014, it launched two new stores in Copenhagen and recently opened The School of Chocolate in its Copenhagen City store.
Hotel Chocolat will move its English and Danish website to Demandware, providing it with the flexibility to easily add on additional sites as it grows internationally. The websites will be optimised for the large number of consumers that use mobile and tablet devices to improve the online offering. In addition, Hotel Chocolat will enhance the gifting experience by including a feature that allows customers to design
personalised hampers online.
“It was an easy decision to select Demandware as a partner. We will now be able to leverage a larger infrastructure and take advantage of regular new features to deliver an easy and enjoyable seamless gifting experience for our customers across multiple channels,” added Shackelton.
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