Multichannel toy retailer The Entertainer says it’s seeing
year-on-year double-digit growth in its online sales, thanks to a
number of recently added initiatives.
For the year ended January 2011, the privately owned company
reported a sales rise of 8.4 percent to £71 million. Profits
dipped slightly from £1.4 million to £1 million, but
multichannel director Duncan Grant says this was better than
expected, as the business had budgeted for a profit of
£750,000.
The decline, says Grant, is mainly due to investment in the
business, which included a warehouse move and an aggressive
store-opening programme. Last year, the business relocated the
warehouse servicing its stores from Amersham in Buckinghamshire
to Swindon. Subsequently, the warehouse serving the company’s
online arm was moved from a short-lease warehouse into the
larger, more-sophisticated Amersham hub.
Web sales now account for 10 percent of total sales, and Grant
says growth has been phenomenal, “JohnLewis.com recently
saw 27 percent growth, we’re beating that,” he says.
Driving online growth, says Grant, is a wider product range, a
better customer service, and a focus on availability-reducing
out-of-stocks, especially at Christmas.
Other growth drivers have been customers’ growing take-up of
store home delivery. In place since 2009, the service enables
stores to place orders on behalf of customers for delivery to
their homes. Building on that for 2010, The Entertainer began
offering a click and collect service. Trialled in June 2010 in
just a handful of stores, the service was rolled out to the
entire network by the following month. “In just over a
year-august-to-august-click and collect sales have
doubled,” says Grant, adding that the service was
instrumental at Christmas.
What’s more, Christmas 2010 was a catalyst for further
development, says Grant. The bad weather experienced last
December “put the business under pressure and showed us
where we could improve,” particularly in back-end
processes. For the current fiscal year, both the stores and the
web are showing positive like-for-like growth and Grant says that
the company has much up its sleeve for the new year. Among the
most ambitious is the aim of reducing the click and collect
turnaround time from two to three days, to just 30 minutes.
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