Shop the M&S way

British high street chain Marks & Spencer re-launched its website and extended the ‘Shop Your Way’ service. It is the first major review since the Amazon re-launch in 2007.Since the website launched in 1999, the Marks & Spencer site has grown significantly an now offers over a 22,000 products, including key growth areas such as flowers, wine, gifts, hampers, white goods and technology, personalised cards, made-to-measure shirts and new services such as Food to Order, M&S Energy and international delivery to 80 countries.

Following customer research, M&S has upgraded the website’s core functionality and design in a bid to support future growth, and improve the customer shopping experience. Key changes made by the company include catwalk videos, stock availability, flexible search feature, ratings and a pop-up shopping basket that shows customers their selection without being diverted from their shopping page.

The further develop a multi-channel service, M&S introduced Shop Your Way. Customers are able to place clothing, beauty and homeware orders in stores, online or over the phone, for home delivery, or free delivery to their nearest store for collection. Shop Your Way will be extended from 46 to 163 locations in the next month.

Steve Rowe, Director of Retail and M&S Direct, said: “Shop Your Way is central to our multi-channel strategy so that we reach new generations of customers in a way that is convenient for them. It’s already proven incredibly popular with customers particularly in our smaller stores that perhaps don’t offer the full range of M&S products. As a result of this success, we’re now extending ‘Shop Your Way’ to another 106 main chain stores and 11 Simply Food stores to help make our customers’ lives easier, especially in the run-up to Christmas.”

In the fiscal year 2008/09, Marks & Spenser reported sales of £324.4 million, an increase of 19.0%. The company targets an annual salesof £500m by 2010/11.