The online retail sector in particular seems to be bucking the sales slump trend, and has witnessed a dramatic increase in sales. With one eye on fashion and the other on cutting edge web management tools, JD Williams has been able to expand its home shopping channels massively in recent months and boost their performance along the way.

The British Retail Consortium recently reported that UK online sales grew by a third in December 2008 over last year. Despite the recession, consumers are clearly turning to the Internet for their retail fix. The combination of a shift in economic conditions and changing fashion demands means that the retail sector has to react and fast. At JD Williams it became apparent that the company needed to provide further product visibility and service pro-activity to maintain the rapid growth of its internet channels. Although the company’s online channel achieved a 45 per cent increase in the first six months of 2008 to £106 million, the group IT department needed tools to better manage web applications, to improve the availability of products, particularly those featured on TV or online media.

JD Williams already operates a substantial online operation. With 25 catalogue brands, 50 interlinked sites and £200 million sales going through the websites with a capacity of over 250,000 purchases; finding a web application performance manager to support and improve the company’s internet channel for home shopping business at first appeared a tall order.

With increasing pressure from web-savvy users for retailers to provide an improved customer experience online, JD Williams needed to make the websites richer and more dynamic whilst taking into account that these needs subsequently increase the demand on resources. CA’s Wily Introscope product offered an analytical answer to the complex issues that will help the company improve on all web application reporting and performance.

CA Wily Introscope can evaluate different interconnected elements of website operation such as core processing, user response times and spikes in demand; create dashboards for operators to monitor performance and resource usage and provide a bespoke customer experience barometer. The overall benefit is a more responsive online service that can detect problems before they affect the customer and thus provide a richer online shopping experience.

This real time analytical capability was timely owing to the ‘Gok Wan Effect’ in UK retailing. With fashion shows featuring stylist Gok Wan such as ‘How to look good naked’ and “Gok’s fashion fix’  seeing soaring demand as viewers attached huge importance to recommendations by Gok and other fashion gurus. The online retail sector has had to brace itself for huge peaks in demand for particular product lines – or instant demand for clothes that have caught the TV fashionista’s eye. Data shows that internet sales now represent 3.5 per cent of total retail sales and with the increasing popularity of fashion/makeover shows and the consumers ever present need to have that ‘must have’ dress; consumers are going online in their droves to find recommended items on the internet.

After the Channel 4 show, JD Williams experienced an increased number of viewers logging into the site and buying online. Using CA’s Wily Introscope, we can look at what image servers are serving simple or complex graphics and see where the load is coming from. If we can monitor this traffic then we can tweak infrastructure elements such as turning off some video to cope with the peak volume from incidents such as the ‘The Gok Wan Effect’. In addition to coping with peak loads we have made our websites a lot richer than they used to be by offering video and dynamic content as part of the package to the consumer. These changes are part of our plan to make the site more interactive and experiential, including front page re-vamps to resemble a catalogue or a women’s magazine.

The CA Wily Introscope technology will support the future deployment of new features, such as allowing customers to view on-line Avatars and dress them, letting shoppers enter clothing sizes and manipulate 3-D shoe images to look at them from different angles.

In the fast paced retail world, websites are continually evolving to keep up with the latest digital trend and catch the attention of the increasing number of online consumers as broadband is extended throughout the UK. Specifically in the UK’s growing online retail sector, the competitive pressures are more intense than ever.

CA’s Wily Introscope has allowed JD Williams to enhance our home shopping sites without requiring a massive increase in power. This approach has minimised the need for capital investment in hardware upgrades. These changes have optimised the resources available to sites that handle up to three million purchases a year and over 250,000 visitors a day. Overall, being on top of our game has increased our ability to handle more sales and most importantly improve the overall customer experience.