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Industry: Mass Merchants & Dept Stores Solution: eCatalog, Dynamic Imaging, Media Portal  Challenges:
House of Fraser, a department store group with 62 locations across the UK and Ireland, is one of the most recognizable names in the fashion industry. Known for delivering an unparalleled shopping experience for over 150 years, House of Fraser set its sights on doing the same for its 500 + luxury designer brands online. With luxury items spanning beauty essentials to home accessories, the premium department store desires to offer its customers a unique shopping experience on the web, which includes enabling features like product zoom and color swatching so that shoppers can learn as much about a product through the website as they might by actually touching it or trying it on in-store. Best Practices: With ambitious plans to continue growing the business exponentially through eCommerce, Scene7 has been able to help House of Fraser deliver year over year profits – even in a “down economy” through cross-channel merchandising and leveraging Scene7’s unique suite of rich media services including eCatalogs, Dynamic Imaging, and Media Portal. "Adobe Scene7 is helping us to engage new customers and to meet our challenging revenue targets," said Peter Callaway, Director of eCommerce, House of Fraser. "We recognized that we needed to support our in-house merchants with the best functionality and tools to accomplish our growth objectives." House of Fraser originally chose Scene7 for its best-in-class tools that enable merchants to have complete control of merchandising and marketing, freeing the IT department to focus on other initiatives. Delivering a fully scalable and flexible platform and Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture, Scene7 seamlessly integrates with its core systems and third-party partners. And so, leveraging Scene7’s best-of-breed merchandising and marketing tools to create a rich, user-friendly shopping experience, House of Fraser could appeal to brand-conscious shoppers. Some of the key site features include:
"The process is all automated - alleviating the need for us to get involved in the daily upload of new images. Scheduled jobs are automatically pushed 3x a day from our photographers, and the system instantly creates all of the sizes, swatches, and zoom features that we need for each product. It’s fantastic." Jo Kouti, eCommerce Manager, House of Fraser. With the embedded viewer in place, shoppers don’t have to leave the product page or spawn a new window to view an item of interest in greater detail; the zoom function brings the product to life with a granular look at color, texture and fine details like stitching. House of Fraser has also employed text overlay which flags critical information about a product, i.e., “New”, “Exclusive” and “Special offers.” This helps customers to identify what they can and can’t have in the initial stages of the shopping experience. "Scene7 Professional Services provided a simple solution for creating color swatches dynamically from the main image of the product. This has helped us streamline production immeasurably," Colette Wilson, eCommerce Development Lead, House of Fraser. eCatalogs. House of Fraser was able to quickly create interactive versions of its print materials using Scene7 eCatalogs. Dynamically assembled and served, Scene7 eCatalogs aided in the delivery of segmented, personalized interactive versions of the print catalogs. Unlike pre-built online catalogs, eCatalogs are instantly reconfigured and updated on the fly making it simple to deliver more relevant, targeted content to drive online sales more cost-effectively. Since launching the website just over a year ago, House of Fraser has produced four unique eCatalogs just by uploading PDFs into the system, rendering them immediately available to the public in real time. “eCatalogs have been very useful in presenting the same marketing material as is available in the stores and enables us to link directly to the products being sold on the site,” Colette Wilson. Media Portal. Scene7 Media Portal has made it possible for House of Fraser to quickly acquire, control and distribute approved creative assets to its external partners and channels, as well as internal users. This browser-based, “self-serve” environment provides portal users with administrator-controlled “views” into company assets for easy access to upload, browse, search, preview and export into myriad formats. “Media Portal is used by our Press and Marketing teams for downloading the original high resolution images. All our image suppliers are able to upload its images directly onto the scene7 FTP server for House of Fraser and by scheduling regular upload and publish jobs, the images can be published and ready to use more quickly,” Colette Wilson. The Scene7 platform has been instrumental in helping House of Fraser achieve a rich visual experience, and implement a number of advanced Web 2.0 features, which even as a fairly new player in the online space has positioned them as an industry leader. "House of Fraser is a brand-conscious department store serving brand-conscious customers," Colette Wilson. "Scene7 gives us the ability to completely control the brand experience and achieve the same high touch shopping experience enjoyed by shoppers in our brick-and-mortar stores." House of Fraser continues to leverage Scene7’s multi-faceted rich media service set to focus on a truly brand-centric experience. Delivering best-in-class eCommerce functionality, Scene7 has enabled House of Fraser to achieve year over year higher conversion rates, increased average order size, and greater customer retention. |
