Tag: nordstrom

The luxury department store reported considerable sales increases in this year’s second quarter.

Nordstrom mobile commerce gets the credit for powerful online sales growth for the luxury department store. The company has released its 2016 Q2 earnings report. The report showed strong mobile engagement.

This powerful growth over mobile commerce occurred despite an overall decline in total sales in all channels.

Nordstrom mobile commerce is now outpacing shopping over laptop and desktop computers. In fact, the retailer has credited m-commerce for much of its current online successes. Shoppers using smartphones and tablets played an important role in the quarter’s e-commerce results.

This shift toward mobile shopping did not occur by accident. Nordstrom has been making considerable investments into mobile tools. The company wants customers to be engaged over their mobile devices.

Nordstrom mobile commerce was a high priority in Q2 2016 as the company focused heavily on its app.

The Nordstrom report revealed considerable insight into the company’s performance during the second quarter. It also underscored the power of mobile shopping as the company placed a focus on its smartphone app.

Among the insight provided in the report was the following:

• Nordstrom saw a year over year decline in total sales. They reached $3.5 billion, which was a drop of 1.2 percent over the same quarter in 2015.
• Total online sales for the company increased by 9.4 percent, year over year. In the second quarter of this year, they reached $683 million.
• Total off-price retail site sales and flash-sale site (HauteLook) sales exploded by almost 35 percent. This was a massive growth over the same quarter in 2015 as it reached $157 million.

The added investment into the Nordstrom mobile commerce app drove performance significantly. The company worked hard to ensure the mobile app would be highly engaging. Among the top features was one that allowed customers shop from specific store locations as well as a visual search function. Co-president and director of the company, Erik B. Nordstrom, explained that this effort was precisely what propelled m-commerce forward and beyond desktop during that quarter. It also explains why the retailer will continue to move in that direction.

The retailer has provided its sales associates with the ability to send these SMS images of merchandise.

Nordstrom Inc. has announced that it is providing its sales associates with a new mobile marketing tool by way of the ability to provide customers with photo texts of merchandise that may be relevant to those shoppers.

The company has started to use a new service through Twilio, a business that offers new messaging capabilities.

These mobile marketing tools are being provided by Twilio to a number of different websites and is now working its way into Fortune 500 companies. Nordstrom has chosen to take on this new capability at a time in which online and mobile commerce is greatly picking up in momentum. Brick and mortar shops are finding themselves in a highly competitive market and those that do not keep up with the technological element, including features for smartphone users, risk rapidly falling behind.

Nordstrom discovered that nearly one in three customers would prefer text based mobile marketing communications.

According to Dan Evans, a spokesperson for Nordstrom, “Almost one-third of our customers have told us they prefer to be contacted by text message and more importantly text messaging with pictures to share fashion images or photos of merchandise with each other.”

Before working with Twilio, sales associates from Nordstrom were able to text customers who had opted in to receive notifications about new merchandise that they might like. However, when using the old system, it was too costly for the retailer to send images along with those messages. Moreover, the retailer was required to wait for months in order to receive the necessary short code to which a given mobile ad could be sent via text. According to Twilio’s data, when all is said and done, a company could spend over $10,000 on each individual short code, per year.

Twilio was able to come up with a mobile marketing deal with three telecom carriers, making It possible for the company to instantly obtain a standard 10 digit phone number for all MMS communications, eliminating the need for those short codes at $10 thousand, each. Its clients pay prices as low as $1 per number, $0.02 to send messages and $0.01 to receive them, offering volume discounts.