The store sold a range of cookware, cast iron utensils, cleaning materials and other household products. In 1967 the company's reputation for uncompromising value and dedicated customer service was recognised by the grant of a warrant to supply the household of Her Majesty the Queen. In September 1997 the company acquired RJ's HomeShop Ltd. 

Today the Cargo HomeShop brand epitomises contemporary furniture and aspirational homewares at affordable prices.  With almost 50 stores and a turnover of circa £33m and 350 plus employees Cargo HomeShop is one of the UK's leading retailers.

CHALLENGE

Cargo HomeShop already had an existing e-commerce solution, however, in recent years its performance was diminishing and it was hard for them to up date and run promotions without the aid of their existing web developer.

PureNet was given the challenge to design a new easy to navigate and easy to manage e-commerce solution that would give Cargo HomeShop full control over their products, categories and promotions such that they could start to generate more sales and create bigger orders.

The solution had to be ready for Christmas 2007 and be able to cope with the hundreds of visitors that visit the site at the same time.

SOLUTION

The solution was built using PureNet’s WebPOS e-commerce platform allowing Cargo HomeShop to manage products, orders and promotions.   The solution allows Cargo to configure promotions across various products and for different scenarios, all possible because of the inbuilt Intelligent Promotions Engine in WebPOS.  The inbuilt WYSIWYG designer allows Cargo to manage the look and feel of all their pages.  The inbuilt Campaign Manager allows them to schedule page changes and promotion activation on certain days giving them the ability to plan the look and the feel of the site for future events.

The solution integrates directly into their fulfilment provider’s warehouse management system giving exact stock figures on the site and providing a directly link from the e-commerce site to the point of pick and ship.  The inbuilt Web Tracking and Site Metrics tools allow Cargo to track visitor numbers, visitors paths, orders taken and various trends to help them understand the behaviour of their customers.

The site gets a significant amount of traffic and the WebPOS e-commerce platform's high-performance architecture has been designed to cope with the high volume of visitors the site attracts each day.

The solution took eight weeks to design, build, test and deploy, within budget and certainly within the timescales.

BENEFITS

Cargo have seen a significant improvement in visitor numbers and generation of orders since the site went live. The average order size of the basket has also increased.  Their return on investment was realised within the first week of the site going live.