| Boston Proper Sees Sales Surge 70 Percent after launch on the
MarketLive E-Commerce Platform No matter how attractive a company’s merchandise, or how temptingly it is presented on the Web, sales will reach their full potential only by following the golden rule of direct marketing: “Put the right merchandise in front of the customer, in a timely manner, and make it easy for her to buy it,” says Margaret Moraskie, Director of E-Commerce at Boston Proper, a leading multi-channel specialty retailer of distinctive apparel designed for today’s independent,  confident and active woman. Moraskie, a veteran retailer in both the online world and offline catalogs and stores, speaks with authority; the company’s site, BostonProper.com, saw sales surge 70 percent after launching on the MarketLive® E-Commerce Platform. Several months later, online sales have risen to 44 percent of total sales – sustained proof that the MarketLive E-Commerce Platform provides Boston Proper exactly what they need to connect with customers. Power that allows creative merchandising to flourish
“I think of our online environment like a store – an extension of the brand, not a catalog, because it is a direct sales channel offering thousands of products. The MarketLive® E-Commerce Platform allows me to use my merchandising and selling skills almost effortlessly, as if I were working one-on-one with a customer in a store,” Moraskie says. She has spent more than 15 years in the retail industry, including twelve with Boston Proper in its catalog, operations and e-commerce divisions, and has encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston Proper customer. “We are targeting an upscale, affluent baby boomer customer, someone who is stylish, well-traveled and busy. She is also a very savvy online shopper – if we do not give her a satisfying online shopping experience, she will go to another site that will.”
Moraskie cites four capabilities of the MarketLive® solution that have helped build customer loyalty and drive online sales upward: The ability to deliver a rich user experience that extends the Boston Proper brand: The site leverages the extensive on-location photography used in Boston Proper’s offline catalogs, a hallmark of the company’s brand. “We invite our customers into the site with provocative, evocative creative. Beautiful photos of distinctive clothing, showcased in exotic locations around the world, is what our customer expects of the Boston Proper brand. The previous platform could not handle a fraction of the graphics we now use; its poor performance put severe limitations on our creativity,” she says. The performance and technical soundness of the MarketLive solution: “I used to say that customers suffered through our site,” Moraskie laughs. “But the reality is that it should have been fast and easy to use, and it wasn’t. We saw an instant difference with MarketLive. What was once a site that was hard to use, buggy, slow and unpredictable is now an online store that is easily navigable, always up, fast and a joy to shop at.” The ease of cross-selling on the site: The MarketLive® E-Commerce platform enables Boston Proper to present complementary items for each article sold on the site – more than 2,000 styles in all. Each item page contains four cross-sells hand-picked by the Boston Proper merchants, a method that is highly effective in boosting sales. The cross-sell “From the very beginning of our online presence, we wanted our customer to feel as if she were in a boutique, and that the site was like a super salesperson,” she explains. “The catalog customer who buys online really benefits; she is presented with complementary styles for everything she picks. And we see the results. Whether the customer picks up an extra item, or hits the clearance area, she is putting more units in her shopping cart.” Specifically, online orders account for 42 percent of Boston Proper’s order volume, but 44 percent of total sales. 
The ability to update the site easily, keeping it fresh: With MarketLive as well as previous providers, Boston Proper designs the site and uses the provider’s resources to build it. Updates and refreshes are handled in-house by the E-Commerce team and Boston Proper’s IT department. “We can put out a new catalog online every four to six weeks, more quickly and efficiently, without any downtime,” Moraskie says. “With the old platform, we would get everything ready on our staging site, and then someone would literally be up all night pushing data to the production site. With the MarketLive E-Commerce Platform, we immediately needed less support from the IT team. We can push a button and 15 minutes later the site is refreshed. We can also change elements such as photos or descriptions immediately, based on product availability or customer feedback. “MarketLive provides many innovative capabilities that add up to a big boost in our creativity,” she continues. “For example, we now have a variety of excellent templates we can use to make the site look different. This is priceless – because Boston Proper is such a visual brand, that kind of capability is so important. By keeping the site fresh, we keep our customers coming back.” The online division also does several virtual catalogs each year – for shoes and accessories, and holiday – that are only available online, adding to the exclusivity of the online shopping experience.
The right relationship is everything
Boston Proper’s online presence began in 1998 with an online order form. The first interactive site was launched in 1999 on a proprietary platform that later became defunct. In 2002 a new site was launched using a well-known hardware and service provider’s Web platform, including development and hosting services. Unfortunately, the site never performed to Boston Proper’s expectations and the provider would not give the business the attention that it needed. In the summer of 2004 Boston Proper made the decision to completely rebuild the site, with a goal of raising its performance to handle the sales volume that Boston Proper management was confident existed. “During our selection process, we decided to leave the large provider and went with MarketLive,” Moraskie says. “MarketLive is focused on middle market companies like ours, and they have excellent experience in the catalog space. We knew that the learning curve would be short, and that MarketLive was fundamentally organized to better meet our service level requirements. We got the attention we required during the development and launch of our site.”
MarketLive® delivers immediate, and sustained, sales results
After going live in February 2005 – with an extremely low number of documented bugs – a record number of orders were taken on the BostonProper.com site the day it launched. Moraskie’s analysis of the sales surge is straightforward: “The proof is always in the pudding, and the day after launch we could see a difference in our online business. The performance and functionality of the MarketLive E-Commerce platform showed us how just how high demand levels were, which our former site could not handle.” Sales levels have since remained high, with BostonProper.com’s fourth quarter 2005 sales running 70 percent ahead of those from fourth quarter 2004.
Boston Proper’s future plans include expansion. The company is “very excited” about MarketLive’s Omniture Web analytics, which will provide a better understanding of consumer behavior. An affiliate marketing plan and a stepped-up email marketing program are also in the works. “We’ve always had plans to do comprehensive online marketing,” Moraskie says, “but for years our site could barely handle the traffic generated by a catalog drop. Now we have the performance and uptime to handle even the busiest times with ease. And, throughout the process, we have built such a strong partnership with MarketLive that our success is their success, too.”
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