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Waterstones will postpone the relaunch of its website until after Christmas in order to avoid losing sales during the all-important festive season.
The retailer has been working on the revamp of its website for several months. It was originally set to relaunch in the summer, but it was then delayed until October.
The company’s managing director James Daunt has told The Bookseller that Waterstones will postpone the relaunch until 30th December in the hope of avoiding the “Marks & Spencer trap”: sales fell when M&S’ six million customers were forced to re-register when its new site launched in February. When M&S posted its financial results in July, it revealed online sales had dropped by 8.1%, which it blamed on disruption caused by the revamp.
Daunt said that with that in mind, “it would seem sensible” to hold off unveiling the new online offer—which will ask the book chain’s customers to re-register—until after Christmas, in the hope that the chain will avoid disruption in the key Christmas sales period. “Our online sales are up 40% at the moment on the existing site,” Daunt added.
He has previously spoken of the importance of refreshing Waterstones’ website in order to compete with other online retailers, particularly Amazon. He told the Guardian that Waterstones’ website was “pathetic in relation to Amazon, and that’s just a fact”.
He added: “We have 3,500 booksellers with an awful lot of knowledge. We’ve got authors coming through our shops—all sorts of things which are very different to [what] Amazon [can offer]—and we are keen to harness that and put it on the website.”