UK catalogue business drives online sales with Venda's eCommerce eCosystem

UK catalogue business drives online sales with Venda's eCommerce eCosystem

Cotton Traders has chosen the Venda eCommerce eCosystem to boost sales on its online retail channel, www.cottontraders.co.uk.

The decision to invest in the online sales offering it launched in 2001 is part of the company’s strategic shift from being perceived as purely a catalogue business, to one which better serves the multichannel consumer of today across the store, catalogue and web.

Recognising the potential of an e-commerce offering, Cotton Traders chose the Venda Enterprise eCommerce on-demand platform, as it offered an easy-to-integrate and flexible solution with transparent, predictable pricing. It also has features that can be tailored specifically to the company’s catalogue-driven and promotion-led ecommerce needs. These include complex rules around promotional codes, stacked price discounts and catalogue specific pricing.

Fran Cotton, founder of Cotton Traders and former England prop forward, said: “Cotton Traders has traditionally been seen as a catalogue-led company, but we are keen to maximise the tremendous sales opportunities an online channel offers. Buyer behaviour is changing – many of our traditional catalogue buyers have migrated to the Internet, so we wanted to provide a site that met their needs and recognised their loyalty, as well as attracting new customers.”

Packaged functionality and standards

“Venda offered a secure and scalable solution that fully supports our catalogue-driven and promotion-led ecommerce needs. Venda is enterprise-wide PCI [Payment Card Industry] Tier 1 compliant, which was a key factor in our choice of partners, and will help to further build trust and confidence with our customers. Our recent sale period was significantly up on the previous year and we believe the Venda eCommerce eCosystem will enable us to create a more customer-friendly shopping experience, and certainly keep Cotton Traders at the forefront of online shopping.”

Eric Abensur, Group chief executive at Venda, added: “Cotton Traders has seen exceptional growth in the catalogue market and truly understands the potential that ecommerce can have on its bottom line. In this day and age, any retailer needs to have an effective e-commerce presence if it's going to tap into the spending habits of the UK public. Over the past decade we’ve seen UK shoppers spend over £250 billion online. Retailers that don’t evolve and embrace the ecommerce revolution could find themselves struggling to compete.”

Venda will handle all the maintenance, hosting, upgrades and system integration for the Cotton Traders site.