Press Release

Lakeland launches new ecommerce website, developed by Javelin Group.

lakeland_websiteLondon, 1 April 2011. Lakeland, the creative kitchenware company, has launched a new ecommerce website to support the growth of its multi-channel retail business, with the help of its implementation partner Javelin Group, Europe’s leading retail and omni-channel consultancy and systems integrator.

Lakeland had created a specification for the next generation of their Lakeland.co.uk website, seeking a highly sophisticated ecommerce solution, incorporating targeted merchandising, sophisticated multivariate testing, and easy search and navigation. After a thorough selection process, Lakeland chose to use a number of ‘best of breed’ partners to fulfill its requirements, coordinated by Javelin Group who were selected to implement the solution. Javelin Group designed and delivered the solution, configuring and integrating multiple applications including: the hybris ecommerce platform, Adobe’s Marketing suite including Omniture Merchandising and Site Catalyst analytics, Baynote’s real-time recommendation engine, and Silverpop’s e-CRM system for promotional and transactional email messaging.

The ‘front end’ user interface was designed by Leeds based ecommerce specialists, “AWA”. They used user research and customer feedback to redesign every part of the Lakeland website, from the homepage, category, product and search results pages, through to basket and checkout, ensuring that they were all clear, concise and accessible. The site was then subjected to several rounds of user testing as Lakeland were keen to ensure that customer feedback was used to guide each stage of the development.

The result: an advanced trading platform with a very rich targeted merchandising capability and the scalability and flexibility to support Lakeland’s diverse requirements well into the future.

The new website, designed around Lakeland’s customers, aims to simplify the online buying process and to help customers shop online with the same ease they would encounter in a Lakeland store. The site provides a wide array of product and housekeeping/cooking information, easy navigation, and useful recommendation tools to support customers as if they were consulting an expert sales associate in the store. It incorporates many innovative functions including personalisation, multivariate testing, recommendations and active merchandising.

Tony Preedy, Marketing Director of Lakeland said: “We are extremely proud of our new website. We were determined that our new platform would enable us to give our customers the very best levels of service, and to enable us to present our innovative range of products in the best possible light. Our new website offers excellent product presentation, hundreds of demo videos and extensive customer reviews, simple and easy search and navigation, a virtual catalogue, a strong ‘active merchandising’ capability which enables us to recommend the right products to our customers based on their behaviour and the preferences of other customers similar to them, sophisticated promotions functionality, a streamlined and intuitive customer journey, multi-variate testing capability and extensive tagging for better analytics so that we can continually learn and improve the site. Javelin Group have succeeded in the very challenging task of integrating the many components and systems necessary to fulfil this vision, and we are delighted with the outcome.”

As well as the sophisticated customer facing functionality, Lakeland also required a wide variety of easy to use e-marketing and content management tools for its business users. The product catalogue, website analytics, online marketing, site layout, and email campaigns can be managed in house without the need for technology experts. Powerful business management tools enable the Lakeland team to manage and update specific areas of the site quickly and easily, creating a real time online trading environment that allows frequent changes to be made and enabling Lakeland to concentrate on improving the customer experience.

Tony Stockil, CEO of Javelin Group said: “We worked closely with Lakeland to design and build an unrivalled ecommerce website. We are very proud of the result: we have combined several best-in-breed technologies to deliver a genuinely usable targeted merchandising and testing capability that is very rarely seen in practice. This website is one with which any business, including the very biggest and most sophisticated online trader, would be delighted.”

Find out more about eCommerce Development with Javelin Group.


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For more information, please contact marketing@javelingroup.com.