Endeavour Group has revealed it has invested $35m in ecommerce and technology through its digital arm endeavourX, has it continues to record strong online sales growth.
The company saw online sales grow by almost 25 per cent in the first six months of FY2022, up to $603m, with online sales remaining on track to exceed $1bn for the first year.
“We are accelerating digital to support our customers right across their shopping journey. For the first time, we are seeing more customers engaging with our brands via the website or app than in our bricks and mortar stores – for example researching a product before going into a store – so our digital platforms have become the front door to all of our retail brands,” said endeavourX Director Claire Smith.
“We just had our biggest digital Christmas on record, and we are constantly looking at how we can innovate to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers – and those needs are changing at lightning speed,” Smith said.
Endeavour Group said that personalisation remains a priority for the company after it built a personalisation engine to enhance Dan Murphy’s loyalty program My Dan’s last year.
Smith added: “Understanding our customers more deeply allows us to provide them with a better experience. For example, we can personalise offers and suggest interesting products to customers that they might have never even heard of, in the same way a streaming service would suggest a movie or tv-series based on what you’ve enjoyed before.”
The company is also committed to using digital to support customers and team members in its bricks and mortar stores.
“We are looking at how we can use technology and innovation to continue to enhance the customer experience in our physical stores,” Smith said.
This includes innovation such as using the Dan Murphy’s drive-thru with number plate technology and electronic shelf labels (ESL) across the BWS and Dan Murphy’s network.
Smith said: “ESLs reduce paper usage and make our store teams more efficient, but we are also exploring how we can use them to help customers browsing in store, leveraging the app capabilities we have built.”
The labels have NFC (Near Field Communication) technology embedded, so customers can simply tap the shelf label with their smartphones to get more product information real-time or read customer reviews.
The ESL technology also captures geo-location data, which will be used when creating planograms for stores in the future.