Currys overhauls IT for multichannel sales push

Struggling electrical retailer Currys has undergone a strategic overhaul of its multichannel strategy in advance of a major re-launch of its e-commerce website this summer.

DSGi, owner of Currys, PC World and Dixons, has been hit hard by falling sales brought on by increased competition from supermarkets and online retails. The company today posted a pre-tax loss of 192.8 million in the year to 3 May 3, against a 114.1million pre-tax profit in the previous 12 months.

The company has historically developed its various customer-facing channels independently of each other, but has found this impaired its ability to live up to customers' expectations.

Tim Brennan, Currys head of trading said the electrical retailer realised it had a "multiple channel" business as opposed to a multichannel one. This became clear after it launched its "reserve and collect" service in 2006.

"Our reserve and collect business is twice as big as our pure web generated sales business," he said, adding that "over 60 per cent of Currys' store sales either begin or involve a visit to its web site".

With its internet presence growing in importance, Brennan said the results of an extensive customer consultation revealed customers were frustrated when they researched a product online, but found it was not available in-store.

Equally, stores were not given incentives to actively promote web-based stock, as they were penalised for taking back refunds of goods bought online. "Now we give them a credit for sales in their area," he said.

Behind the scenes the company has worked to integrate supply chain processes across its stores and online to achieve "one, transparent stock file for each product, with the background efficiencies that come out of that, including less duplication of workloads and stockholding," Brennan added.

It is working on allowing staff to see the status of stock online and at other branches to increase levels of product availability to the customer. Online it is capitalising on the pureplay domain expertise of its Pixmania business acquired by DSGi in 2006 migrating Currys to the latest version of its in-house e-commerce platform.

"We're plugging the Pixmania e-merchant platform into a variety of legacy systems," added Brennan. "But having one system and one view is something we're looking at, potentially standardising our implementations of SAP across the UK."

Having already issued two profit warnings this year ahead of today's losses, DSGi had announcing a five-point plan it said would save 50 million in the coming year and includes Currys' multichannel realignment.