ECOMMERCE CASE STUDY

UAE MARKET

CAREER SUMMARY – JACO AUCAMP

eCommerce Manager Driving growth through effective online merchandising and marketing management.

Accomplished eCommerce manager with proven ability to develop, implement and deliver eCommerce strategies that support business and financial objectives. Have work globally and led eCommerce

operations for multi million-dollar organizations.

Effective manager, able to build highly engaged and motivated teams focused on driving results. Strong passion for ecommerce and technology, keeping up to date with changes in the industry through

continual professional development.

Areas of Expertise:P&L Modelling & Management Strategic & Tactical Planning

Team managementAnalytics

FASHION & BABYWEAR

Digital commerce in apparel.

eCommerce apparel is about three key pillars namely, discovery, visualization and engagement

Discovery: How do customers find your brand and products?

• Make it easy for customers to buy the right fit and Size

• Keep a close eye on out of stock and size fragmentation

• Always be new and relevant

• Avoid selling on your home page

• Use discounts strategically not to damage store and brand identity

• Build and be honest with product reviews

• Use brand tone to give character to your product descriptions

Visualization: How do you present the brand and products on the site?

• Sell a look to customers, not just a product

• Be good at communicating visually with your customers (product’s information)

• Send out clear consistent messaging

• Pay Attention to product packaging

• Inspire customers with designs

• Use sign-up form with offer

• Tell stories with your “about” pages

• Keep color options separate but together.

Engagement: How to you keep customers interested?

• Invite customers to be part of a community

• Offer personalized shopping and email marketing

• Know and understand your customers

• Personalized Email marketing

• Stay real on social media

• Incentivize customers for referring the brand or products to friends.

• Reach out to fashion bloggers and influencers.

*Try to hire people that fit your customer demographic and psychographics

PROJECT

Success:Project: First to Launch eBooks in South Africa

This project was an entirely unknown territory for myself and the business. It started with building the business case andpersuading senior stakeholders to invest into this major project. Once agreed, I started meeting publishers and technologyproviders. We successfully implemented the design and development of Africa’s only digital fulfillment warehouse for eBooks (Onthe Dot) and Kalahari bespoke eBook application, completing the entire eBook ecosystem. This was a great success and alsoresulted in the launch of our own e-Reader (Gobii) device that was a top selling electronic device for the year and distributinglocal content to other retailers like Kobo.

Failure:Project: Site Search for Mothercare Russia

One of the leading frustrations of Mothercare Russia was the poor site search quality. The search engine could not be optimizedby attribute sets to see taxonomy and failed to see genders and clothing pieces as dresses, pants, shirts as clothing. The issueand requirement was submitted to IT, but after 6 months there was still no resolution. I then took it on myself to find a short termsolution by adding keywords in a hidden field that was indexed by SOLR. The added complexity was that this keyword mappinghad been done in English and Russian for each product. The results greatly improved site search and lead to a +16% overallconversion increase, but populating the products with keywords greatly reduced operational capacity as the task was very timeconsuming.

Lessons learned – Taking short cuts will come bite you in the long run.

DOMAIN TRENDS

Real Time Customization: L'Oréal Make-up ApplicationDynamic shopping that adapts to the shopper in real time. – Each shopper will have access to unique product recommendations and add-ons based on their preferences, location, demographics, brand interactions and past purchases.

Product data Aggregators and Ecommerce fashion: True fit Data AggregatorFinding that perfect fit is a huge obstacle for buying fashion online. The more information there is available on a product the less reluctant people will be from buying it online.

Artificial Intelligence chat-bots: H&M, Sephora and Victoria Secret.Fully automated chat agents that will answer customer questions and act as the first point of contact with the brand. This increases the number of platforms on which a brand can transact by offering guided and interactive browsing at all times.

No Need for Cash: Kit & AceMasterCard announced its application “Selfie Pay” that confirms a user’s identity using biometrics namely a self portrait. The store Kit and Ace do not accept cash payments and have no actual cash registers in stores. They accept credit and mobile payment.

Mobile Shopping: Must stay a key focusMore than half of web session are mobile, yet they only account for 1/3 of sales. Apparel brands further need to improve the mobile user experience and marketing, and trade teams will need to focus on strategies that convert on mobile.

MERCHANDISING

Products are grouped by how they are displayed and/or packaged

Merchandising product assortments are grouped by linking and data.

Offline merchandise Online merchandise

Products are “self describing” as customers can interact and see products in person.

Products must be described using copy, images, attributes and other digital media.

You can build customer profiles using loyalty programs

Use customer data and profiling to build into the system to use to drive sales.

Inventory management is a highly focused on what you have in different stores

Inventory management allows fulfillment anywhere anytime.

Recommendations are made by sales people are highly personalized

Recommendations are made by algorithms and based on generalizations.

Store organizing takes the form of content strategy and information architecture,

Store organization is about space planning and arranging the store to sell more

products.

Personalization is done by using an algorithm and the database information to serving relevant products to the customer.

Personalized shopping experience is complete and depends on the salesperson

execution.

You attract customers to your store using ads, search engine marketing and social media.

You attract customers to your store using signage, displays and visual branding.

Personalization

Finding Products

Store Organization

Customer Management

Recommendation

Inventory Management

Product Descriptions

Product assortment

DIGITAL CANNIBALIZATION

Digital Cannibalization

Cross-Channel CannibalizationYEAR 1 (5%), YEAR 2 (3%) & YEAR 3 (1%)

Digital cannibalization will be higher early as we would take into the current customer base and that is large in-store customers. This will reduce as we drive new customer acquisitions via our digital marketing tactics.

Channel cannibalization is a cross-channel concept. Multi-channel organizations create divisions betweenchannels and ultimate competition that increases cost and inefficiencies. In a cross-channel strategy there willbe this perceived cannibalization as leads generated by digital marketing or click and collect orders will result instores sales and by the same token, customers visiting stores might decide to purchase their goods online.

Omni-channel benefits: (No channel cannibalization)

Customers spend 93% more than customer who shop online.

Customers spend 208% more than customers who only shop in stores.

DIGITAL PENETRATION

Digital Penetration

Share of Business - Based on Net Sales & 17 Stores in UAEYEAR 1 (0.7%-1.5%), YEAR 2 (1.0%-2.5%), YEAR 3 (2.0%-3.5%)

In the UAE there are 17 GAP stores and with growth of online, we should be able to grow to a significant share of business within the first 3 years.

Assumptions:• Brand is invested to digitally transform.

• Strong alignment and integration between cross functional teams.

• Technology that supports online fashion and trading activities.

• IT infrastructure supports operational scalability and workflow processes.

• Strong Digital marketing investment to grow customer acquisition.

• Good CRM & Social base to convert to ecommerce customers.

• Omni-channel activities to drive cross channel sales.

• Margin provision made to drive online exclusive offers.

6 MONTH PLAN – 3 PHASE APPROACH

1 2 3

Planning:

Meet with key partners and supporting stakeholders

Immerse myself with the Brand (Customer, principles, methods and processes)

Understand organization capacity and alignment.

Review current technology/platform strengths and weaknesses.

Build and plan business strategy and goals

Design resource architecture and start recruiting.

Developing & Integrating

Translate brand principles, goals, processes, SLA’s to development team in the form of BRD’s.

Together with the PMO build key milestones and time lines.

Actively co-ordinate and drive relevant stakeholders support (B&M, Stores, operations, logistics, finance)

With central support review vendors and 3rd parties to support project.

Create and Set launching phases and activities together with B&M, Marketing and stores Ops.

Executing

Conclude End to End UAT testing and close monitor site during soft launch.

Leverage influencer & social (Facebook, Instagram and drive Lead Ads, Look-a-like targeting, etc.)

Leverage CRM base to promote launch via Email and SMS.

Drive Paid Marketing and Programmatic for awareness

In store sign-up and online voucher code card to drive database and online customers.

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ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES KPI REPORTING LINE(S)

Snr Online Trade Manager Accountable for the developing and managing of the fullP&L. and delivering bottom line profit.

Bottom line ProfitNet Sales & Net Margin

Head of Digital CommerceBrand Managing Director

Online Trade Manager(Collaborate with B&M)

Responsible for driving ecommerce KPI’s and the annual Net sales and Margin goals.

Net Sales & Net MarginConversion & AOV

Snr Online Trade Manager

Merchandiser(Collaborate with B&M)

Responsible online catalogue and following to trade calendar to ensure holistic product life cycle changes.

Conversion & AOVAvailability, ATC% Rate

Online Trade Manager

Assistant Merchandiser(Collaborate with Marketing)

Support Merchandiser on day2day functions and report on sales, margin, availability, stock, etc.

Availability, ATC%, Product Views

Merchandiser

Digital Marketing Manager(Collaborate with Marketing

Accountable for driving traffic and managing advertising costs and secondly growing our customer database.

Traffic, Customer BaseL-pages, Bounce Rate%

Online Trade Manager

Paid Marketing Specialist Accountable for managing and optimizing our paid traffic marketing activities and costs with the agency.

Paid Traffic & AcquisitionCPC, CPO, ROI, Acquisition

Digital Marketing Manager

SEO Specialist Accountable for managing and optimizing our site technically and content wise to drive organic traffic.

Traffic, Page Traffic, CVR%, OCTR%, Non Brand Traffic.

Digital Marketing Manager

Web Content / Copywriter Responsible for creating and ensuring the quality of web content on the site, emails and ad-campaigns.

Words per Day, PageTraffic

Digital Marketing Manager

Designer Responsible for the visual design life cycle from brief to the execution on the Brand's web sites.

Design Capacity KPI Digital Marketing Manager

ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE

Brand eCom

Brand Marketing

& CRM

Brand Finance &

Ops

Brand B&M

Central eCom

Ops and Logistics

Central SI Team

Central eCom

Support (BI, PMO)

Spoke Ecosystem Spoke Team

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YEAR 1

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YEAR 1YEAR 1

Snr Online Trade Manager

Online Trade Manager

Head of Digital Commerce

Brand MD

Content Specialist Editor / Copywriter

Merchandiser

Digital Marketing Manager

Designer

Merchandise Assistant

PPC Specialist

SEO Specialist

BUSINESS CONCERNS

Buying and Merchandising:• The B&M and Spoke team will have a very close relationships. • There should be alignment with pricing, range, seasonal launches, promotions tactics and sales events. *• The trading calendar and WSSI should be planned together, but this will become important as ecommerce volume grows. • The impact on the B&M team will be low, but depends on how well the infrastructure automats workflow processes.***

Stores and eCom• Store designs must communicate collection point for C&C and return policy must also be updated to include online.• Teams motivated includes training, but mostly by aligning their goals with ecommerce. (see sales recording)• Logistics & Supply chain must be integrated with stores. Point of sales must be able to processes returns for online orders and

be updated with new C&C & SFT orders. Stores must be supported ** with effective order information and tools, (DOM/BOSS) and sufficient resources to manage fulfillment from stores. *** Store stock and customers orders must be clearly identifiable.

• Packaging for C&C packing will be similar to current stores packaging. SFT orders would require courier packaging.

Sales Record• Online sales must be recorded under stores vs location. This will motivate store staff to driving and promote online sales. • Ecommerce sales should be also be recorded individually to measure and manage contribution, performance and costs.• Cost should Brand P&L specific, where technology and technology services should be shared.

Cross Channel KPI• Single Omni channel P&L• Measure and reward levers that drive consumers down the path to purchase.• Relook at store engagement and staffing metrics.

* Does Brand allow online exclusive offers?** Are stores setup to fulfil from stores or will it be selected stores? Will DC priorities brand fleet for customer orders?*** What is the fulfillment model? Warehouse only, or warehouse supported by the flagship store(s), or stores fulfillment only? (stores functioning as distribution nodes?

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LEVERAGING

The Principle brandI will leverage the principle brand best practices and utilize all the creative elements and product / attribution information. If the principle brand uses the similar technology / platform I would also leverage support for the business. • What is the global strategy for the brand?• What are the brand guidelines?• Is there a platform can we access all creative elements and what costs are associated if any?• Can we integrate into their PIMS or receive direct information feeds?• What is the global KPI for ecommerce. • What processes/tactics are working or not working for them or their partners? • Do they have a “plug & play” cloud platform we can utilize. (similar to Zara model)• What data can they share to improve our tactics (AdWords account, Basket CRM program, etc.)• Will we supplement the range with the full UK range? (Depending if the franchise have a push model)• Technology charges (Depending on Model)• Logistics and returns of extended range. • Flexibility of integrating operations as well as customer service management. (Depending on Model)

Customer Data (to Forecast)The customer data would help me understand the average value, lifetime and engagement of a customer and build segments based on customer purchase behavior.

Now that I have my segments and their purchase behavior (AOV, Order per customer, etc.) and retention rate, I can tie this backto my acquisition and retention costs and build a forecast model. This model will guide me on the amount of customers I need toacquire to achieve a specific topline.