Redcats brands are ranked number 3 worldwide in home shopping and the 19th largest retail cataloger just behind JC Penney and Sears. Redcats statistics are impressive with sales of €4.4 billion in 26 countries, 60+ e-commerce websites, 30 catalogs, 100+ stores and 38 million active customers. According to Redcats USA, they have been able to advance their lead as an agile competitor in online and catalog-based retailing leveraging site search, navigation and merchandising technology from Progress EasyAsk.
Milton Pappas, EVP of Redcats USA responsible for Marketing and eCommerce explained that the company has deployed a single global platform for eCommerce for its network of online retailers called Millena. The eCommerce Platform hosts and manages multiple Web stores on a common infrastructure and allows a high degree of customization to fit the various unique brand identities and business objectives. Millena also allows all divisions to share in emerging technologies while providing the ability to implement best practices across the entire corporation.
In 2003 Redcats needed a quick and easy way for customers to find products based on individual interests, extend their ability to consistently and dynamically merchandise products across multiple sales channels, and standardize on a Single Global Solution. Redcats selected Progress EasyAsk as the single site search, navigation and merchandising solution, along with its own proprietary software.
Mr. Pappas explained that Redcats selected Progress EasyAsk because of its lowest total cost of ownership (TCO), rapid deployment and ease of implementation. EasyAsk was also the right choice for Redcats because of Progress Software's global support presence, and the ability to standardize international sites using multi-lingual linguistic search for English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German and more.
As a result of the deployment of Progress EasyAsk, Redcats online conversion rates have been near or at the top of the Nielsen//NetRatings reports since May 2006, when Nielsen first started tracking Redcats sites. In fact, the company’s brands have been in Nielsen//NetRating’s top ten highest conversion rates seventeen times.
In addition to the dramatic increase in conversion rates, the deployment has allowed the company to establish e-commerce best practices across Redcats’ leading retail web sites worldwide -- visited by approximately 15 million unique shoppers each month.
Mr. Pappas concluded by discussing the future of merchandising in Redcats sites. They see expanding the guided navigation offered currently in Redcats’ sites powered by EasyAsk in search results to include guided navigation in its site design in areas on the Websites such as top “Tabbed” navigation. So a customer would have a choice of using site search or tabbed categories for finding the right product. And Retail is all about choice.
