Beauty retailer hires Mercado for online makeover

Hair and beauty retailer lookfantastic.com has chosen Mercado's search, navigation and merchandising solution to help improve its customer shopping experience.

Lookfantastic has been in the hair and beauty business for the last 30 years and has had an online presence since its CEO, Daniel Crown, identified an opportunity and decided to adopt e-retailing almost 10 years ago.

Now, Lookfantastic.com fulfills up to 2,000 online orders a day from its warehouse, based in Hove, East Sussex.

With such high levels of demand, lookfantastic.com was relaunched in November 2007 with a new platform and adopted Mercado's on-demand solution in January 2008.

The business had identified three key areas of improvement that will successfully improve its overall user experience: usability, navigation and search, with the Mercado solution being at the heart of the improvements.

Anna Bacon, lookfantastic.com's Head of Marketing, is excited about entering a new era of e-commerce.

The company was impressed with Mercado's focus on shopper engagement, and feels that Mercado's product will facilitate its overall multichannel marketing strategy.

Bacon said: "The decision to work with Mercado was a simple one for us; they have a very consultative approach, their products suited our requirements, they offer real value and their solution offers us a great level of control.

"It gives us the flexibility to easily incorporate new brands and lines for the future without requiring a great deal of input from our IT department.

"Basically it is user-friendly, intuitive and does all the hard work for you".

She added: "It's all about improving the visitor's shopping experience; Mercado's solution handles search misspellings and can automatically sort and display different products according to the visitor's search term and the results are always relevant to the buyer.

"For example we can list top 20 brands, we can recommend related products, create cross-site and specific landing pages and promotions, and position the results in powerful merchandising zones.

"We can easily manage our brands between the stores and online, the Mercado solution offers us and our customers a better user experience and allows a better understanding of that experience".

Rich Beattie, Vice President of Mercado Europe, said: "With its growing customer base, both in the online and offline retail world, lookfantastic.com now has the opportunity to create a better online user experience which will in turn drive sales in their current and future salons.

"Creating, facilitating and encouraging an improved customer journey across all channels will result in higher overall conversions and retention for lookfantastic.com".

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