Director of E-Commerce, Shop Direct
Who are you and what do you do?
My name’s Matthew Hardcastle, I’ve been working at Shop Direct for about 5 months and I’m a Director here. Prior to Shop Direct I worked at eBay for 5 years, I’ve worked in e-commerce for about 10 years and I originally came from a consumer goods marketing background.
Who are Shop Direct?
Shop Direct is one of the UK’s largest retail businesses. It was originally formed out of the Littlewoods catalogue and Great Universal Stores home shopping businesses but we’re now a big online player. Most of our business is done online and we have some fantastic brands including Littlewoods and Great Universal (as I mentioned) as well as the newly launched Very, Woolworths.co.uk, Marshall Ward and Kays.
What role does E-commerce have to play?
The destiny of Shop Direct’s whole business is online – currently 55% of the business is online sales and we want that to increase to at least 70%. Our vision is not only to reach that target and go beyond it but to become the UK’s largest online retailer.
Building a world-class E-commerce team
In terms of delivering online growth we need to cover all areas of e-commerce and the end to end customer journey. The main areas of development for us are site experience; we need people who understand what does / doesn’t make a good website. Secondly we need people who understand search; what makes a good search experience from search engines right through to when they leave our site. And thirdly, I’m looking for people who understand content; when customers come to our site they need to see images, text, videos that help them make decisions about their shopping. To build this team I’m looking for a wide range of areas and disciplines.
Why join Shop Direct?
Firstly, you have the opportunity here to really influence and change the business. We have a wide remit with no boundaries in terms of improving the customer experience and our online performance. Secondly, this is a business with scale, we have great technology and we’re not short of resources. Thirdly, despite our scale, we can actually move very quickly. We have a lab which develops new and innovative ideas and rolls them out very quickly and a real testing culture – something that we want to keep because it’s integral to our online growth.
For more details on all of the e-commerce roles available and to apply, please visit http://www.shopdirectcareers.com
