Earlier today we retweeted a link to an excellent blog post by Econsultancy that highlights how John Lewis has used best practice to help achieve astonishing ecommerce growth.

The full article, entitled 14 reasons behind John Lewis’ 44% increase in online sales, is well worth a read by anyone with an interest in improving their digital marketing and ecommerce performance in particular. Describing how ecommerce now represents a quarter of all John Lewis sales, with over £800m worth of products being ordered online last December alone, it looks at some of promotional tactics and usability factors that contribute to the brand’s ecommerce success. John Lewis has provided a useful benchmark for ecommerce best practice for a number of years. In fact the brand often crops-up in conversations with clients about interface and navigation design. By reaping the benefits of on-going testing and refinement, what John Lewis does so profitably is focus on ease of use, conversion rate optimisation and thorough channel integration. Intuitive and efficient navigation is always a major challenge for retail sites, especially those with product ranges as large and diverse as a business like John Lewis. The solution that’s proved effective is clarity and consistency of top-level navigation, with extensive drop-down sub-menus, and a powerful product search function. The combination significantly reduces the number of clicks required to find and view individual products, it’s a simple way to highlight the breadth of the product range, and it has a direct influence on improving conversion rates. Content-rich product pages, featuring customer reviews and clear calls-to-action, together with a straightforward checkout process are essential. Another, perhaps less obvious, example of best practice that’s employed to great effect by John Lewis is removing unnecessary distractions from the checkout. It’s a tactic developed through experimentation and quantitative analysis of customer behaviour. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and intelligently-targeted pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, mobile applications, personlised email marketing campaigns, and the close integration of online and in-store services (such as “Click and Collect”) also play important parts in the overall story of ecommerce success. While not every retailer has the marketing or development budgets to match those of brands like John Lewis, and not every online operation concerned with conversions is a retailer, the best practices they demonstrate can be exploited by any business to improve customer experience, brand loyalty and ecommerce profitability.