Dabs.com in 2005
In 2005, dabs.com is a £200 million company with 235
staff, holding 15,000 lines for a customer base of almost
1.5 million and processing around 5000 customer orders
every day. Dabs.com has 8m visits a month from around
750,000 unique users. Its catalogue contains 20,000 prod-
ucts with laptops, LCD monitors and external hard drives
among the main sales lines.
NCC (2005) reports that dabs.com believes that what its
customers require is a dynamic site that provides compre-
hensive information on its product ranges, delivery charges,
returns policy, financing services and rewards scheme. It
also provides dabs.tv, a video service that allows
customers to see more complex products in greater detail.
Jonathan Wall, Dab’s marketing director, sees security
as important as part of the customer experience, and to
protect the business, he says:
We were one of the first e-businesses to adopt Visa’s
‘Verified by Visa’ 3D secure payment authentication
system and we’ve also implemented MasterCard’s
SecureCode variant. We’ve always worked closely with
both credit card companies and it’s a concern that
dates back to our mail order side. The threat of being
attacked and defrauded is always in the forefront of our
thoughts.Delivery
To e nsure delivery as promised, Jonathan Wall explains
the importance dabs.com attach to IT:
We invest as much in our highly automated warehouse as
we do in our marketing. Our systems use a sophisticated
combination of dynamic bins and unique product num-
bering. A lot of the management team come from
technical backgrounds. Our back office system was writ-
ten in OpenVMS by our IT director. Our sales processing
system was written in-house.Staffing
According to NCC (2005), staff skills are viewed as impor-
tant from technology staff, to product buyers. Wall says:
We pay a higher than average salary, and that means
we get a higher level of staff. And we really see the
effect of that in the way our buyers and merchandisers
approach the market.
Dabs.com ended offline sales in September 2001, after
online sales reached half of turnover. This enabled it to
reduce costs. Although its consumer sales are online,
dabs.com does retain a call centre for customer service
and account management services for its business clients
who spend £15,000 or more per year. Excellence in
customer service is also seen as part of the customer
experience and helps dabs.com reduce complaints to
trading standards officers compared to some of its online
rivals such as eBuyer.com.Europe is the next challenge: the company launched
Dabs.fr in France in 2004. But all will depend on its ability
to adapt quickly to any changes in customer behaviour.The 2003 site update
In 2003, dabs.com achieved a year-on-year profits rise
from £2.5m to £5.1m and sales rise from £150m to
£200m. It predicted the growth will continue, with sales
reaching £350m in 2005. Dabs has about one million
unique visitors monthly and adds a further 30,000 new
users every month. This success has been achieved in
just 4 years from the launch of its first transactional site in- The site reassures each visitor, by the scale of its
success. On 5 December it read:
1,098,412 customers
37,093 orders in December
21,289 products available for sale.
Dabs’s marketing director, Jonathan Wall, talking to IT
Week(2003) explained how the initial growth occurred,
and how future growth will be sustained: ‘We dominate
the PC hobbyist/ IT professional sector, but our business
must evolve. We want to cast our net further so that we
are appealing to people who are interested in technology
as a whole. New customers need a new approach. We
have built a new environment and a new web site for this
target audience.’
In mid-2003 dabs.com launched a site to help it
achieve sales to the new audience. Research was used to
help develop the new site. The usability of the existing
web site was tested and the new concept was also shown
to a focus group. After analysing the responses Dabs
created a pilot site, which the same focus group then
approved. In total, the new site took 10 months to develop
and was an investment of £750,000.The 2005 site update
NCC (2005) says Wall makes the business case for the
new site as follows:
Our new site will take us right up there to the top of the
field, you have to try and stay ahead. We’ll have guided
navigation, still quite rare on a UK site, which will help
customers to find what they’re looking for more intu-
itively. Early e-commerce customers knew that they
specifically wanted a Sony Vaio laptop, for example.
New customers just know that they want a laptop that’s
small and fast and costs less than £1,000. Guided navi-
gation means they can search according to a product’s
attributes rather than specific brands and models.
Since the average selling price of laptops is going down,
slim margins are decreased further. Wall says: ‘Selling elec-
tronic equipment on the web has traditionally been passive
but by redesigning our site we’ll be able to show customers
what another extra £50 spent on a laptop will buy them.’CHAPTER 7· DELIVERING THE ONLINE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCEINMA_C07.QXD 17/5/06 4:23 pm Page 342