Niddal abu swerehuniversity of Palestine120070576 dabs.com case study march, 2010 Prepared by: niddal abu swereh niddal abu swereh Supervised By: Supervised

Niddal abu swereh university of Palestine 120070576

dabs.com case studydabs.com case study

march, 2010

PreparedPrepared byby:: niddal abu swerehniddal abu swereh

Supervised By:Supervised By: Miss Rasha ATallahMiss Rasha ATallah


Company background

dabs.com was originally created by entrepreneur David Atherton in partnership with writer Bruce Smith (the name Dabs comes from the combined initials of their two names). Their first venture, Dabs Press was a publisher of technology books. Although David and Bruce remain firm friends, Dabs has been 100% owned by David since 1990.


Company background cont.

Dabs Direct was launched in 1990, as a mail order firm which mainly promoted itself through ads in home technology magazines such as Personal Computer World and Computer Shopper. Dabs.com was launched in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, but unlike many dot-com startup businesses, dabs.com was based on an existing offline business.


Strategy

The importance that dabs.com owners place on customer experience and usability is suggested by their mission statement, which places customer experience at its core together with choice and price. dabs.com’s mission is: ‘to provide customers with a quick and easy way of buying the products they want, at the most competitive prices around, delivered directly to their door.’


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 5,000 customer orders every day. dabs.com has 8m visits a month from around 750,000 unique users. Its catalogue contains 20,000 products with laptops, LCD monitors and external hard drives among the main sales lines.


Delivery

To ensure 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, says Wall. Our systems use a sophisticated combination of dynamic bins and unique product numbering. A lot of the management team come from technical backgrounds. Our back office system was written in OpenVMS by our IT director. Our sales processing system was written in-house.


Staffing

According to NCC (2005), staff skills are viewed as important 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, says Wall. And we really see the effect of that in the way our buyers and merchandisers approach the market.'


The 2003 site update

In 2003, dabs.com achieved 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 1999. The site reassures each visitor, by the scale of its success. On December the 5th it read: • 1,098,412 customers • 37,093 orders in December • 21,289 products available for sale


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 intuitively. 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 navigation means they can search according to a product's attributes rather than specific brands and models.'


On-site search capabilities

Part of the new site, is improved on-site search capabilities from Endeca, which powers the search of Walmart and Circuit City sites in the US. Search is important to increasing conversion rates, and so increasing sales, since if a user is not-presented with a relevant product when they search, they are likely to try another retailer. The search capability should strike a balance between delivering too many results and too few. Channel Register (2005) reports that dabs.com hopes to increase conversion rate by up to 50% by updating the site’s search and navigation features. Current conversion rate is 3.5% and it is hoped this will be increased to nearer 5%.


Accessibility

Since dabs.com has tech-savvy customers, it has to support them as they adopt new ways of browsing. Dabs.com found that by 1995 nearly a fifth of its users were using the Mozilla Firefox browser, so a further requirement for the new site was to make it accessible to users browsing with a range of browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Apples Safari.


Marketing communications

Marketing communications approaches used by dabs.com is summarized in Chapter 8 in the Mini-case ‘Electronic retailers cut-back on their E-communications spend.’ For customer acquisition, the main communications tools that are used are:

• Search engine marketing (the main investment) • Referrals from affiliates (this has been reduced) • Online display advertising on third party sites

(limited) • PR • Sponsorship (Shirt sponsorship for Premiership

team Fulham)


Very important noteVery important note

dabs.com case study update

Dabs.com was bought by BT in 2006, you can read an interview here


Picture of the websitePicture of the website


Reverence Reverence

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Niddal abu swerehuniversity of Palestine120070576 dabs.com case study march, 2010 Prepared by: niddal abu swereh niddal abu swereh Supervised By: Supervised