Island Trends - Case Study pdf  
Situation
Island Trends is an upscale retail store located on Marco Island off the southwestern coast of Florida in the United States. The store specializes in island and resort themed clothing, swimwear, footwear, watches, fragrances and accessories for men and women from brands such as Tommy Bahama, Indigo Palms, Nat Nast, Saltaire, Pure Fiji, and Kai. To expand its market, Island Trends in 2003 introduced an Internet sales channel at www.islandtrends.com. The company also operates a phone sales business.

Challenge
Island Trends has benefited from consumer interest in online shopping. But ecommerce also has led to increased competition, as more retailers are complementing physical stores with online sales channels. To differentiate itself and maintain growth, Island Trends has added hundreds of new products to its lines of clothing and accessories, while more aggressively targeting customers via online sales and marketing programs.

The result has been an increase in the complexity of managing sales across channels. Prior to fall 2006, Island Trends was using a retail management software system that lacked ecommerce functionality, meaning Island Trends kept store and web sales data in separate databases. Updating the old system to include ecommerce capability would have been an expensive and arduous process for which Island Trends had neither the time or budget.

Solution
In fall 2006, Island Trends deployed CORESense, an on-demand retail management software suite designed specifically to handle multi-channel sales activities. CORESense automates and integrates order fulfillment, inventory management, supplier management and customer relationship management across POS, ecommerce and phone sales channels, enabling Island Trends to operate more efficiently, reduce costs associated with sales management, and increase revenue.

CORESense was selected by Island Trends for its ability to manage store, web and phone sales channels in a single system, and for its web-based, on-demand infrastructure, which enables Island Trends executives to manage products, channels, inventory, fulfillment, customer communications and marketing remotely. Because CORESense hosts the solutions, Island Trends can focus on sales and service, rather than software maintenance.

CORESense also automated Island Trends sales through third-party web channels such as Yahoo!, Froogle and Shopzilla, and facilitated the addition of meta data and content to category and product pages to help improve organic search rankings.

Results
Despite increased competition, Island Trends grew its business 20% between September 2006 and August 2007, due in part to operational benefits derived from the CORESense system.

CORESense integration to Google Analytics has also enabled Island Trends to understand web traffic patterns and the effectiveness of keyword ad spending on internet sales revenue. This data assists Island Trends in making better marketing decisions, by focusing spending on keywords and products that give greater returns on their ad investment in Google Adwords, Yahoo! and other internet marketing channels.
  • Unified retail management system enables single point of reference for all sales
  • Single database eliminates manual efforts, spreadsheets and spreadsheet errors
  • Web-based software allows for operation, management, sales and marketing changes from anywhere in the world
  • 20% increase in sales across channels since deploying CORESense