UK catalogue giant Shop Direct tests NFC shopping

The retailer’s online department store Very.co.uk has taken over a shop front in the busy Liverpool One shopping centre to promote three fashion collections that have been specifically tailored to meet the needs of local shoppers — based on the online browsing and purchasing behaviour of customers in the Liverpool area.

Very's Liverpool "window shop"
VERY: “Vacant shop windows offer a unique digital opportunity.” Click to enlarge.

Online department store Very.co.uk, part of catalogue shopping giant Shop Direct, has opened a digital window shop in Liverpool city centre.

Very has taken over a shop front in Liverpool city centre’s Hanover Street throughout December to promote three specially created fashion trends, ‘Glitz and Glam’, ‘Rock Chic’ and ‘Snow Princess’. Each of the three ranges has been designed to specifically appeal to the tastes of local shoppers, based on the typical browsing and purchasing habits of the online retailer’s customers in the Liverpool area.

The window shop is located within the busy Liverpool One shopping centre and incorporates billboards containing both NFC tags and QR codes. Using their smartphones or tablets, passersby will be able to scan to shop the collections and the wider Very.co.uk website, with their purchases delivered free the following day if ordered before 9pm.

“As a successful pure-play etailer, bricks and mortar is not on our agenda,” says Gareth Jones, group retail director at Shop Direct Group. “But vacant shop windows offer a unique digital opportunity to get our brands and products in front of shoppers while they’re already on the high street and in browsing or buying mode.

“A third of traffic to the Very.co.uk website now comes from mobile devices and we are constantly innovating to enable shoppers to more easily engage with the brand and browse and buy our products while on the move. Scan to shop functionality has become more sophisticated over the last couple of years, particularly since the introduction of NFC. The increased flexibility, usability and transaction security of this type of functionality will make browsing and shopping via the Very.co.uk window shop quick, easy and safe.

“By personalising the featured collections in this trial to Liverpool fashion shoppers, we hope that the Hanover Street window shop also provides them with a little style inspiration for the party season. Depending on the results of this trial, we may then look to roll out the concept into more cities in 2013.”

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