Online Retail News In Brief (28 June 2017)

By IMRG

In case you missed them, we’ve pulled together a few online retail news highlights from around the web this week.

New proposition in fashion delivery and returns

Amazon are launching an innovative new initiative for their online fashion offering that could put pressure on other retailers to follow suit.

Prime Wardrobe will offer customers a try-before-you-buy model – where payment is not taken up front, but only after the customer has decided what they want to keep – with staggered discounts offered of up to 20% for keeping the full range of items ordered.

L1 Retail buys Holland & Barrett

L1 Retail has purchased health and supplement retailer Holland and Barrett for USD $1.8bn. Completion of the deal is expected in September 2017.

More calls for a car-free Oxford Street

The New West End Company has made fresh proposals for Oxford Street pedestrianisation.

The proposal suggests traffic-free areas between 10am and 10pm and forms part of a wider traffic-reduction strategy.

The company announced that time-specific pedestrianisation enjoys support from 85% of surveyed shoppers.

The end of price tags?

The Telegraph has predicted the disappearance of paper price tags within five years. It reported that Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Morrisons are planning to replace price tags with electronic pricing information on shelves.

The move would allow retailers to change their prices within 20 seconds, responding to demand, and keeping pricing information up-to-date more efficiently and instantly than paper price tags allow.

AR Fashion

Retailers are continuing to experiment with augmented reality (AR) in order to engage customers. Yoox has launched AR in its online fashion app, which allows shoppers to ‘try on’ items before ordering, using filters similar to those found in Snapchat.

Image source: Fashion and Mash

Brexit referendum, one year on

Friday 23 June marked one year since Britain voted to leave the European Union. However, even though that period of time has elapsed, Global-e reports that 68% of retailers have no strategy in place for Brexit.

Being the contentious issue that it is, and with no certainty over the terms of Britain’s departure, the debate rages on as to what the implications of Brexit are, and whether it means doom, boom or some combination of both for British retail.

If you’re in the process of planning for Brexit, take a look at

this article, which tells you what you need to know about VAT post-Brexit
this video, in which we ask, does Brexit mean uncertainty?
this video from earlier this year, in which we discuss the prospects for retail in 2017

One-hour groceries

Tesco’s new app, ‘Tesco Now’, offers one-hour delivery on up to 20 items. The service currently runs in central London postcodes, and customers can track the progress of their order through the app.

For more on the current state of UK online retail delivery, download the latest IMRG Metapack Delivery Index.

June, the month of ice cream and quiche

The BBC reported that last month, the hottest June for over forty years, inspired spikes in sales of ice cream and quiche, which saw year-on-year growth of 24% and 11% respectively. The Nielsen figures also indicated a 4% year-on-year growth for major retailers.

The classic culinary combination.

Image source: Zastavki

The ATM turned 50

The humble automated telling machine (ATM) reached a half-century this week. The first machine was installed at Barclays in Enfield and became a completely ubiquitous fixture in high streets right across the country in subsequent decades.

The payment landscape today is a far more fragmented place of course, with a wide range of card and digital options available for people to choose from. Will this spell the end for the humble ATM then? The future is impossible to predict and the data is conflicting – on the one hand, 44% report they rarely use them to pull out cash anymore, yet a record £730 million was withdrawn from ATMs in a single day in December 2016.

They may not be finished quite yet.