Our websites are driven by our bespoke and proprietary e-commerce platform, designed to maximise opportunities and deliver competitive advantage in our niche market. It has the capacity to handle significantly increased volumes, and the capability to expand into new markets.
Having in-house software development resource helps deliver cost-effective investment in platform development and enables us to respond quickly to changing customer behaviours and expectations, by rapidly developing new features and functionality.
We continue to develop our proprietary e-commerce platform to drive website traffic, optimise conversion rates and maximise operational efficiencies.
Our bespoke platform continues to offer a point of differentiation in the market and remains the primary focus of our development efforts. We have over 24 million website users, conversion rates of 1.4%, 1.0 million active customers, and 0.2 million repeat customers.
We launched a company-wide drive to increasingly adopt AI into everyday working practices including our software development process.
Our bespoke e-commerce platform continues to offer a major point of differentiation in the market and remains the primary focus of our development efforts. There are plans to support business growth by recruiting additional roles across engineering, quality and analysis, and by working with external developers to provide additional specialist resource as necessary. Where commercially and functionally appropriate, we work with selected third-parties to integrate 'off the shelf' solutions to complement our platform, such as a Marketplace Aggregator and CRM Provider.
Alongside continuing rollout of important infrastructure improvements and increased focus on cyber-security and resilience, recent project launches have included:
AI-based inventory forecasting and purchasing platform - our largest ever single project;
digital promotions creating the ability to create, manage and report on a variety of promotions;
integration with CRM and analytics platform to help us better understand and communicate with our customers in more effective ways;
website AI-chatbot providing product information and advice.
Ongoing developments include:
integration with a third-party Warehouse Management System and adapting to deliver all technical aspects of the new, automated warehouse
