Full steam ahead to cross-channel retailer

Mr Toeller, you recently announced in an interview, that Fressnapf's online shop will only grow by 5 to 10 per cent this year. What's the reason why the growth rate isn't higher than originally expected? The development of our own cross channel approach is more important to us than a pure player strategy and therefore customer satisfaction comes before growth in turnover. With the roll out of our cross-channel strategy in the middle of the year, we have already placed more emphasis on intensifying our focus more on the customer and meeting his individual needs and want to reach him at the place in which he lives.
Thus, we are optimistic that this will produce very positive re­sults in the long-term for the whole group. Due to the changeover to SAP and Hybris, as well as the change in our fulfilment providers, we were fully aware that this would re­sult in a lower growth rate.

Fressnapf is currently on the way to becoming a multi-channel retailer. How have things progressed in 2014? In the future, we don't just see ourselves as multi-channel retailers with two decoupled distribution channels but rather as real cross-channel retailers, where all marketing and distribution channels are served in an integrated way. With the introduction of SAP, GK and Hybris this year, we have created an important prerequisite to control all processes through all distribution networks. That's a big milestone for us. Even today, customers can order online shop products in-store and either collect them on site or have the goods delivered to their homes. Likewise, it's already possible nowadays to return the goods to the store.
The first steps in the direction of cross-channel are, therefore, already visible, but our aim, of course, is to constantly improve. For this reason, we have also made some improvements internally. In particular, the merger of the e-commerce and marketing departments to a new cross-channel marketing symbolises our structural change to a real cross-channel retailer. The international roll out of the online shop has yet to happen. What does the schedule for this look like? In order to create the prerequisites for a scalable online and cross-channel platform, processes and IT solutions were top of our strategy list in 2014. The…