The Home Store Group
Investors
What we do
Homestore Group started Internet marketing just over 18 months ago with the acquisition of RTD followed in March 2008 by Biasco. These established built in white goods specialist retailers have more than 10 years’ history and complimentary product ranges. The Homestore product range now exceeds 10,000 with 5,000 actively marketed on Internet search and comparison sites, complimented with a growing affiliate scheme. Results… Sales are currently taken totally automatically by 3 Web sites or by a small telephone and showroom sales team.
The Homestore marketing spend is directed using a feedback performance system based on continuously monitored competitiveness which also monitors customer behaviour and the searched term universe.
This system is product type agnostic and has recently been applied to other home wares and consumer electronics, having been proven on the difficult and competitive white goods area… to offset the seasonal variance in sales of white goods.
Homestore are planning to add further product types to offset seasonality and increase growth in the following year. More…
How we do it
The company acquisitions have provided The Homestore Group with an experienced team which, thanks to the high levels of automation and systems integration, is very efficient [small] for the size of business. These systems have been designed and proven to be highly scalable allowing the business to react to growth without human resource pressure.
Homestore’s systems are under constant review to improve internal efficiency but mainly to support the continuous tuning of the marketing machine. All of the existing systems development and design is driven internally with additional resource and expertise acquired as required using external design and development partners.
Who does it
Sales
Sales is the area that does not benefit (as much) from the highly scalable systems as some of the Internet marketing is directed towards telephone and showroom sales. The existing sales team is expert in kitchen appliances. Future growth in other product areas would see recruitment and training of additional sales people for those product areas. The resource load on the human sales team can be tuned by the marketing system.
Customer Service
The customer service team is less product type specific than the sales team and as such benefits from the scalability of the systems. Most initial customer enquiries can be dealt by Web based systems and email.
Logistics
Order processing and purchasing are as automatic as the suppliers can cope with. A current project, die for completion this year, will see more than 50% of the product range managed electronically. More…
Delivery is booked automatically with our warehousing and delivery partners…
Accounts
The accounts team uses SAP purchasing, accounting, stock and general ledger products that are integrated into the sales and purchasing systems allowing accounts to be run with only 3 staff.
Marketing & IT
Marketing and IT is under one roof in the Homestore Group. This allows marketing to demand systems changes and developments to react as quickly as possible to market changes and competitive pressure.
The team is the result of the acquired businesses and comes with many years of experience in systems automation, stock exchange trading systems, SAP, HR time monitoring and recording, more…
The systems and Web site technology currently in use by The Homestore Group are the result of more than 5 years’ development by this team.