Primark demands landlords give them 30% rent cuts for not using CVAs

Primark is demanding that landlords cut its shop rents by 30 per cent after struggling high street chains used insolvency tools to slash theirs.

New Look, the Topshop owner Arcadia and Monsoon used company voluntary arrangements (CVAs) to close stores and reduce their bills.

CVAs have doubled in the past two years as bricks and mortar retailers have been caught out by the rise of online shopping. The CBI reported that retailers had recorded the longest period of falling sales for eight years.

Primark, which has so far resisted launching an online store, has 189 shops in the UK and made £7 billion of sales last year. In return for rent reductions, the discount fast-fashion retailer has been offering landlords lease extensions or an investment in store refurbishment. “We have a duty to our shareholders to maintain a competitive cost base,” Primark told The Sunday Times.

Its demand will add to the woes of Britain’s listed property companies, including Intu and Hammerson, which are facing investor scrutiny about the inflated values of shopping centres.

Next has secured average rent reductions of 29 per cent. WH Smith is paying no rent on a handful of stores while Julian Dunkerton, co-founder of Superdry, warned that if landlords did not agree to rent cuts he would shut shops. Hotel Chocolat’s founder, Angus Thirlwell, said “arrogant and dominant property owners” were now being forced to be more supportive of retailers.

Sports Direct regrets saving House of Fraser from closure

Sports Direct says it regrets rescuing House of Fraser in its much-delayed results, which revealed a €674m (£605m) tax bill from Belgium authorities.

The firm, which bought the department store out of administration a year ago, said: “If we had the gift of hindsight we might have made a different decision in August 2018.”

It described problems at House of Fraser as “nothing short of terminal”.

It added it was in talks with Belgian officials to resolve the tax bill.

The full-year results had been due to be published on 15 July but were delayed until 26 July, in part, because of uncertainty over the future trading performance of House of Fraser.

‘House of horrors’

Those results had been expected to be published on Friday morning, but were subject to continuous delays throughout the day.

It has now emerged that Sports Direct, which is majority-owned and run by billionaire Mike Ashley, was hit by the tax bill by Belgian authorities on 25 July.

The company said the request for back taxes is linked to the way its goods are moved throughout the European Union and are taxed in Belgium.

Meanwhile, it also said that its chief financial officer of two years, Jon Kempster, is stepping down and will be succeeded by his deputy, Chris Wootton.

Commenting on House of Fraser, Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com, said: “It’s a House of horrors, more like.”

He said Sports Direct had “every reason to regret buying House of Fraser now”.

“It’s such a shame as there were such high hopes,” he added.

Mr Ashley had vowed to turn House of Fraser into the “Harrods of the High Street” when he bought the department store chain out of administration for £90m last August.

However, on Friday he said: “In the short-term you can’t justify it. It’s like buying a broken down car at the roadside – you have to get it to the garage to fix it.”

But he said: “Long-term, we’d like to think we are hopeful of where we are going.”

5 crucial ecommerce tools for new or established online stores

When you search for ecommerce tools that you can use for your online store, you will find that there are thousands of them available at your disposal.

They range from ecommerce website platforms to those with more specific functions like automation tools and form builders.

With the multitudes present, it can feel overwhelming to select which tools are ideal for your needs.

Just by using the right tools, you can achieve optimum operational efficiency, better customer relationships, and improvements in your sales and conversions.

That said, here are five crucial ecommerce tools you should use for your online store.

There’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms available to help merchants build websites, maintain product catalogues, manage shopping carts, process payments, fulfill orders and market brands. Amid this crowded market, BigCommerce has risen in prominence in recent years, thanks to its embracing of the “headless commerce” trend.

Today’s ecommerce merchants need more than functional storefront websites. You need to offer your products on several digital sales channels, and your site needs to be a media-rich destination led by content, brand and community experiences. By allowing merchants to manage the commerce side of business in one centralized place that’s optimized to sync effortlessly with other channels through plugins, APIs and other integrations, BigCommerce’s headless commerce offering is where it’s at.

To support that experience and raise your income and visibility, you should also be where your customers are, whether that’s with social commerce, mobile apps, blogs, marketplaces or price comparison engines.

BigCommerce can help you with just that. It builds stunning and seamlessly integrable storefronts for Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google Shopping, WordPress, Instagram and others. And you can do all that while handling products, payments and deliveries all in one place. The platform allows you to develop whatever digital experience you like and link out to a BigCommerce-hosted checkout interface, or to host it all yourself.

For your online store to give customers a stellar brand experience, sell where they are, and generate more sales, you need a headless commerce tool like BigCommerce.

Engaging with your customers through direct messages is essential to the success of your online store. If you can accommodate your customers’ inquiries instantly, you will make them feel valued, and they’re more likely to patronize your products and services.

To make that happen, you can use a tool like Crisp. It automates chatting with your site visitors when pre-set triggers are prompted. This makes for more personalized and highly interactive customer engagement.

It allows you to send files, documents and images – and to connect your live chat with social networking sites like Messenger and Twitter.

Scheduling calls with your customers is also more convenient with Crisp. Instead of using a third-party communication software, your customers can enjoy video and audio calls right through Crisp.

Plus, if you have customers speaking a different language and you’re worried you can’t converse with them, you can breathe easy. Crisp can translate both your and your customers’ messages automatically so you can still interact in real-time.

With Crisp, you can foster customer relationships through live chat and significantly improve your conversions.

Did you know that when it comes to purchasing decisions, 83 percent of consumers trust their peers’ recommendations more than advertisements? Moreover, if they see people patronizing a product, they are likely to consider it as attention-worthy. This reality is called “social proof,” and if you haven’t leveraged it yet, you should now, because it can increase your conversions by 15 percent.

To make that happen, you need a tool called TrustPulse. When you install it on your online store, visitors can see real-time and recent activities such as sign-ups, purchases and product demonstrations.

Such notification creates a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) in your visitors and prompts them to participate, just as the others have. And if you want to see how your conversions and pages are doing, TrustPulse can provide you analytics and reports.

Additional tip: aside from TrustPulse, you can also leverage user-generated content (UGC) such as testimonials for social proof. Testimonials will help convince your prospective customers that your products are worth it. Not leveraging UGC is one of the biggest branding mistakes online retailers can make, mind you.

When you’re running your online store, one of the basic things you’d want to be doing is monitoring your ads performance and conversions from specific products.

You do this by inserting tracking codes and scripts of appropriate plugins into your website. To organize and manage these codes efficiently, you need a tool like IntellyWP.

With it, you can see all your tracking codes and scripts on one page. You can also opt to display them on the whole website or in particular pages or posts only.

If you ever fret losing your previous tracking when your website theme is updated, fear not because that won’t happen when you use this tool. With IntellyWP, you can manage pixels for tracking your ads, codes, and conversions in a more organized manner.

Imagine this. Your shoppers browse through your product list on your ecommerce site and add items on their virtual carts one after another.  Suddenly, when they’re about to hit checkout and seal the deal, they leave without making any purchase.

Is this a common scenario in your online store? If so, then you need to win your sales and shoppers back using strategies and a powerful tool called Sumo.

Sumo is built to help you supercharge your ecommerce sales and conversions. It has a neat pop-up feature which helps you gather emails and regain lost revenue. In this way, Sumo decreases cart abandonment and increases your average order value.

Here’s what happens when you wield abandoned cart popups using Sumo:

• Sumo recognizes signs of shoppers who want to leave the site.
• It launches an attractive exit intent pop-up form to bring shoppers back to the purchase funnel immediately – or at a later time through its autoresponder email.
• Using the popup, you can present irresistible discounts or value offers when shoppers try to click away or desert their carts.
• Sumo delivers an exclusive discount code in the success message and the auto-response email.

Sumo’s abandoned cart pop-ups help online store owners to recover sales from potential buyers who don’t make a purchase.

Wield these tools

These tools are well-known in how they have significantly improved the performance of many ecommerce websites.

If you have not used these tools yet to achieve the best possible results for your online store, it’s about time you do.

Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash

Waitrose announces store closes as middle classes shoppers go to Lidl

The favourite grocer of the middle classes, Waitrose, is shutting seven more shops with the discounter Lidl swooping on three in renewed signs of the rapidly changing retail market.

Waitrose began as a small grocery shop in Acton, north London, 115 years ago. It has 334 shops, employs 52,590 people and merged with John Lewis in 1937.

However Lidl, which arrived in Britain in the 1990s, controls a bigger slice of the grocery market than Waitrose as customers have been lured by its cut-price offerings since the recession. The German company has 760 shops.

Waitrose admitted that it had not been able to make a profit on the seven affected stores and would be selling four outlets in Bromley, Kent, Oadby in Leicester, Sandhurst in Berkshire and Wollaton in Nottingham and closing another three in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Stevenage in Hertfordshire and Waterside in British Airways’ headquarters near Heathrow.

The grocer said that it had started consultation with the 677 employees at risk. “We haven’t taken this decision lightly but we have to do what’s right for the business as a whole,” Mark Gifford, Waitrose & Partners director of shop trade, said.