While Black Friday signals the beginning of the holiday selling season in the U.S., in the U.K., it is the traditional switching on ceremony of the famous Oxford Street Christmas lights – funded by more than 200 retailers on Oxford Street – that marks the official start of London’s Christmas shopping season. This year, the holiday selling season began November 1; the giant Christmas decorations will light up Oxford Street until January 5. British high-street retailer, Aurora Fashions, is scaling its successful iPad point of sale (POS) system (referred to herein as an iPad self order system) trial just in time for the Christmas peak.
The award-winning, multi-channel, multi-national fashion retailer began trialing an iPad self order system in eight of its stores in London and Oxford about three months ago; within ten weeks the system was fully integrated into the trial stores. (Read the full story in our previous blog post, “Aurora Launches UK’s 1st Retail iPad POS Mobile Ordering System.”) On November 16, Retail Week’s Rebecca Thomson, reported that Aurora Fashions is expanding that trial.
Aurora launched the trial of the iPad self order system on a single iPad in each of the eight stores, with all four of its well-known international high-end women’s fashion brands participating, including its Karen Millen brand, which was spun off as an independent company last March. (The other three brands are Coast, Oasis, and Warehouse. See slide show here. Its Warehouse brand won the ‘High Street Retailer of the Year’ category at the 2011 Drapers Fashion Awards on November 16.)
In the next phase of the trial, the company expanded the iPad self order system to the Argyll Street Oasis flagship and Warehouse stores, with the Oasis store trialing eight iPads and the Warehouse store, three.
The third phase will further expand the trial to two of Aurora’s Westfield Stratford stores and eleven additional Karen Millen brand stores in the U.K. In all, a total of twenty-three “relatively high traffic stores” will be trialing the iPad self order system by the peak of the Christmas shopping season, which will give the fashion retailer the opportunity to see how the system performs “during the busiest time of the year.” Aurora wants to see how its sales teams manage system maintenance and charging during “high-volume periods.” The company also wants to evaluate what limits, if any, it needs to impose on the broad freedoms it has given employees to come up with increasingly creative ways to use the iPads in multi-channel customer engagement, to achieve the perfect balance between creative freedom and the security of corporate systems.
Aurora’s Director of Strategic Development, Ish Patel, says that, overall, the iPad self order system has made the customer experience more enjoyable and the retail experience, easier for sales associates, which ultimately means more sales. If the system continues to perform as well as it has to date, Aurora plans to expand the trial country-wide.
Read about and See a Slide Show of all the Christmas Light Displays in London Here
Disclaimer: This is an independent report sourced from one or more news articles and or press releases; none of the company’s, entities or technologies digressed in this report are affiliated with or a client of Aptito.
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