E-Commerce Business of the Year
O’Neills Irish International Sports Company Ltd awarded E-Commerce Business of the Year at the UK’s Digital Entrepreneur Awards
O’Neills Irish International Sports Company Ltd were awarded the E-Commerce Business of the Year award at the UK’s Digital Entrepreneur Awards, which were held at the Palace Hotel, Manchester on Wednesday 11th November 2015.
The Digital Entrepreneur Awards are the UK’s only national awards dedicated to internet entrepreneurialism, celebrating the best rapidly growing industry and recognising online business excellence.
The awards celebrate not only the high profile websites and leaders driving online e-commerce, but the silent heroes who develop the systems that change the online landscape and shape our digital future.
O’Neills beat off some stiff competition including last year’s winners to land this much coveted recognition.
The E-Commerce Business of the Year category is dedicated to businesses experiencing or creating a fast growing return from online sales. In particular the judges were looking for pioneering businesses that are doing things differently with their online presence and outweighing the competition. The judges were also looking to reward an entrepreneurial team for their impact on the customer journey, lead generation strategy and of course sales.
O’Neills, the largest sportswear manufacturing company in Ireland, was commended by the judges for its unique continuous improvement approach to e-commerce and for the quality of its on-going training and mentoring programme for all e-commerce team members.
Judge and CEO of headline sponsor, cloud-computing firm UKFast, Lawrence Jones said: “As a judging panel we were incredibly impressed with O’Neills’ commitment to cutting-edge e-commerce design and the overall speed and usability of its website. It sounds like a simple thing but it’s surprising how often it’s done badly. In this case the whole e-commerce journey works perfectly, from discovery of the site to delivery of the product.”
Following the announcement of the award, O’Neills Group IT Manager, Ronan McSorley said: “The entire team is delighted to have won such a prestigious award. In O’Neills there is a combined team focus on ensuring our website performs to the highest possible e-commerce benchmarks. This applies throughout all aspects of our design process from the photography of our products, content descriptions, ensuring the site is optimized for search engine visibility and promoting and marketing through proactive social media, email marketing and on site merchandising.
O’Neills has a continuous improvement approach to e-commerce. The company has an on-going training and mentoring programme for all e-commerce team members to ensure continual development in the skills sets that are used in achieving our strategic approach.
Ronan also added: “This year we successfully completed a full e-commerce website redesign. This was a fully responsive design project, which incorporated intense attention to detail, optimising the customer journey from site performance to the overall transaction experience. There is also full integration across the business in terms of customer service from the highest levels of site security to ensure our customers have full trust in the O’Neills e-commerce platform, through to rigorous customer focused standards of logging and processing orders to ensure they are despatched to our customers as fast as possible.
In order to enable oneills.com to perform to its optimum, we have underpinned its development with ongoing staff training in all aspects of ecommerce. There is a high level of integration and seamless co-operation between the different departments responsible for our e-commerce platform. The staff training has been a key success along with the establishment of a new purpose built, state of the art, order fulfilment and dispatch facility. This along with specifically tailored job roles has ensured maximum efficiency. It is these attributes that we believe make oneills.com stand out.”