Premium & Luxury brands dominate DTC ecommerce customer experience ranking
- Luxury and premium brands have embraced value-add features and overtaken their mass-market peers to provide inspirational, low-friction digital customer experiences.
- British beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury tops the ranking of 100 consumer brands
- High-performing Premium & Luxury brands include Montblanc, Paul Smith and Ray-Ban
LONDON, 8TH SEPTEMBER, 2023 - Premium and luxury brands have shaken off the status of ecommerce laggards when it comes to the experience provided by their direct-to-consumer (DTC) websites.
The findings come from research by digital experience design & build agency Inviqa, which has benchmarked the DTC websites of 100 consumer brands across 10 product categories. Overall the Premium & Luxury category - including brands such as Montblanc, Paul Smith, Ray-Ban and Burberry – was the highest scoring with an average per brand of 66% of the total available marks across 36 criteria scored in the study.
The average score for all brands in the research was 59%, with the average for the worst performing category – Toys & Games – being just 50%.
Brands in the Premium & Luxury category scored strongly on factors such as the ease of finding products via the navigation, detailed product information and imagery, and ease of finding store and stockist information plus booking an offline appointment.
The higher margins that luxury and premium brands are working with also allow them to offer a DTC ecommerce proposition that might not be profitable for mass-market peers. 70% of brands in the category allow customers to order personalised products via their website compared to only 29% overall. 80% offer free standard delivery on all orders. And 70% of brands in the category offer gift services, such as gift wrapping, gift messages or purchase of e-gift vouchers for the brand.
However, there are a couple of website features that Premium & Luxury brands have chosen not to adopt, likely as they prefer to closely control what is published on their DTC sites. Only one of the 10 – Ray-Ban – provides product ratings & reviews functionality, compared to 72% of the total brands. And while overall 40% of brands had integrated user-generated content (such as Instagram posts) into their sites, none of the brands in the Premium & Luxury category had done so.
Each brand was assessed through the eyes of a potential customer, looking at the potential friction points, proposition and value added along the shopper journey through a mixture of products, services, content and site functionality. Brands from 10 categories were assessed: Baby, Beauty & Fragrance, Consumer Electronics, Footwear, Health, Homewares, Jewellery & Watches, Pet, Premium & Luxury and Toys & Games.
British beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury came top overall with an impressive 80% score. As well as scoring very strongly for how easy it is to discover, compare and select products on its website, its customer service channels were excellent when tested.
In addition, the Charlotte Tilbury site provides many compelling reasons to shop there rather than buy its products through other retailers or marketplaces. This includes online exclusive product, subscription services, a loyalty scheme and a product recommendation tool.
After Charlotte Tilbury, other top scoring brands include Pandora, Thomas Sabo and Villeroy & Boch (all scoring 75%), Adidas, Clarks, Nike & Samsung (all scoring 74%) and Lego scoring 72%.
An overview of the findings and further details of the top-ranking brands has been published in Inviqa’s DTC Ecommerce Report which can be downloaded at: https://inviqa.com/insights/dtc-ecommerce-report-2023
About Inviqa
Inviqa is a digital experience agency combining strategy, design and engineering to deliver digital products that connect brands with their customers.
Part of Havas, we are committed to enhancing our clients’ businesses and their customers’ lives with best-of-breed technology and UX. Current and previous clients include: Reckitt, Unilever, Molton Brown, Reiss, N Brown Group, Arsenal, Boohoo Group and Brompton Bicycle.
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