Top 25 Drinks Retail Websites for June

Brought to you by Retailinsider.com and Cookie Reports

Supermarket EH Booth rose dramatically up the table of the Top 25 UK’s leading drinks retailing websites in June as it grabbed a top five spot that better reflects its position as one of the best multiple retailers of drinks in the country.

It moved up 15 places to fifth spot as it doubled its score to 6 out of 10, according to the monthly table of UK websites for drinks retailers, produced exclusively for Retailinsider.com by website testing specialist Sitemorse.

To produce the rankings Sitemorse runs automated software that page-by-page reads the first 125 pages of each website and analyses on the basis of six key criteria - function, code quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and SEO capability.

Ahead of EH Booth there was a change at the top of the table as The Whisky Shop moved up one place with a score of 7.10 to push Spar (UK) into second place with its 6.72, which is a dip from the 7.26 it achieved last month.

It has been a turbulent month for the drinks websites as only two of the top 25 remain in the same position as they did in May – these being Majestic Wine and Waitrose – which compares with the seven non-movers previously. After EH Booth, the biggest mover this month is Naked Wines that fell eight places into 22^nd spot to push it into the bottom five.

It sits alongside some very big names in the bottom half of the table as Tesco, Asda, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose all scored rather poorly within the tight 2.60 to 3.30 band that is a long way from the score of 7 out of 10 that Sitemorse regards as a credible score that all retailers should aim for.

However, these players still delivered a better performance than some specialist drinks retailers including the bottom five – Virgin Wines, Naked Wines, Slurp, Laithwaites and Sunday Times Wine Club.  

This is rather a sad state of affairs as these operators should arguably be delivering the best performance as drinks is their specialist area and most of them do not have stores so they are wholly reliant on their websites and mail order businesses to generate revenues.

Despite its still lowly position in 23^rd spot Slurp has made some progress this month as it moves up two places to take it off the bottom slot. It has also been active with innovations as it recently launched a Daily Deals service that feature video tasting notes.

Overall, it has been a good recent period for online drinks retailing, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, which reported a healthy 12% month-on-month increase in sales for the Beers, Wine and Spirits category in May. The Bank Holiday in the early part of the month and the Jubilee celebrations were seen as likely key drivers in this uplift.

Top 25 Drinks Retail Websites – June 2012

Company Name                      +/-       Score out of 10

1.      The Whisky Shop         +1        7.10

2.      Spar (UK)                     -1         6.72

3.      Fortnum & Mason       +1        6.24

4.      Budgens                      +1        6.22

5.      EH Booth & Co          +14      6.00

6.      Aldi                              -3         5.80    

7.      Bargain Booze             -1         5.56

8.      Iceland                         +1        5.30

9.      Lidl                              -2         5.19

10.  The Wine Society        -2         5.18

11.  Londis                          -1         4.38

12.  BeerMerchants.com   -1         4.22                

13.  Majestic Wine             same   3.84

14.  Sainsbury’s                  -2         3.76

15.  The Drink Shop            +1        3.51

16.  Tesco                           +1        3.28

17.  Selfridges                    +1        3.10

18.  Asda                            -3         2.90

19.  Marks & Spencer        +2        2.58

20.  Waitrose                     same   2.58

21.  Virgin Wines               +1        2.50

22.  Naked Wines               - 8        2.40

23.  Slurp.co.uk                  +2        2.16

24.  Laithwaites                  -1         2..4

25.  Sun Times Wine Club  -1         1.79

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Innovative Retailers - Legal365

Brought to you by Retailinsider.com and PCMS

The Name: Legal365

The Place: Currently online only but soon to come to a high street near you

The Story: Back in the olden days it used to be that only a lawyer could own or invest in a law firm. No longer. Since January 2012  the government has changed all that and now anyone can apply to run an ABS (Alternative Business Structure) and set up a legal service. Prepare for an unholy battle between the start up upstarts like Legal365 and the big boys who charge you £100 for opening the door. Now who was it who said ‘first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’

Ajaz Ahmed: Embarking on another revolution.

Ooh. A quiz. Is it Shakespeare? Whatever. I’m just giving you a flavour of what people think of our learned friends. They are right up there in the popularity stakes with MPs and parking wardens. But Mr Ajaz Ahmed who has already had one brilliant idea in his life (founding Freeserve) has gone and had another one, making legal services more accessible and affordable to the general public and small businesses. He would like, in fact, to be the ‘Specsavers of the legal world’.

Run that past me again? Ahmed is adamant that people have already forgotten what opticians used to be like. Ten years ago before the government changed the rules on that sector it too was a restricted industry, not offering fair value for money and forcing people to buy glasses where they had their eye test done. SpecSavers changed the industry for ever and Ahmed wants to do the same for the legal world. As he likes to say ‘people hate lawyers’.

And why do we hate them so much? Simple. The biggest problem is that they charge by the hour giving them a great incentive to make the job last as long as possible, and secondly they have a lack of transparency. Legal365 is trying to turn both those rationales on their heads.

Gimme the lowdown. There are two phases. Phase one is up and running already and is the purely online presence - Legal365.com. There are 340 different consumer and small business legal services on it ranging from wills, probate, applications for maternity leave, neighbour disputes, work grievances, hiring and firing, organising terms and conditions, and contracts of employment. Ahmed thinks that most business is done on a handshake because people cannot afford to organise legal contracts. It costs £20 to do it on Legal365. A lot of people separate and never divorce because the lawyers take all the money. It costs £75 here to fill in the divorce forms and have it reviewed by a lawyer.

£75!!!!??? Don’t sound so interested please. Yes, you can virtually do it in your lunchbreak. You choose the relevant document. The software has been developed to ask you questions and according to the answers you give builds your document. You can pay an extra fee to have any document reviewed by a lawyer and the software will tell you, based on your answers, whether your case is too complex or not suitable for this approach.

I love it already. In addition as you would expect from the founder of Freeserve, he has made it easy to understand. Its jargon free and ease of navigation has been a priority. But online retailing is all very well,  it is actually phase two wherein lies the revolution. Who was it who said ‘Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know.’

Ooh. Give me a second. Too late. Anyway, taking the mystery out is step two and Ahmed hopes that there will soon be an awful lot of his Legal365 shops on the high street. He is expecting the most popular service to be his ‘legal bar service’ whereby you go in and just buy a fixed amount of time with a lawyer. The first shop is opening in Leeds (the legal firm which partially owns Legal365 is based in Yorkshire) towards the end of 2012 but it will work on a franchise model which could roll out very quickly. The idea is that you walk in and immediately all the services are displayed, with a fixed price next to them. Lawyers all trained to speak plain English and transactions completed in a fraction of the time. More of a coffee shop feel to it than a frightening legal environment.

And still as subsidised as the online arm? Well not quite. You are sitting face to face with a trained lawyer after all but still far less than a traditional law firm.

And talking of them – what do they think? In Ahmed’s words ‘ they’ll hate us, which is great’. He claims they are in ‘absolute denial’ about the possibilities and full of reasons why it won’t work which is ‘exactly the right response’ because while they do that, Legal365 will steal a march on the whole pack of them.

But surely other people are going to replicate his model, no? Other people will definitely go down the online route and the Americans – who have been at this for a while now – will launch here too but Ahmed is a confident man on this. He says the market is big enough to take a number of players – its valued at £23 billion per annum in the UK – and his idea will open up the market to be even bigger, bringing in people who don’t currently use legal services. There have been 200 applications to run an ABS including big names like the Co-Op but despite lots of activity he has seen no innovation at all. It’s the same old same old.

And who will these lawyers in his shops be exactly? The thrusting young turks in their 20s and 30s who cannot be waiting for 20 years to become a partner before they start earning serious money. They buy a franchise to run one of these and bingo.

I see, the sky is the limit then? I think it’s safe to say Mr Ahmed sees no limit to what might be achieved especially when you factor in the ‘white label element’. One of the reasons for Freeserve’s success was its great route to market – through the many Dixons shops on the UK high street. His shops could end up as concessions within other shops providing another great route to market.

So, let’s have it. Where could it be in five years? In hundreds of locations, serving millions of people and worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Jargon free. Just how we like it.

PCMS Group is a leading independent supplier of software and services to the retail industry; PCMS Store and Multi-channel solutions have been chosen by over 98 retailers including Arcadia, John Lewis and M&S. 

Bed sales are not a dream

One of the UK’s most unusual luxury hotels recently opened its doors for the first time to welcome adventurous sea-loving guests. 

Concrete fortress turns hotel.

The hotel has been carved out of Spitbank Fort - one of three concrete fortress structures built in the late 1800s a good 15 minutes out to sea off the shore at Portsmouth to protect the harbour from invaders.

Creating this high-end eight-bedroom hotel has taken an investment equivalent to £375,000 per room, which is a lot of money for sure but it is still a mere drop in the ocean for its owner Mike Clare. He is the retailing entrepreneur who built-up bed retailer Dreams before selling it to private equity firm Exponent in 2008 for around £220 million.

Located well away from any potentially noisy neighbours and with a nightly room rate of £800 it is assumed that any lucky people staying the Fort will enjoy a comfortable night’s sleep – especially as the beds must surely be of a superior quality.

These beds better be comfortable.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Exponent that has found selling beds to be a recipe for sleepless nights since it signed on the dotted line. While rapidly expanding the portfolio of stores from 170 in 2008 to a current 270 units the company has been hit badly by the downturn.

At its last set of accounts Dreams recorded a 7% growth in turnover to £300 million but EBITDA dropped more than 50% from £25.1 million to £11.2 million and this has led to myriad knock-on effects.

At the back-end of last year the company reorganised its finances with Exponent investing another £20 million into the business as well as booting out of its chairman John Clare (formerly the boss of Dixons).


Around this time Dreams’ credit insurer Euler Hermes withdrew cover for five of its suppliers, which has in the past fuelled the demise a number of retailers. Against this backdrop, Dreams has sought to ease its cash flow by convincing landlords to switch from quarterly to monthly rental payments.

To date this has proved successful on a number of stores but despite this, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the principal lender to Dreams, has been minded to open talks with private equity firms about making investments in the business and to sit alongside Exponent.  

While the tough retail market has affected all high ticket merchants it seems beds have been affected more than most. This has certainly been the case with Carpetright that recently issued disappointing results for the 11 weeks trading to April 14, which showed sales across Europe fell by 4% for stores open more than one year.

There's no hiding from those uncomfortable bed sales.

This prompted full-year pre-tax profits estimates to be cut from £4 million to £3 million for the group. And the cause of this downgrade seemed to be partly the decision by management to go into beds. It launched a new range earlier this year but they have performed little better than the previous lot and this has done little to help the company offset the falling sales it has been experiencing in carpets and other floor coverings.

Quite the contrary, although they only account for 6% of total group turnover the disappointing sales of beds are having a correspondingly negative impact on profits. This has given investors in the City little appetite for buying Carpetright shares and likewise, there has been little news about any new investors injecting money into Dreams.

It therefore seems unlikely that the rumours Clare is plotting a takeover of Dreams have any grain of truth in them. Instead, he seems to be more enamoured with his venture into ultimate sea-view hotels as shown by the fact he last month bought the other two Portsmouth Harbour fortresses – Horse Sand and No Man’s Land.   

The name of the latter structure seems a rather apt description of the state of the beds market because at the moment it is a bit of no-go zone for both customers and investors – including Clare, unless all that sea air has affected his thinking.

This column was originally published in Kbbreview.

Short & Sweet Movers & Shakers Q&A with Alan White of N.Brown

Brought to you by Retailinsider.com and K3 Retail

Alan White, CEO of N. Brown Group

1. What is the greatest opportunity for your business?

There is still a great opportunity to improve our online conversion by trading the web more effectively.

2. What is the biggest challenge to your business?

Undoubtedly it is the lack of growth in the economy, which then causes discounting

3. With the benefit of hindsight what would you have done differently so far?

Bought the exact quantity of stock to meet the customer demand

4. What is the future of the physical store?

Over 80% of clothing and footwear is bought on the high street so they will be around for a long time to come. However the major shopping locations will thrive and poor town centres will continue to suffer. Customer will get more used to multi-channel shopping and geo-locational marketing.

5. Will mobile devices be the primary sales channel in the future?

Not the primary channel but a very, very important one, so it is essential to adapt to the device.

6. What other retail business do you admire?

All those posting strong sales growth!

6. If you hadn't been a retailer what would you have liked to do?

I love business and retail so I could have been a retail analyst or in my dreams a professional sportsman.

8. What marks out of 10 do you give yourself so far for achievement?

Ten out of ten for effort - others can decide whether the effort was effective.

True collaborative approach from pub chain

Who knows of any retail collaborations between store managers and manufacturers?

There might be many reasons to argue that the leisure sector is behind that of retail (this recent guest column highlights some of them) but a recent collaboration run by pub chain Nicholson's was truly innovative and I'm not sure if this sort of thing has ever been replicated in the retail sector.

The group plucked various managers from within its chain of 81 pubs - of which 45 are in London - and sent them off to various breweries around the country to create unique beers that would then be available exclusively in the company's outlets during the summer months.

Off they went to eight brewers  including the likes of Sambooks in London's Battersea, Roosters in Yorkshire and the Inveralmond Brewery in Perth, Scotland. The managers had extensive input into the brewing process - deciding on the bitterness levels and overall flavour characteristics of each beer as well as the ingredients selection, and vitally the name.

What they have come up with is a great selection of unique beers containing  hops from around the globe, unusual ingredients like Lavender honey, and various other elements that have contributed to creating a batch of very individual drinks. They reflect both the Nicholson's store managers' tastes as well as the breweries to which they were seconded.

Among the creations is Hawaii 340 from Cropton Brewery, Natural Beauty from Moor Beer Company, Sunshine and LolliHops from Thwaites, and Lavender Ale from Sambrooks.

The beers are available from June 11 for three months and I recommend giving them a try if you get the chance. But potentially, more importantly, retailers could maybe give this type of collaboration with manufacturers a go.

Not only does it help create unique products - an increasingly vital element of the industry - but it leads to great employee engagement. It's a win-win you could say and we should all drink to that.

Guest Post - Tesco’s move into the Marketplace: Star move or problem child?

Tesco’s highly anticipated launch of its marketplace last month may have been a quiet internal affair but it’s likely to set off a number of waves across the online retail market. The store’s decision to compete with the likes of Amazon and eBay may have come as a surprise to some but at eSellerPro, we expect to see more retailers’ following in Tesco’s footsteps as the online market becomes more saturated.

Established retailers to join the Marketplace.

Marketplaces offer retailers an attractive alternative to diversify their online revenue stream and reach millions of potential customers. With low entry costs, broad support mechanisms and minimal risks involved I am not surprised that more brands are now choosing to develop their own marketplace.

For brands, such as Tesco who already have a large customer base, introducing its own marketplace is likely to be the next natural step to grow the business. Not only does this enable the company to sell a broader range of goods through third party sellers, but it is likely to increase traffic to the website and ultimately sales of the company’s own products.

Of course, as with any business change, the move comes with risk. Instantly it puts Tesco’s in competition with two heavy hitters within the space - Amazon and eBay, and with both players dominating the industry for a number of years many have questioned whether Tesco’s really stands a chance at competing against two well-established names. 

However, what many are forgetting is that Tesco has a number of unique attributes that are able to differentiate it from the competition and more importantly pose a serious threat to both Amazon and eBay.

Take the company’s Clubcard for example. This will most definitely offer the brand an added advantage, providing customers an added incentive to shop at TescoDirect as opposed to the other online marketplaces. With customers now able to redeem extra points from purchasing non-Tesco goods, this could be a deciding factor for many buyers leading them to purchase from Tesco rather than traditional marketplaces.

Clubcard: differentiating Tesco from other Marketplaces.

Also let’s not forget Tesco’s vast network of stores. With over 6,000 physical stores around the world the potential for 'click and collect' is huge. Currently 770 stores are part of the scheme, but with an additional 700 more collection points planned to be introduced over the next year this is likely to act as a major draw for many customers looking to purchase goods online. Not only can customers collect items at their convenience, but they can also save on postage costs.

However, what is likely to be the main threat for Amazon and eBay is the company’s extensive distribution network, which will no doubt act as the biggest draw for smaller retailers to use the marketplace. As a result we are likely to see competitors increase investment in their own distribution centres in order to compete with the supermarket chain, to the point where same day delivery will become a key differentiator.

With the company’s profits taking a hit recently it is clear that Tesco is banking on this new initiative to make up for its recent losses. Even though it’s still early days there are clear indicators that show Tesco should be able to compete successfully against the likes of eBay and Amazon. 

In my opinion, if they are able to harness these key attributes and use them to their advantage, I will be extremely surprised if this new venture does not result in success for the chain. 

Keith Bird is CEO of eSellerPro