Dotcom Manager - Claire Glassborow

Halfords has a strong record of growth across the business, but nothing comes close to the 120% year on year increase in sales that has been delivered through our e-commerce website www.halfords.com

That’s hardly surprising in one way, since its launch in 2003 we have introduced more and more products on line and now have over 3,500 items you can order for home delivery. Internet shopping has also increased over the same period of course, but a large measure of credit for this success should be claimed by the e-commerce team.

She has experience in a similar role with another retailer and this has given her strong views about the way the site needs to develop from here. The next task is to increase the number of items available on-line to replicate all 14,000 products that customers can find in one of our superstores. Integrating the website with SAP has already allowed this to start to happen, but her ambitions are bigger – using the website as merely one entry point to a multi-channel, integrated system where customers can order on-line and pick-up in store, check stock availability for specialist products which they wouldn’t have access to in their local store, and even using the site in-store as a virtual catalogue, as well as the traditional home-delivery model.

Her passion for the subject is infectious and she thrives on the collective drive to succeed within the business. She gets just as much of a kick from the culture too ‘Even though we’re very business focused, it’s more of a relaxed culture than I’ve been used to and there is a great acceptance for new ideas. If you want to try something, as long as you can back it up, the business will encourage and support you. It means you’re able to try things and see if they work which is great’ says Claire.