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How Topshop.com survives the Kate Moss effect
Analysis: Arcadia CIO explains the power of online apparel

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Thursday 22 November 2007

When Topshop launched the Kate Moss range earlier this year, its website traffic leapt from its average of 1.5 million page views per day to 5 million.

But the site could cope with such a spike because it had an infrastructure designed to weather the often sudden changes in consumer demand which characterises the fashion sector. Parent company Arcadia Group's IT director Andrew Clarke told silicon.com he expects traffic on the company's site to spike again as shoppers gear up for Christmas.

Clarke estimates £13.8bn will be spent by the UK's 27 million online shoppers over the Christmas period - and wants plenty of that spend to go through one of Arcadia's branded sites.

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Clarke said the Arcadia site, which includes the retailer's seven brands - Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Topman, Topshop and Wallis - was revamped 16 months ago and is being continually updated.

A single infrastructure, provided by IBM, runs all of the brands. It was built along a modular architecture, so applications can be swapped out and upgraded when necessary. Within it is a load-balancing facility that can be used to beef up certain aspects on the site.

He explained: "Early on in the Kate Moss range launch, we had a huge run on orders. We were able to focus the power of the systems on the order process. On the previous day there was more activity around viewing images of the line, so we put more power into the front-end browsing."

Arcadia's web brands see a lot of traffic - Topshop.com alone gets 500,000 visits a week, with 30 per cent of visitors returning on a daily basis. And across the board, sales volumes have risen by 80 per cent, year-on-year. But Clarke is continually looking for improvement. Because the site is built on a modular architecture, he can swap out the standard elements that the site was built with for more advanced versions. One of these developments he is considering is a more advanced search engine that could for instance, search ranges by size.

Clarke is pleased with the way the site is going, compared to the original offering built over 10 years ago, which could only handle 30 per cent of the retailer's products.

He said: "Compared to other retailers, we are up there. We've caught up massively and we will get where we want to be within 18 months. ASOS is one of the online apparel retailers that we would see as the benchmark."

And Clarke is sure of the Topshop site's standing within Arcadia.

He said: "Our ecommerce presence is vital. Customers just expect it now. There is a huge degree of browsing, where customers are using the site as a catalogue and then go into the stores to make their purchase."