Apparel brand New York & Co. Inc. is banking on more shoppers picking up their online orders in store to wring greater profits out of those online orders.
“We believe we have the opportunity to grow our order online, pick up in store, which we will begin to focus on as we move forward,” New York & Co. CEO Greg Scott said on the company’s fiscal second quarter 2017 earnings call last week, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha. “Looking for new ways to ship faster, more efficiently and more effectively with less cost is what we are focused on currently.”
New York & Co. operates about 460 stores nationwide. The buy online, pick up in store ordering process is relatively frictionless on New York & Co.’s website. Items that are available to be picked up in a store feature a button that a shopper can click “get it now.” The site automatically detects the shopper’s location and shows her nearby stores where she can pick up her online order.
The feature, however, does not always have up-to-date inventory information. Internet Retailer tried adding three items to an online shopping cart using the buy online, pick up in store button. Two out of the three times, an error message appeared, stating that the selected item was no longer available and had been removed from the online shopping cart.
New York & Co., No. 164 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, could not immediately be reached for comment.
On the earnings call for the quarter ended July 29, president and chief operating officer John Worthington said the company is making strides toward improving the real-time accuracy of store inventory.
“During the quarter, we started the rollout of new mobile handheld scanners to our stores, which we believe will provide several benefits, including increased speed freight processing, improved reliability, better in-store real-time reporting, improvement in omni [order] processing and complement our new POS [point-of-sale] and tablets that we recently installed in stores, enabling us to improve productivity and focus our efforts on driving sales and conversion,” he said.
While New York & Co. does not break out e-commerce dollar figures in its quarterly earnings reports, Scott said online accounted for 25% of the retailer’s total business, which would mean New York & Co. generated about $56 million in online sales during fiscal Q2. Scott said that figure represents double-digit year-over-year growth.
For the fiscal second quarter ended July 29, New York & Co. reported:
- Net sales of $224.1 million, down 3.7% from $232.8 million during the same time last year.
- A year-over-year comparable sales decline of 1.1%, which reflects e-commerce growth partly offsetting declining store sales. During the same period last year, New York & Co. posted a 0.3% comparable sales gain.
- Net income of $4.8 million, up from $945,000.
For the first six months of 2017, New York & Co. reported:
- Net sales of $434.0 million, down 3.3% from $448.9 million in the year-ago quarter.
- A year-over-year comparable sales decline of 0.9%, the same as last year.
- Net income of $576,000, compared with a $4.8 million loss.