Digital sales are a major investment priority for watchmaker Movado Group Inc. The reason is, in part, based on Movado’s recent web sales growth, says Behzad Soltani, executive vice president, commercial president and chief technology officer, for Movado Group.
Flagship brand Movado’s second-quarter digital sales (including online sales of its products through outside retailers and marketplaces) grew 130% year over year, Soltani says. Movado sells its products online through retailers including Saks.com and on marketplaces such as Amazon.com Inc. and Tmall (owned by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.) in China. Saks is part of Hudson’s Bay Co., No. 28 in the 2020 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000. Amazon is No 1. in the Top 1000. Movado, which owns watch brands such as MVMT and Olivia Burton, also licenses its watches to brands including Coach (part of Tapestry, No. 207) and Hugo Boss. Movado also operates 47 physical stores.
Earlier this year, Movado integrated two of its owned brand websites—its flagship Movado brand as well as its lower-priced MVMT line—to with eShopWorld, a international services company that is designed to enable retailers to quickly ramp up selling online to international shoppers across the globe. It plans to integrate its other three owned brands—Olivia Burton, Ebel and Concord—with eShopWorld early next year.
“Looking at our direct-to-consumer websites, we could see that visitors were visiting us from other countries,” Soltani says. “But even with a broad international presence, serving global consumers can be complicated and expensive.”
Movado already hosts all of its brands on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This allows Movado to have a single site for each brand and personalize the site experience for each country. Commerce Cloud can automatically change the language of the sites based on geolocation, and tailor them for local markets.
For example, Movado doesn’t sell its connected watches into some countries, such as China, because the smart watch’s software has not been certified in those markets. Also, if a product isn’t available in a regional warehouse near the customer, the Salesforce platform enables Movado to hide that product for a country’s site until it is restocked. Additionally, operating all global sites for a brand in the cloud under one URL helps boost SEO, Soltani says, as search engines factor total site traffic into search results.
But Movado still needed help with currency conversion, international duty and tax calculations, customs forms and accepting local payment types. That’s where eShopWorld comes in, Soltani says. With eShopWorld, when a shopper visits Movado or MVMT’s sites, she can choose her country at the bottom. When a shopper checks out, she’s presented with local payment options such as Klarna, which is popular in Europe, or UnionPay in Hong Kong. She then purchases the product normally on the Movado checkout page, but in the background eShopWorld handles submitting international funds to the proper entity for Movado.
For example, a sale to a consumer based in Hong Kong would be submitted to Movado’s registered Hong Kong business. For customs documentation, the eShopWorld platform sends proper documentation for each order and a warehouse worker prints and attaches it to the package when packing and shipping products, Soltani says.
Movado went live with eShopWorld for its flagship brand site in June. Adding eShopWorld took about three months, Soltani says. It followed that up with its MVMT brand site in September. One of the biggest benefits of eShopWorld is that it handles checkout, currency, customer and duties for sales into hundreds of countries, Modavo says.
Despite operating in the cloud with Salesforce, Movado didn’t sell a significant amount into many foreign countries because these details weren’t tailored to the unique preferences of each global consumer. Now that payment options and shipping and duties are automatically handled across a range of countries, Movado says it is is gaining incremental sales from countries it had never sold into before.
“We’ve sold to Slovenia,” Soltani says. “For Movado, we’ve not tried to go there but since we’ve turned it on, we have gotten incremental sales from there.”
Additionally, Soltani is particularly surprised that online sales in Canada are higher now than before the transition to eShopWorld. Canada was one of the few country-specific sites it operated separately at Movado.ca.
“Canada was a surprise for us,” Soltani says. “We clearly were not expecting the country where we actually had a dedicated website before to have better sales.” He attributes the growth to the improved checkout experience with more local payment options.
September same-store sales through the eShopWorld platform for the company’s U.S. clients rose 104% compared with September 2019, eShopWorld says. For September, U.S clients experienced the highest year-over-year sales growth in Chile (where sales were up 379% year over year), Morocco (up 292%) and Malaysia (up 239%).
EShopWorld charges its charges retailer and brand clients a percentage of sales for purchases through its platform.
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