JD Williams sees online sales boom

A bricks and mortar company says it has earned more online in three weeks than it did in six months by conventional means.

JD Williams, an established UK catalogue company, integrated its existing business with an online presence, and has seen revenues soar.

Around six per cent of visitors to the site place an order, which is approximately three times the industry norm of two per cent. Those customers that do order online spend a third more than through the conventional channels.

To become an ebusiness the company split its existing systems, including decades of DB2 data stored on an IBM OS/390, and put them into 16 new ecommerce sites.

It implemented hardware cryptography to improve secure sockets layer performance, and used IBM WebSphere as the application server platform.

Tom Fothergill, ecommerce general manager at JD Williams, said of the company's online transformation: "With so much history and legacy information stored in our existing S/390 systems, we realised we could be the most competitive company by leveraging those systems."

The company used Java and Java server pages because they are open technologies that can be used to port onto any platform, and migrated the entire application to IBM's OS/390 operating system on the S/390.

"We used IBM MQSeries. The 16 ecommerce sites leverage a series of reusable business logic components that communicate with each other," said Fothergill.

MERANT Egility provided the backbone to access the data from JD Williams' existing OS/390 legacy systems and integrate it with the new ecommerce sites running WebSphere and MQ Series on OS/390.

First published in Network News

See also:

Internet catches up with mail order

The internet is beginning to rival traditional mail order for people who like to shop from home for their Christmas presents, according to a survey by the Post Office in the UK.  21 Nov 2000

Action stations for mail order reseller

ICL veteran David Palk has been brought in to restore confidence in troubled reseller Action Computer.  02 Nov 2000

UK online shoppers still lack confidence

Lack of consumer confidence is stifling ebusiness uptake in the UK, according to the National Consumer Council.  03 Aug 2000

Ecommerce: where there's a will, there's a way

Although three out of four adults in the UK now use the internet in some shape or form, very few actually take the plunge and buy goods online. Julian Patterson looks at why ecommerce is not taking off in Europe as quickly as might be expected.  12 Jul 2000

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