When Staples launched its strategic reinvention three years ago, its No. 1 priority was to reposition the company for the future and return to growing sales and earnings.
Staples CEO Ron Sargent reported positive news on those fronts during the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call on Aug. 19.
Total company sales grew 1%.
“We continue to make progress on our reinvention during the quarter,” Sargent said, according to Seeking Alpha. “We drove solid sales and earnings growth in North American Commercial, with ongoing strength in categories beyond office supplies. We achieved sequential improvement in comparable sales and increased profitability year-over-year in North American Stores and online.”
Improving the customer experience is of utmost importance, Sargent said.
“During the second quarter, we completed the refresh of our staplesadvantage.com website,” he explained. “The new site is faster. It’s optimized for business customers and designed to sell categories beyond office supplies. The traffic to the new site is up. Customer conversion continues to improve year-over-year, and over the coming weeks we’ll expand our omni-channel capabilities with the launch of Buy Online, Pick up in Store on staplesadvantage.com. And this is going to provide our contract customers with the ability to buy products online, and pick them up from their local store in only two hours.”
Simplification is also a key goal for Staples.
“During the second quarter we rolled out a new release of staples.com to improve and simplify the customer experience and we are encouraged by early results,” Sargent said. “The site is now built for multiple devices. We’ve improved search capabilities and we’ve improved personalization features. Since the launch, customer conversion and revenue per visit are up.”
Results in Canada were stronger than in the U.S. in both stores and online during the second quarter.
Staples kicked off its Back-to-School offerings.
“We are making it easy for parents to find everything their kids need for a great value this year,” Sargent said. “We’ve brought back our 110% price match guarantee to ensure customers pay the lowest price both in stores and online as well as the Staples less list. While most of the big back-to-school weeks are still ahead of us, early results have been right in line with our expectations.”