Danish ecommerce award winner on how to achieve success

SkatePro has won two prestigious ecommerce awards in a very short time. The largest online skate shop from Scandinavia doesn’t think this is a coincidence. According to Carsten Schmidt, partner at SkatePro, good customer experiences equals online success. An extraordinary focus on the customer is needed at the top.

SkatePro won the Gold award at FDIH’s annual ecommerce award show on May 22th of this year. Three weeks later they won silver in the entrepreneur category at the European E-commerce Awards. So it seems SkatePro is doing something right…

“The ecommerce awards mean a lot to us. It is a great recognition of all our employees, but for our customers the awards are no big deal”, Carsten Schmidt, Partner at SkatePro, says. He thinks an extraordinary customer focus makes the Danish ecommerce company stand out from their competitors.

Focus on customers in everything that you offer
“We focus on the customers in everything that we offer. We believe that the experience is essential for the customers to choose us”, Schmidt says. “Our product selection, customer service, delivery options and payment methods are adapted to our customers’ needs and wants. And it is constantly being optimized in terms of trends and demand.”

And part of focusing on customers is the decision to open several phsyical stores. Customers were already able to pick up their parcels at SkatePro’s warehouse in the small Danish town Hinnerup, but many customers far from that place were also demanding the opportunity to test or return the products. SkatePro is now meeting this need by opening brick-and-mortar stores.

Alternative delivery options and offline presence
According to Steffen Pasgaard, Vice President of EDI-Soft, the software company that has SkatePro as one of its clients, the customer-focused strategy is of great inspiration, especially in relation to physical stores and delivery options. He says consumers nowadays expect a certain freedom of choice, also when it comes to delivery options. When the Danish online shop Cykelpartner.dk introduced several delivery possibilities, they increased their conversion rate by 25%. It is clearly a sign that customers demand more alternative delivery options in online shops”, he believes.

So opening physical stores is a way to offer customers such demanded extra delivery options. “Click & collect and omnichannel are trends that put pure players such as Amazon, who only offer online sales, under pressure. In return retailers like the American company Macy’s, who combines offline sales in department stores with online sales, are gaining market share”, he says. “The offline store becomes a kind of warehouse and showroom for the online shop, where customers are able to try on and not least return items.”

What SkatePro’s concerned: the online retailer is confident it has good procedures for going cross-border, in terms of language adaptation, delivery management software, phone number setup and so on. “Therefore, we have the best prerequisites for success in new markets. We are very excited about the development of our new British and French online shops, as they are huge ecommerce markets,” Schmidt concludes.

About SkatePro
SkatePro was founded in 1996 and has its headquarters in Hinnerup, Denmark. A total of 72 people, with 12 different nationalities, work for the company that sends between 300 and 3,000 parcels each day.