Well, hasn't it turned out to be an interesting week in the world of personalised greetings cards?
First Moonpig's impressive results, now the venerable Marks & Spencer is making a high-profile move into this space. In its announcement M&S described the online greetings card business as a "£25m market", which means Moonpig currently has more than 80% of it. Even more interesting, it reckons the market has the potential to grow to a whopping £130m by 2013.
M&S has quietly built up a significant presence in store-bought cards and giftwrap through offering a tight range of high-value cards at extremely reasonable prices. You can get a card for a quid in M&S that would cost about £2.45 at some other retailers. Apparently they are now the fourth biggest retailer of cards in the UK.
More importantly, unlike, say Clinton Cards (I didn't even know they had a website or a personalised card offering until yesterday) M&S has a huge and growing online presence with people buying more and more stuff from them via the web, so it has the traffic to make this new service fly. According to last week's Hitwise stats on the top retail websites, M&S is at number seven. M&S Direct, which includes its website but also catalogue and other direct sales such as wine and flower gifts, grew sales by 19% to £324m in its last financial year. Within that, online sales grew 34%. It aims to hit £500m in Direct sales by 2010/11.
I can't find any information in the retailer's various reports about how many online customers it actually has, no doubt they keep that quiet for strategic competitive reasons, probably the same reason why online trading is conveniently lumped in with some other stuff.
Anyhow, it must be all systems go up at Tigerprint as there was a big plug for the card service on the promo email M&S sent out to online customers yesterday and it is also features on the main M&S home page at the moment. Having had a play around with it this morning the interface is suitably friendly and easy-to-use and in keeping with the whole M&S online experience; though the click and drag page turning feature once you start personalising a card didn't seem to work as intuitively as I might have expected. That could be operator failure, of course.
It also takes you into a separate site, marksandspencerpersonalised.com where I need to create a new account. This is understandable but might limit the opportunity to cross-sell with other online gifts such as flowers, champagne etc where a card would be the perfect complement as it will require two transactions. But maybe they'll be able to mesh the interfaces in future.
After finishing this blog I'll put an order in before the 2pm deadline for next day delivery and see what happens. Although given the current postal backlog in the capital I shall temper my expectations accordingly.
