The expert panel

Matthew Curry, Head of Ecommerce at Lovehoney. 

Matt was hard to please this year, though he did have this so say: 

“What I’m most impressed by are people looking to disrupt the standard ‘come to this site and buy something’ method of shopping.

Just as having a separate Basket and Checkout are vaguely silly skeumorphisms of an old offline process, so too is the idea of visiting a place where things are. Amazon’s #AmazonCart is an example of where this process is being disrupted, maybe not all that successfully, but you can see where it’s going.”

Dan Barker, e-business consultant

Dan has worked with a number of ecommerce brands, and has also been a regular contributor to Econsultancy. In articles like this one, and his own blog posts

Stuart McMillan, Deputy Head of Ecommerce at Schuh

Stuart manages day-to-day ecommerce operations at Schuh, and has recently been overseeing its move to responsive design

James Gurd, Owner of Digital Juggler

James has worked with a number of ecommerce brands, as well as being a regular contributor to the blog and our reports. 

Sweaty Betty

A smaller retailer which has done a great job making the most of its ecommerce platform. 

AO.com

Nominated by Stuart McMillan for its user-centred design. AO.com has been the subject of praise on this blog too. 

Black Milk

Nominated by Dan Barker: 

“The Black Milk site continues to really impress me, again from the point of view of really doing everything they can with its current platform.

They’re on Shopify, and are using all the workarounds they can to use it as a proper global ecommerce tool.

It’s easy to look for failings in a platform and use those as an excuse not to do things, but it’s much more fun to do everything you can with what you’re using.”

Moonpig

Matthew Curry was impressed by the smoothness of the purchase process on Moonpig. With lots of personalisation options, it’s a challenge to provide a good experience. 

Liberty

Dan Barker: 

“Liberty did some great stuff this year. I always like them as an example of a luxury site that manages to get away with being very busy.

Take a look at the Nike landing pages as a good example of running a co-brand promotion that gets lots of sales, lots of PR, lots of social coverage, lots of links, and makes people happy along with it.”

Schuh

James Gurd: 

“I think Schuh did a good job with its relaunch on a responsive site. The team worked really hard on the fine-tuning and have a fast loading site.

Schuh is also hot on customer service and is currently offering its £1 next-day delivery, seven days per week. Amazing.”

Hermès “La Maison des Carrés”

Dan: 

“Everyone seemed to hate it, but I really loved the Hermès ‘La Maison des Carrés’ site for doing something really different and experiential.”

Selfridges

Selfridges relaunched its website in October, with many commenting on the price tag. However, it’s a luxury brand and the web is its biggest shop window. 

For more, we interviewed Multichannel Director Simon Forster about the project. 

LUSH

This site focused around content and made a pretty good job of it.

 

House of Fraser

James: 

“House of Fraser continues to grow strongly with a focus on its multichannel proposition and market leading delivery services like the new order by 7pm for next day Buy & Collect in-store.

The ecommerce team really gets multichannel and the whole business buys into the philosophy, which is evident in the customer service.”

The Natural History Museum shop

We featured this on the blog earlier in the year, thanks in no small part to its excellent product copywriting

standing T. rex soft toy

Amazon

Most of our panel mentioned Amazon, with phrases like ‘hard not to admire’. It also handled its Black Friday sale very well indeed. 

black friday lister

Folk Clothing

James: 

“From a pure aesthetic point of view, I absolutely love Folks. From the HTML5 video on the landing page to the small interactive touches, it’s just fun to browse.

It has many gaps from a pure ecommerce angle, such as intelligent faceted navigation in the shop but I still enjoy browsing. I think this is my guilty pleasure of 2014.”

Next

Stuart’s choice: 

“A site I like for its apparent simplicity is Next, just look at the filtration on a long category page to see the attention to detail in an understated way.

I really value effectiveness/efficiency in a user experience.”

Which sites do you think were most impressive this year? Let us know in the comments…