We here at Venda would like to offer a massive congratulations to our client Boohoo who have scooped the Best Online Retailer Award at ITV’s Lorraine’s High Street Fashion Awards for the second year in a row!

Boohoo have been campaigning non-stop to gather the support of their loyal fans, and their hard work has paid off as they once again walk away with the prize. As a continuously growing and developing brand, who have quickly become a front-runner in the online retailing world despite being a relatively new brand, it is amazing to see such recognition for their success. Winning was no easy feat with Boohoo facing competition from ASOS and Very amongst other top online retailers, but the public have once again recognised Boohoo’s efforts in the ever-growing world of eCommerce.

Boohoo’s Joint Chief Executive, Carol Kane, has said of winning the award, “We are delighted to have been recognised as the best online retailer by the viewers of Lorraine, especially within such a strong category. Winning any award is always an honour, but there is something particularly special about winning when the public have voted.”

We would also like to offer our congratulations to F&F Clothing at Tesco who’s on-trend clothing at low prices saw them nominated in the Affordable Fashion category! There was tough competition in the category, including the likes of Primark and George, and it’s great to see F&F Clothing being recognised.

Congratulations to all winners of the Lorraine’s High Street Fashion Awards! We hope you all enjoy celebrating, and wish you continued success for the future!

Hop on over to Boohoo.com now, where they are generously offering 15% off all orders with the code OFFER15 as a celebration and a ‘Thank You’ to all who voted!

Happy Online Shopping!

You can also check out Venda Group CEO, Eric Abensur’s charismatically amusing welcome speech below, with a special mention to Venda customer Arsenal!

And finally, because we found their story so touching and inspiring, below you will find the video of Chrissie Rucker (The White Company) and Nick Wheeler’s (Charles Tyrwhitt) amusing acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Congratulations once again to all of the evenings winners! Be sure to check out our YouTube channel for other event videos, and make sure you subscribe to be the first to see our latest uploads!

Commerce Plus came to life in December 2012, created through the merging of two SinnerSchrader subsidiaries, spot-media and next commerce. Current clients benefiting from Commerce Plus’ innovative eCommerce solutions include Jack Wolfskin, O2 and Olsen. The partnership will allow Commerce Plus to offer SaaS through the Venda platform, in-turn allowing Venda to expand our european presence into the German market.

Moritz Koch, Managing Director at Commerce Plus, explains of the partnership: “Venda is a smart marketing solution for brand manufacturers and retailers, and presents many advantages. Venda’s strong backend standards promote increased creativity in the frontend, without straining the budget. This allows us to put more of our energy into implementing digital shopping opportunities for consumers”.

Eric Abensur, CEO at Venda, is equally as thrilled about partnering with Commerce Plus: “Commerce Plus’s extensive specialist know-how coupled with their impressive contacts in brand manufacturing and retail make them an ideal partner for Venda. The combination of professional partners and a powerful shopping system will contribute enormously to positioning eCommerce solutions at the forefront of the German market in no time”.

For futher details on this exciting new collaboration, check out the Commerce Plus website.

(Above) Venda Group CEO, Eric Abensur, makes his speech

The awards presentation was delivered by Sky News anchor Dermot Murnaghan, with each award presented to the deserving winners by the individual sponsors of each award, including many faces from the Venda team!
After a wonderfully entertaining speech from Nick Wheeler of Charles Tyrwhitt and Chrissie Rucker of The White Company, winners of the The Lifetime Achievement Award, guests were free to enjoy the music from a live band, whilst no doubt spending their drinks vouchers at the bar in celebration!                                                                                                        Other winners from the evening include Bureau Direct for Outstanding Customer Service, Direct Golf for Best Website and Littlewoods for Best Use of Social Media. A full list of the nights winners can be found on the Direct Commerce website.

(Above)Venda Head of Marketing, Finula Crowe, presents Argos with the award for Exploitation of Technology in Businesses with sales over £25 million.

(Below) The Venda team enjoy the award speeches

We would like to send our congratulations to all of the nights winners! We hope you all enjoyed your evening and had an amazing time celebrating everyone’s success.

The Venda UK office was infused with the sound of laughter this Monday afternoon, as we took on the task of making our nominations for the Internet Retailing Awards!

For those of you not yet familiar with this years nomination process, everyone who is not a retailer can only nominate by filming a VERY short (6 seconds in fact!) video using the Vine app, which must then be Tweeted at Internet Retailing; Yes, meaning you must not only be filmed, but also put onto the Internet for the whole world to see! As daunting as that can be, it’s actually an awful lot of fun and we urge you to join in and make your own nomination videos!

Below are our first 7 nominations for our wonderful clients; Wilko, Urban Outfitters, Royal Mail, Heal’s, British Museum, TK Maxx and Arsenal. Now that we are Vine pros (well, almost…), our second film shoot is locked in for the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled for even more Vine videos from the Venda team! Safe to say, we’re not all as shy as we might make out

For full details on the Internet Retailing Awards, be sure to check our our previous blog post, or the official awards website.

Good luck to all of our nominees, we have our fingers crossed that you will all be shortlisted, and we look forward to celebrating with you on the night!

The 4th Venda Developer Workshop took place on April 18th at the very impressive and accomodating venue of Kings Place. We were pleased to welcome over 50 developers on the morning, making this our biggest workshop yet.

With registration opening at 9.30, guests were greeted with breakfast to kick off the day, offering up the first opportunity to mingle with fellow developers and the Venda team. This was followed by an introduction from Venda COO Damon Mannion, before jumping straight into the first of the days 12 presentations, with the Venda team approaching the topics of the’ Venda Template Release v13′ and ‘Applying Bootstrap to the Venda Control Panel’. It was then over to Template Surgery where clients had the opportunity to quiz Venda developers about their queries surrounding the VCP.

The second part of our day offered up presentations on Venda APIs, before our first guest speaker of the day, Rob Smith of Blueleaf, took his chance to share an Externally Configured Products case study on Venda client, Laura Ashley. This was followed by an introduction to Venda In Store, before everyones favourite part of the day…lunch

The afternoon saw the focus switch to our main theme of the day, Responsive Web Design; with presentations from our Venda developers, an amusingly honest presentation on the perils of Responsive Design from Alex Sexton of LN-CC and Chris Marshall of On State sharing on the novel ways you can manipulate a Venda Site with URL parameters, before rounding the day off nicely with Venda co-founder and CTO James Cronin talking us through the Venda Development Roadmap. Attendees were once again given the opportunity to quiz the Venda team in a final Q&A session before unwinding in the bar, discussing the days events.

Throughout the day our attendees were Tweeting using the hashtag #vendadevconf sharing their thoughts on the days activity and networking together in their excitment. Below are some of our favourite Tweets of the day!

@VendaUK #vendadevconf my first workshop and realising what benefits I can bring to my organisation being aware of new things. Great!! – Vijay Yadav ‏@vyadav1

Exciting prospects with the new Venda APIs and sign on… mobile apps and configurable products? Noice #vendadevconf - Ellis Grouse ‏@_egrouse

Great example of good UX on Venda In Store . Impressed! #Vendadevconf - Eder Agostinho ‏@gustin8

Interesting talks at #vendadevconf @VendaUK have made massive progress with in-store functionality and improvements to their VCP backend – Ramsay Bell ‏@ramsaybell
Tweets about “#vendadevconf”

Of course no workshop day would be complete without a few prizes! We would like to offer our congratulatios to Joe Akers Douglas, who’s involvment in the day saw him take home the much coveted Ven-Guin (that’s a Venda Penguin, FYI.) and who’s continuous participation in the developers forum saw him awarded with a brand new Google Nexus 7; a good day all round for Joe! Our second Google Nexus 7 of the day was gifted to Ederson Agostinho of Total Jobs Group for his excitable contributions to the Twitter hashtag throughout the day. One particular tweet that caught the eye of the Venda team was;

Hayley’s presentation my favourite so far, love her “lady bug” outfit too #Vendadevconf

Flattery will get you everywhere with the Venda team! Other prizes were also offered out for best questions throughout the Q&A sessions, so congratulations to all of our winners from the day!

We would like to thank all who attended, with a special thanks to our guest presenters. The presentation slides and videos will be available to all who attended in the coming weeks. We hope you all enjoyed the day, and we look forward to seeing you all at the next Venda Developer Workshop.

Venda are very pleased to announce their sponsorship of the 2013 Internet Retailing Awards, set to take place at the very impressive venue, SushiSamba, on June 26th.

These awards recognise achievement by today’s leading multichannel retailers, taking into account the multichannel, multinational and multifaceted achievements of retailers who successfully connect with the online customer, making them an ideal collaboration for Venda!

SushiSamba

Nominations for the awards are open now until May 7th, so if you are a retailer be sure to hop on over to the Internet Retailing Awards website, where you can easily nominate by completing a short form.

And if you’re not a retailer? Don’t fret, you can still nominate! This year Internet Retailing have taken their nominations process digital and interactive, with the introduction of Vine. Simply record a 6 second video of yourself completing the following sentence;

“[Impressive retailer of your choosing] should win [the XAward] because…”

and tweet it to @etail, with the accompanying hashtag #TheAwards. Feel free to share them with us @VendaUK too, as we’d love to see your entries!

Awards up for grabs include, The M-Retailing Award, The Customer Award and The Innovation Award, amongst many others. The winners will be judged by an international panel of highly-experienced commercial leaders; including Venda’s Group CEO, Eric Abensur! Be sure to visit the official Internet Retailing Awards website to view the full list of awards, judges, the evening agenda, and of course to purchase your tickets!

Attending? Tweet us @VendaUK and let us know! We are very excited for what promises to be a fun and enjoyable night, and we look forward to seeing you all there.

Next Thursday, 18th April, will see the 4th Venda Developer Workshop take place at Kings Place, central London.

Kicking off at 9.30 with registration and coffee, the day is set to be packed-out with useful presentations from team Venda and our guest speakers. Our aim of the day is to bring you up-to-date with all the latest Venda platform developments, exciting future improvements, and examples of how you can best utilise the Venda platform.

Presentations will kick off from 10am, with a lunch break in the middle of the day, and of course finishing off the day with a few drinks in the bar; meaning there will be plenty of time for networking with over 50 developers who will be in attendance, allowing you to expand your developer network.

Throughout the day you will also be given the chance to quiz the Venda developers face-to-face on any pressing issues you’ve been dying to pick their brains about! Time will however be limited, so be sure to prepare your questions in advance, to make the most of your time with our team.

Of course, no workshop day would be complete without the addition of some exciting prizes, and we’ve secured some good ones this time around! So be prepared to get stuck in and engage throughout the day to be in with the chance of taking home one of our prizes.

For a full agenda of the day, a full list of our speakers and a map to the location, be sure to visit the event’s Lanyrd page where you will find everything you need to know. Not yet registered? Make sure to contact Olly Secluna to get yourself on board for this exciting day.

Finally, follow us on Twitter @VendaUK and Tweet us using the hashtag #VendaDevConf, to let us know you’re attending and to begin networking with fellow attendees! This may also be your key to winning a fabulous prize…

We look forward to seeing you all there!

Venda are pleased to be this years main sponsor of the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards! The entries have been submitted, the judges have finalised the nominations shortlist, and all that’s left to do is celebrate on the night.

Today saw the announcement of the awards shortlist, chosen by a panel of independent judges. The full shortlist, for all companies involved in all categories, is as follows;

The Venda-ECMOD awards, which aim to recognise the business excellence of organisations engaged in direct-to-customer retailing, both in traditional and newly emerging channels, will be held on April 18th in the Great Hall at Chelsea Football Club in Stamford Bridge, and will be celebrated in style with a Black Tie, gala dinner event.

With a number of awards across a unique choice of categories up for grabs, the awards seek to celebrate achievements of businesses of all scales, at all stages of development. Award categories include Best Website, Best Catalogue Creative, Best Exploitation of Technology , ECMOD Life Time Achievement Award and the Direct Commerce Readers Choice Award, nominated by their readership.

With an abundance of retailers in attendance, this is an excellent opportunity to network with some key industry names, so be sure to book yourself a ticket here.

For full information on the awards, be sure to visit the ECMOD Awards website, where you fill find a list of FAQ‘s that aims to answer all of your queries. Alternatively, take a read through the Venda-ECMOD awards call for entries brochure, which includes all relevant information on the awards, including the structure behind the nomination process.

Will you be in attendance? Tweet us @VendaUK and let us know. We look forward to seeing you there!

But, just as the high street seems to be standing upon its last legs, a few key industry names have swooped in and offered some much needed support. Today saw the announcement that music retail giant, HMV, is to be rescued by Hilco, who already own the Canadian string of the HMV brand. In a deal said to be worth £50m, the entertainment retailers have been given a new lease of life and a second chance to prove their place in the retail industry. The deal will save 132 HMV stores and will rescue over 2,500 jobs.

Since acquiring the Canadian wing of HMV two years ago, Hilco claim that business is now ‘trading strongly’ and the same can only be hoped of the British chain. It’ll be a challenge to bring the brand back to life, with such strong online competition from entertainment giants such as Amazon. It’s been reported that the first move to save the company will come in the form of abandoning sales of mobiles and tablets, and focusing solely on their music and visual range, the reason HMV became a big name brand in the first place.

The announcement comes just days after a similar saving grace was offered to camera retailer Jessops. After suffering the fate of the administrators back in January, Dragon’s Den superstar Peter Jones has stepped in and offered his services to the brand alongside Hilco, and plan to open up 40 stores before the end of April, with the first shops already having opened their doors in London’s Oxford Street last week.

Online retailing will play a huge part in the hopeful future success of Jessops, as Peter Jones plans to integrate a collect-in-store model, taking away the dreaded pressure of having to wait at home for your delivery. The 40 stores are simply to supplement the demand for click-and-collect methods across the UK, allowing customers to make their order through the convenience of online shopping whilst having the security of being able to collect in store.

Fashion retail brand, Republic, also found themselves with a second chance at trading on the High Street thanks to Sports Direct’s, Mike Ashley. The brand entered into administration earlier this year, with their online store being shut down amongst the madness. Mike Ashley stepped in in late February, saving 116 stores and over 2,000 jobs allowing the retailer to sustain their presence on the high street. As it stands, their online retail presence has still not been restored, but with the website being part of the acquisition, it’s likely eCommerce will become a key part in the future of Republic.

Just as the future of the high street started to look bleak, it seems industry influencers have had a change of heart and are doing all they can to save it. But, it’s not without the help of eCommerce. Without an online presence, these second chances will be wasted. As Peter Jones’ in-store collection strategy proves, it’s now down to online retail to save the high street by working harmoniousluy, side by side, to create the ultimate shopping experience for our consumers. So whilst our future high street might not be all coffee shops and tumble weed, it is likely to be filtered with warehouse style stores, designed for collection purposes only.