Fragrance Direct forays into app commerce

Fragrance Direct launches native shopping app in response to customers’ increasing preference for mobile

London, UK, 12 April 2018.

Leading UK beauty retailer Fragrance Direct is one of the first in the beauty sector to foray into the app commerce space.

Rick Jowle, founder and CEO at Fragrance Direct said: “We’ve seen a huge shift towards mobile consumer behaviour, not just in sessions but also in revenue as well. We felt that producing an app would make sure we could give our mobile users a more optimised experience, that was quicker and more streamlined than our current mobile site.”

The app has been built on Poq’s app commerce platform. Current Poq clients range from fast fashion brands Missguided and QUIZ, to department store group House of Fraser and online homewares brand MADE.com.

Fragrance Direct replatformed their ecommerce solution to Salesforce Commerce Cloud earlier this year, which Poq seamlessly integrates with to reduce duplication of effort from the website to the app.

The SaaS model that Poq offers was a key selling point for the team at Fragrance Direct.

“We were interested in working with a company that’s constantly evolving and developing new technologies that we can benefit from,“ says Rick, “Poq’s SaaS based model allows us to launch an app very quickly and keep up with development changes and bug fixes etc. without having a huge in-house team to manage it from the outset.”

Øyvind Henriksen, CEO and Co-Founder of Poq said: “Widely adopted by fashion retailers, native shopping apps are less common in beauty, and Fragrance Direct will be considered a pioneer by being one of the first-movers, which makes perfect sense as they were early adopters of the internet in the nineties too.

“We are confident that they will see immediate and significant improvements on their mobile metrics by launching an app and we’re excited to watch the story unfold.”

The Fragrance Direct app is now available on the App Store and Google Play store.