E-Commerce Sprouts Late, Blooms Rapidly At Stage Stores

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

March 2014 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

Three years and two platforms into its e-commerce effort, Stage Stores anticipates 40% online order growth.

If Steven Hunter learned anything from the 2012 holiday season, he learned that his company’s two-year-old open-source e-commerce platform was living on borrowed time.

Hunter, EVP and CIO at $1.7 billion multi-banner retailer Stage Stores, admits that his company was fashionably late to the e-commerce party. Stage Stores, which operates nearly 900 Bealls, Goodys, Palais Royale, Peebles, and Stage Stores across 40 U.S. states, didn’t launch its first e-commerce site until 2010. That solution, built in-house on the Magento Commerce platform, was a stopgap measure from the onset, a low-cost channel test that would either prove or disprove the viability of e-commerce for the nearly 100-year-old department store chain. “Even as we built it, we knew it would have to be replaced if online traffic and sales grew,” says Hunter. Much to the company’s delight, online traffic and sales did grow. In fact, they grew rapidly. And in the end, the company’s delayed arrival on the e-commerce scene has served it well.