Wet Seal, Inc., saw its consolidated comparable store sales decline 16.9% in the first quarter, but ecommerce sales for its Wet Seal brand did increase 8.4%, according to its first quarter financial results.
John Goodman, CEO of Wet Seal, Inc., said Wet Seal has stabilized its website and it has taken full advantage of its newest board members and their wealth of knowledge in social, digital and ecommerce.
Wet Seal is beginning to see a positive impact on traffic and conversion from its email, SMS and retargeting strategies. Goodman said mobile now represents more than half of the Wetseal.com traffic with the highest conversion rates coming from the desktop.
Even though margins were down for the first quarter as Wet Seal utilized promotions to re-engage its customers and build the ecommerce business, but Goodman said the company saw improvement as the quarter progressed.
Goodman said Wet Seal is seeing its digital marketing and social engagement strategies begin to drive traffic and conversion, enabling the company to reduce promotional level and generate improved margin.
According to Goodman, key priorities for ecommerce in the second quarter includes Wet Seal to become the featured merchant on Oink, a payment system for kids and teenagers and begin offering its payment technology.
In the second quarter, Wet Seal will introduce Fanreel to its website. This will enable the retailer to integrate fan generated photos into product pages and allow customers to sharpen these looks.
And lastly, Wet Seal will be establishing a Tumblr blog on Wet Seal and Wet Seal Plus and launching a dedicated effort to create engaging content and create it for that site.
Wet Seal also has a strong presence on other social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wanelo, Snapchat and Pinterest. All of these sites, according to Goodman, have generated traffic to the Wet Seal website.
Wet Seal, Inc., also announced the exit strategy of its Arden B brand.