By Kymberly Martin
Awarded four industry gongs.
The awards for Appliances Online just kept coming at the ORIAS (Online Retail Industry Awards) held in Sydney last night.
The online retailer took out Best Pure-Play Online Retailer, Online Retailer of the Year, was inducted into Hall of Fame and CEO John Winning (pictured below) received the Industry Recognition Award, in front of an industry gathering of over 750 guests.
Speaking from Mt Kilimanjaro where he is taking part in the Cure Brain Cancer fund raising climb, John Winning said he wanted to dedicate the award to the Appliances Online team and “those who have helped me build the company, thanks to their hard work over the past 12 years. I think as an industry, we have a long way to go and I know we still have a long way to go with Appliances Online. It’s super exciting and the people in the room tonight will help shape the future and there will be plenty more coming through that we haven’t even seen yet. It’s only early days and I think we have a very bright future for online retail.”
Winning Group chief financial officer Aaron Links told Appliance Retailer that the award was a huge honour, and a great recognition for the hard work. “We are obsessed with making our customers happy and I think we do a very good job of it. We don’t strive for it but it is nice when we win it. We have won awards previously but this has been a very successful year for us.”
Accepting the award on behalf of John Winning, Links told the attendees, “I want to thank the Appliances Online team, the people are amazing and absolutely obsessed with doing the right thing by the customer and the customer experience. We live and breathe that day-in and day-out. It has been instilled in us by the Winning family and in particular, John. We would like to thank our customers and everyone in the room. It is a real privilege to win this award.”
For the second time Harvey Norman walked off with the Best-Multi Channel Retailer award. “We were up against some really good competition like Woolworths and Dan Murphy’s,” Harvey Norman chief digital officer, Gary Wheelhouse (pictured below) told Appliance Retailer.
He said the multi-channel award is the one the company wanted to win “because it recognises the fact that what we do supports our greatest asset which is having great stores, great people and being close to where the customers are. We are fairly driven about what we do.
“One of the great things about awards like this is that it brings in lots of potential new partners.” As for the next big thing when it comes to online retailing, Wheelhouse said customers can expect to see further integration into the store experience and speeding up the time it takes people to collect their purchasers. “We just launched one hour delivery and schedule delivery times to customers when it is convenient to them and customers love it.”