With a strategy of growing sales through comparison shopping and other third-party sites as well as at LimogesJewelry.com, the retailer of personalized jewelry, a unit of MBM Co. Inc., is running more than 80% ahead of last year, e-commerce marketing manager Lara Stache tells Internet Retailer.

“We’re up 84% year-to-year so far this year, though our goal was 34%,” she says.

Limoges Jewelry, No. 427 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, still does more than half of its overall sales through its catalog, Stache says. But it’s on course to increase its web share as it improves the way it manages its inventory on third-party sites including Shopzilla.com, PriceGrabber.com and search sites including Google and Yahoo-Overture, Stache says.

Limoges Jewelry is using Mercent Corp.’s Mercent Retail application to automatically feed inventory to its partner sites, and with daily inventory updates it’s able to analyze by individual product SKUs how well sales are doing at each site.

The system has freed up Stache to concentrate more on merchandising and marketing, while taking more time to plan products while consumer demand for them is still strong, Stache says.

“Anytime we see a product doing well in any channel, our merchandise people work to get more variations of it,” Stache says. But it takes two to six weeks to develop a new product, depending on where it’s coming from, she adds, and the retailer’s former inventory management system often didn’t produce information quickly enough to plan products, many of which are designed to be personalized with a customer’s name. “Now we can act faster, so we can show customers hot products when they still want them.”

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