Dixons ends stint as online brand

Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - 11:56 by David Aiken

Many people will remember when Dixons was a fixture of UK high streets, selling consumer electronic products of all kinds. While the stores may have been rebranded six years ago, Dixons.co.uk allowed the name to live on, via safe shopping online.

However, the Dixons Retail group has now chosen to completely remove the brand which bears its name from the world of e-commerce this month, so that consumers will no longer engage with it, either online or in store.

Retail Week reports that a spokesperson for the organisation said that in the multichannel world which modern consumers inhabit, running the Dixons.co.uk site was becoming a less viable option.

They explained that people were now used to checking the cost of particular items online across multiple retailers and then heading to a local store to buy the cheapest of the bunch.

Over the last three months the Dixons Retail group has seen sales rise by seven per cent across its various businesses. However, it saw a real growth in multichannel sales, which were up by 48 per cent.

In 2011, the Dixons Retail group looked to be in trouble after it posted a loss of 224 million. Its performance in the UK has been better than in Europe as a whole, with a 15 per cent increase in profits recorded, thanks to the enthusiasm of British consumers.

While Dixons.co.uk may no longer offer safe shopping online, its service and staff will be passed on to other areas of the retail group. In fact, the only place you can now see the Dixons brand is on the small number of travel-oriented stores that are only found within the duty free areas of airports in the UK, which means that it is just about managing to cling on in a niche manner.