Supermarket Sainsbury's has doubled traffic and increased sales significantly since relaunching its online activities last year.

Kirstey Elston, senior brand manager for Sainsburys.co.uk, says first-time orders grew 18 per cent in the first seven days of the main web site and the Sainsbury’s To You online grocery shopping service going live last September.

‘There was a 40 per cent increase in Sainsbury’s To You registrations that went on to complete an initial shop,’ she said.

Elston says the increase can be attributed to the growth in traffic on the main site coming through to the Sainsbury’s To You shopping area, increasing the generation of registrations and first orders for groceries.

‘Traffic on the main Sainsbury’s site went up 100 per cent year on year, from 715,000 hits in November 2004 to 1.45 million in 2005,’ she said.

Sainsbury’s also worked with web site consultancy AKQA to redesign its entire online presence, making it more user-friendly.

AKQA installed Microsoft’s content management server and created template-based pages for the Sainsbury’s online team to put content directly on the site, removing the need to go through the supplier to update content.

‘We realised that a new content management system would reduce the amount of flexibility we had to be creative, but that it would increase our ability to keep the site fresh,’ said Elston.

Other online Sainsbury’s areas can also now update their content without referring to the main web team or AKQA.

The IT supporting Sainsbury's ecommerce activities is being migrated back in-house at the moment, following the early termination of the supermarket's outsourcing agreement with Accenture (Computing, 27 October).