Although ecommerce hasn’t become a reality yet at Big Lots, CEO David Campisi is excited about what the spring launch 2016 will do for the company in terms of customer experience, customer engagement, and brand loyalty.
“Our team has been working diligently on the development and early testing of our ecommerce platform,” Campisi said during the Dec. 4 third-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “For BIG, 2016 will be the year to launch and learn. We’re scheduled to go live in Q1 of 2016 and my expectation for next year is that 
Jennifer will embrace our online capabilities as a valuable tool. As we approach the final days of 2015, I want to take a moment to thank the Big Lots team, 37,000 associates strong. You’ve done a great job this year and the corporate culture and associate engagement at Big Lots has never been stronger.”
“Jennifer” is a design persona, an archetype that is representative of a key customer segment at Big Lots created a few years ago. Recently, Big Lots completed its annual survey of associates and the response rate was the highest in company history and well above the retail industry norms, Campisi noted.
“The feedback suggests we’ve made tremendous progress, but I believe we’re still at the beginning of the beginning,” Campisi said. “Our team is focused on continuous improvement, increasing our relevance, and executing with disruptive behavior. It’s not business as usual at Big Lots, and I’m more excited today than ever about our future.”
Regarding the ecommerce launch next year, Campisi said the company’s IT department is in testing mode to “ensure that everything is going to work once we pull the trigger. But internally, I like to talk about it's a crawl, walk, run strategy. So as we move into the launch date, it's going to be very limited to a very few people and some of them are sitting in this room. And we’ll make those purchases, make sure it works before we go full bore. But I think as I said before, we're going to launch with somewhere between 8,000 to 9000 SKUs, which is 15% to maybe slightly more percent of the total.”
Campisi said the company won’t launch furniture on the ecommerce site right away.
“It’s going to be mostly the home products and electronics and some of the hard home areas as well,” he explained. “Appliances are a big business online. We know that. So we’ll launch with limited SKUs and see what the appetite is. But candidly, I would tell you the momentum is going to come in as we move into the all-important fourth quarter of 2016. We don’t have a huge number planned out there for 2016. We believe there’s an appetite and there’s an appetite for some other categories that potentially will be offered in the third and fourth quarter. Again, it’s a crawl, walk, run strategy and crawling is really critical here. As you saw, some retailers struggling on Cyber Monday, I don’t want to have those problems. We’re excited about it. The team has got their heads around it and they’re working really hard. I would tell you, it’s one of the best-looking landing pages I’ve ever seen. We feel good about the exterior piece of that website. I just need to make sure the guts of that thing, the plumbing works. We’re very close to getting to that point.”