ASOS is an online retailer of fashion items. The company has no high street stores, instead operating solely on the Internet: the name comes from As Seen On Screen (and is pronounced ACE-OSS). 

The company was founded in 1999 by Quentin Griffiths and Nick Robertson, two young entrepreneurs who saw the potential for an online fashion shop. ASOS appeared one year after the launch of Boo.com , another online fashion retailer: the differences between the two firms could not have been much greater. While Boo.com focused on some very sophisticated technology to display the clothing and other items, ASOS focused on ensuring that the website was accessible. Boo.com's software relied on customers having cutting-edge computers in their homes, which, in 1998, simply wasn't the case. Most people found that the Boo.com website was either extremely slow to load, or didn't load at all: ASOS was simpler, clearer and faster. 

The company grew rapidly as more young people obtained access to good computer equipment. The growth of Internet shopping has been largely driven by the young: people who have grown up with the technology have no problem in using it to shop, whereas many older people still have difficulty in trusting it. The company's smartphone app has been downloaded ten million times, making it a major source of business for the company. 

ASOS have a fulfilment centre in Bradford from which the goods are dispatched to customers. Company headquarters are in Camden Town, London, and the company has a customer services department in Hertfordshire, in easy travelling distance from the headquarters. Being heavily centralised does bring problems: a major fire at a fuel depot near its Barnsley centre closed the company down for six weeks, and a fire in the centre itself stopped business for three days......

Case study questions 

1. What difficulties might a supplier have in dealing with ASOS? 

2. How might ASOS overcome the lack of social interaction involved in traditional retailing? 

3. Why might the smartphone app have been such a success? 

4. Why does ASOS emphasise the ease of returning goods? 

5. What are the major strengths of online shopping compared with traditional high street shopping?