Direct in Home, Mothercare's web-based home delivery service, increased sales by 0.9% to £43 million after a relaunch of the website in May.
UK like-for-like sales bounced back in the second quarter with a 0.3% rise, following a 3.4% fall in the first three months.
As well as a good response to its value range, Mothercare has also seen strong demand for its premium offering, including "Little Bird" backed by TV chef Jamie Oliver's wife Jools, and plans to extend these lines next year. It said its Baby K range by singer Mylene Klass also continued to perform well.
Its delivery-in-store online service saw sales fall 7.7% to £17.9 million, but Mothercare hopes to drive an improvement after introducing next day delivery.
The group's international business helped boost Mothercare's overall performance with a 20% increase in underlying profit to £22.1 million.
But weaker trading conditions in the eurozone dampened international sales growth, which was 4.4% in the half-year, down from 5.4%.
Eastern Europe and Turkey continued to deliver strong growth at Mothercare, the company said.
Mothercare's turnaround plan centres on driving international expansion as it eventually reduces its UK estate to 95 out-of-town sites and 105 high street locations.
Mothercare shares lifted 5% after today's figures. But Kate Calvert, retail analyst at Seymour Pierce, said she did not believe Mothercare was an "easy fix".
"It will be difficult to make Mothercare relevant again for the modern mother as it has strong competition from Amazon and the supermarkets," she added.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article