Primary Services
Graphic Design
Digital Marketing
E-commerce development
Front end development
SEO
Systems integration
About the customer
Scotlandshop.com had a solid web presence which had been
developed over the course of a few years into a reputable
e-commerce venture. In 2010 the business embarked upon a
repositioning exercise, and as part of this the website was to be
re-designed and streamlined to meet new business processes and
needs. Brightwire won a competitive pitch against a design house
and e-commerce agency to become the preferred partner. Our
strengths were considered to be our skills in design and technical
ability, expertise in providing innovative digital marketing and IT
insight and guidance, and ability to meet the needs of the business
with a proven e-commerce platform.
Business drivers
ScotlandShop.com needed to re-design and brand the website, and
to ensure it was underpinned by a strong e-commerce platform that
allowed the client to update product information and content as
required. The project was expected to re-develop six language
versions of the site, and to integrate this as far as possible into
business processes in order to streamline picking and packing,
improve customer service and communications, and increase the
average order value. In addition the project required a significant
degree of search engine optimisation analysis and techniques in
order to improve its ranking and drive increased visitor numbers to
the site. It needed to be:
-
easy to use for staff across the
organisation, with task automation making it easier to manage
customers, orders and communications;
- be
multi-lingual and easy to update product
information in several languages and currencies, across several
sites;
- increase customer
conversion rates with innovative digital marketing tools
built-in to the system.
What Brightwire delivered
We started the project by defining the business objectives,
gaining an insight into how the organisation worked in terms of
people and processes, and setting key priorities. We then commenced
the creative element of the project, which saw a number of mood
boards and design research undertaken on competitor and
aspirational sites, before agreeing a design route. This design
route was then accompanied by a sitemap and wireframe layouts of
the site's key selling pages (such as the homepage, product
category landing page and product page). Once this was agreed we
then worked to design the checkout process in order to ensure that
this met the needs of the target customer in the simplest, and most
usable, way possible.
In tandem with this piece of work we documented and agreed a set
of functional requirements for the site. This document was
accompanied by a detailed project plan which split some features
into separate phases as was required to meet the business
priorities in the most achievable way. This agreed, the technical
stage of the project commenced where the design was overlaid onto
coded pages, and the e-commerce platform was developed with
multilingual and content management capability built in from the
outset. At the same time we developed some completely custom areas
of the site, such as:
- a
bespoke tartan finder which allows customers to search for a tartan
and see all items available in their chosen tartan;
-
cross-sell product recommendations;
- ability
for buyers to create custom products (most of Scotlandshop.com's
products can be completely tailored by customers, providing bespoke
measurements and customising items in any of 500+ tartans);
-
integration with multiple payment providers;
- custom
stock re-order reports (which allowed Scotlandshop.com a clear view
of which stock items needed to be ordered from suppliers);
-
abandoned shopping cart reporting and the ability to communicate
with customers who have abandoned their carts;
- online
chat capability, which allowed Scotlandshop.com to actively
communicate with its customers;
- deep
Google Analytics integration including order funnel reports and
keyword analysis.
In the new site, order fulfilment is vastly superior and the new
e-commerce platform has significantly streamlined customer and
order management processes, whilst reducing manual input and
errors. It returns better results in search engine ranking
and allows Scotlandshop.com full control over images, text and
features across all of the multilingual sites, whilst having
reduced the manual effort previously associated with translated
content. The site and its new platform is one which will easily
allow the business to grow in line with its new objectives, and as
such provides a robust and usable foundation for this future
growth. The site was launched in time for the Christmas shopping
season in 2010 and we are now working with Scotlandshop.com to
deliver ongoing features as part of an annual plan for site
enhancements.
