Summary
As British garden furniture retailer Lazy Susan Furniture was expanding its business into Europe, it became clear that it needed to overcome a number of technical and strategic challenges related to its website. Adding to the urgency of this was the need to address Brexit restrictions for its European customers.
The brand briefed ecommerce agency GPMD to revise its website and to serve as its long-term partner on strategic, as well as on the technical and development issues. The updated website was launched on a new platform and included new technologies that allowed, for the first time, customer reviews and facilitated searches.
The revisions contributed to a 145% YoY increase in revenue for the company.
Objectives & aims
As the brand was expanding beyond its UK-roots into Europe and as demand for its products was increasing, it became clear that its original website was no longer meeting its needs and that a number of technical issues needed to be addressed:
- Scalability issues for site maintenance which had been resulting in manual fixes
- Lack of usability and efficiency throughout the site
- Slow speed and performance issues with the website caused by having too many complicated integrations
- The mobile experience needed a complete overhaul
Implementation, execution & tactic
The brand launched a new website on an customisable, open commerce platform. The new platform allowed the company to scale its business quickly and to connect new integrations with increased efficiency. It also implemented a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that automated business processes and eliminated the need to enter information multiple times.
The company also added new technologies to its site to enhance its customer experience. For instance, it added a review platform to allow for customer reviews; this addition provided social proof within the brand’s social community. It also incorporated a software tool that enhanced its search capabilities; the tool seeks to determine users’ intent by examining not just their use of keywords, but also their online behaviour.
As a result of the new platform implementation, the brand was able to streamline its operations and simplify its inventory management. It was also able to automate many of its processes, thus significantly reducing the time and resources its ecommerce team needed to maintain the site. These initiatives helped the company address the scalability, efficiency and speed issues that had been hampering its growth.
As the speed of development increased, the team was able to focus on further optimising the site and building out its tech stack. The agency helped the company identify the site projects that would achieve the strongest results. This targeted approach enabled the brand to test and fine tune the key elements on its website.
Results
- 145% increase in revenue
- 65% increase in traffic
- 2.3% increase in conversion rate