Abbey’s Bookshop
Abbey’s Bookshop is a cornerstone in Sydney’s CBD, offering a fantastic range of books and merchandise since 1968. Abbey’s has been a client of Erudite’s for many years, but they recently came to us for an overhaul of their site. Previously, their three departments had separate sites, Abbey’s Bookshop, Galaxy Bookshop and Language Bookstore. Abbey wanted to merge the three sites into one for a more immersive experience than a niche one.
Issues
- The site needed to retain all existing information and tracking data
- Potential issues in merging three sets of data with increasing product catalogue size
- Seamlessly maintaining existing interfacing with POS with the new checkout process
- Balancing page load times with rich product content
Objectives
- Create a modern mobile responsive website with user experience as a priority
- Streamline the checkout process
- The ability for Abbey’s to configure landing pages and product lists as required
- Retain product catalogue for all three bookstores within the one site
- Retain and improve on existing SEO & web tracking analytics
- Decrease site load time as much as possible
Research
We had extensive consultations with Abbey’s and investigated the faults of the current site and checkout process. Major pain points were the multi-step checkout, non-mobile responsive design, site load time, and difficulty in creating targeted landing pages. We determined that using the existing codebase and technologies of J2EE, HTML, CSS and custom Javascript would allow us to take a modular approach and only rewrite the parts that needed it. We researched many checkout options and best practices and engaged with Abbey’s, who had an excellent grasp of what their users were struggling with to complete checkout. We provided a one-page checkout option with auto-detection of available shipping options. We also created pre-built blocks to populate the landing pages quickly and easily by Abbey’s. We were able to merge the three product catalogues and optimise the product index with changes to the SQL query structure. We performed advanced web server configuration in conjunction with front end optimisations to improve page speeds.
Conclusions
The updated Abbey’s site is a much more streamlined site offering an improved user experience. The decreased site load time has a very noticeable effect on the user but also assists with SEO. The mobile responsive site also allows for more conversions as the browsing experience is much easier and more accessible.
