Helping an independent retailer grow online revenue

The challenge

The Champagne Company is the UK’s number-one independent Champagne retailer. With a strong focus on delighting its customers, the retailer’s goal is to provide easy and enjoyable shopping experiences where site visitors can purchase their favourite Champagne at consistent, fair prices.

The business was looking to build a new ecommerce shop that would enable The Champagne Company to deliver superior user experiences, and to continuously improve and evolve them, whilst benefiting from an open, flexible platform that supports the latest ecommerce technologies.

The retailer had engaged a digital agency to build and launch a new and improved online store based on the Magento Commerce platform, but had been let down part-way through the work.

But with Christmas on the horizon, the independent retailer needed to finish the store to a high standard and get it live before the critical trading period.

The new site needed to provide:

A fast, frictionless checkout
Improved site stability and traffic handling
Improved automation of administration flows
Improved security and site speed
Improved tools, structure, and content to support visibility via search
A new and improved look and feel

What we did

We got to work immediately, with strategy workshops to establish a shared vision amongst the retailer’s stakeholders, a detailed user experience (UX) review, and in-depth code audit.

Defining what the minimum viable product (MVP) website should constitute was critical to moving quickly and delivering a product that would deliver maximum value against the business goals of improving usability, conversion, and growing online revenue.

Key areas of focus included remedial developments, in particular around performance and security, simplifying the checkout, and improving the user experience, with a focus on search.

The launch of The Champagne Company’s high-performance MVP website has delivered usability improvements that have directly contributed to record-breaking conversion spikes and revenue growth.

Since then, we have continued to review the user experience and deliver ongoing enhancements, from enabling The Champagne Company to become the first independent wine and spirits company in the UK to add gifting options, to simplifying the checkout from a nine-page process to a frictionless, two-step process.

woman browsing champagne company website on a tablet

The results

Just weeks after launching the new site, the retailer achieved the following milestones in its key performance metrics:

Revenue up by 31%
Ecommerce conversion rate up by 120%
Pages per session up by 44%
Average page load time has reduced by 33%
Average session duration has increased by 32%
Bounce rate down by 21%

The Champagne Company them went on to achieve the following year-on-year milestones:

Revenue up by 35%
Ecommerce conversion rate up by 101%
Transactions up 57%
Pages per session up by 32%
Average page load time has reduced by 45%
Average session duration has increased by 26%
Bounce rate down by 16%

Behind the numbers is an improved and simplified user experience, from easy, mobile-friendly search and simplified navigation, to a fast, two-page checkout and superior delivery and fulfillment process including one-hour delivery slots and text communication.

More features are in development as The Champagne Company looks to continuously improve the website and the experiences it offers. The retailer has recently integrated a new EPOS system using Ebizmarts, as well as now offering enhanced search functionality through Klevu. The focus is now on launching two Magento-based sister sites, the first of which will be The Drinks Emporium launching in the coming weeks.

Equipped with its new website and digital roadmap, The Champagne Company can finally deliver on its marketing plans and aggressively pursue its aim to double sales by 2020.

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