Charity webstore redesign enhances site performance and boosts customer engagement.

Serving customers from around the world, this high-profile UK-based online store specialises in exclusive memorabilia and collectibles. 

Unlike other ecommerce sites, it doesn't follow the usual holiday-driven sales peaks. Instead, traffic and sales are fuelled by new product launches and significant events. The webstore’s revenue funds a charity, so optimal web performance and the ability to manage large spikes in traffic is critical.

With a small internal team, the business required a partner that could help maintain and optimise the website, built on Magento (now Adobe Commerce), to ensure its seamless operation and maximise revenue while reducing the burden on the in-house team. 

After four years working on the back end of the website and building trust in our expertise, the organisation entrusted Inviqa with a full re-design of the webstore.
 

Our initial focus was on maintaining and upgrading the server and webstore’s system to ensure the website was never on end-of-life software and could manage the spikes in traffic experienced during new collection launches or significant events without disruption to the shopping experience.

We performed site-specific improvements, such as streamlining the checkout experience to make it more user-friendly, integrated the Worldpay payment gateway and built an integration with MS Dynamics Business Central to support an internal system change.

Late last year, the store’s team asked us to redesign elements of the website - something that had not been touched for six years. After reviewing the requested changes, we suggested a complete redesign of the website. The proposed work would take about the same time and effort as updating the individual elements, would improve the entire look, feel and functionality of the website, and allow us to bring it in line with the latest UX best practice.

Excited by the prospect, the team entrusted us with the full redesign of the website and our Experience Design and Engineering teams worked together to improve the look and feel, functionality and performance of the site.

While we had strict brand guidelines to adhere to, our designers managed to push this to its full potential, finding inspiration from luxury retail outlets to create a modern take on a luxury shopping experience. As work progressed on the redesign, we kept stakeholders closely engaged with clickable prototypes that allowed them to move through key user journeys of the redesigned webstore and provide feedback on the design and functionality. As designs were signed off, we built out a new design system so the store’s team can easily add new pages to the site in line with the updated brand.

To keep usability at the heart of the design and ensure the UX aligns with best practices, we updated the navigation structure and designed new features such as ‘add to basket’ layovers and the ability to favourite products, modernising what has traditionally been simply a functional website. We also addressed and improved core vitals such as site speed, allowing the store’s team to optimise the site and re-engage their diverse customer base.
 

The online continues to work optimally and easily manages the spikes in traffic without disruption to the shopping experience.

It’s also a lot easier for the store’s team to manage in-house and update to accommodate new products or collections.

The redesigned webstore launched at the end of August 2024, and alongside a more modern look and feel, the site’s performance metrics have significantly improved, with the site scoring 92, 90, and 93 respectively for performance, accessibility and best practices.

While early days, compared to the same period last year the website performance metrics look promising. During the first month after the redesign went live, the site experienced - compared to the same period last year - 

• A 42% increase in views per session and a 58% increase in views per active users
• Average engagement time per active user increased by 32.6% and engaged sessions per active user increased by 44.7%
• Engagement rate increased by 30% and dwell time increased by 11.48%
• Number of visitors that started the checkout process increased by 18.5% while sessions with a purchase event increased by 105%.