Brief
Ryman holds in excess of twenty thousand lines. It increasingly offers a range of services too. To deliver on their eCommerce division’s strategic objectives, they needed a website that was professional enough for a business audience, yet at the same time, accessible to a consumer audience and easily navigable by both.
Insight
Ryman’s future is as a multi-channel retailer – with online sales and support being a big part of its overall offering. So what they needed was less a redesign than a total upgrade. One that would deliver an enhanced user experience yet contain within it the technical flexibility to make any tactical and strategic adjustments the business may demand going forward.
Solutions
Serving both B2C and B2B customers, the primary navigation was crucial to the new site’s success. We designed it to make the full product range (everything from pens to printers to paperclips for the home, the office, or indeed the home/office) as instantly accessible as possible. At the same time, the homepage also presents an improved promotional area, directing visitors towards tactical offers. Within Ryman, the different regions of the UK have different brand objectives and the site’s flexibility – offering superb content management capabilities and sophisticated pricing control – allows these to be reflected too. Finally, our design was crafted to accommodate future integration and multi-channel developments, giving it a longer and more useful life – in internet as well as human years.
Results
As well as looking great and being positively reviewed by everyone from focus groups to individual users, the new design has had an instant impact on the figures. Year on year online sales are up 60%. Conversion rates are up 20% too, which has done Ryman’s PPC a power of good. So with customers and analysts happy, the final outcome for Ryman is brighter than one of their orange highlighters.
