Case study with Richard Voyce, Digital Director at The Conran Shop.
Richard is responsible for the eCommerce site at The Conran Shop, looking after everything from IT to strategy and managing suppliers:
“The biggest success we’ve had with Advanced Commerce is the time we’ve been able to save as a small team. We are an extremely lean team, who at the same time, run a large website."
The Challenge The Conran Shop faced:
“When we started looking at search, merchandising and recommendations suppliers, it’s very apparent that a lot of the tech is outdated, even if it might look dressed up to appear slick and modern. This is why I was impressed with Advanced Commerce’s offering. It’s been built from the ground up and with modern principles in mind.”
“We previously had 3 separate systems in place, one search provider, a recommendations provider and Magento’s merchandising functionality- which involved a lot of manual sorting of our product pages. As these tools didn’t align well together, we found customers were getting an inconsistent experience across our site and it was difficult for us to manage as a team.
We really wanted to create consistently good experiences for our customers across a significant amount of categories. One of the main problems with having to manually sort our product listings is that we only had 2 merchandisers in house, so this was a huge drain on time and resources.
When we started looking at search, merchandising and recommendations suppliers, it’s very apparent that a lot of the tech is outdated, even if it might look dressed up to appear slick and modern. There are even some suppliers that acquire other tech companies, bolt it onto their offering and call it their own- but when you look under the hood and see what’s really going on, it’s apparent that it’s going to be a painful experience to manage as a merchandiser.
And this is why I was impressed with Advanced Commerce’s offering. It’s been built from the ground up and with modern principles in mind. We saw that we could fix our problems with Advanced Commerce.”
Why The Conran Shop chose Advanced Commerce:
“Advanced Commerce was recommended to me by someone in my network who had worked with your CEO, André, before. After initial talks, what really drove me towards Advanced Commerce was that André has such a refreshing attitude and is quite different to other CEOs in this industry. He’s genuinely a really nice guy, easy to work with and very straight forward. I found this to be a refreshing change and wanted to work with someone like that. That’s what really sold it for me.”
The Solution
“We are using the tool at the moment for our search, merchandising and recommendations across the website. What’s really interesting about the tool is that it has the capability to get into the finer details- I don’t think we’ve even gotten close to maxing out the full ROI potential Advanced Commerce gives us, so that’s really great!"
"In terms of Professional Services, we’ve been using the expertise of Katie, who has great industry experience as she’s from a merchandiser background. She’s been able to help bring the team up to speed with the platform’s capabilities while also educating us on merchandising best practices. She’s recently helped us to build out a practical roadmap that prioritises tasks for us to work through and supports us in achieving these objectives.
It’s been great that your team hasn’t just sold us a tool - You’ve set our merchandising team up for the future by teaching us best practice tips that we can use independently.”
The Results
“From a success point of view, the biggest one for me would be the time we’ve been able to save as a small team. We are an extremely lean team, who at the same time, run a large website (which runs like a department store with many products to match.) Although we have a small team, we wanted our customers to have consistently good experiences across our site. With Advanced Commerce, one of our biggest wins has been being able to utilise the power of the platform. It gives us the assurance that the rules we’ve built are applied throughout our site and we no longer have to visually spot errors- it is already done for us.
We’ve recently changed our business model significantly, and therefore, our strategy is going in a different direction now. One of the future wins I’m looking forward to is expanding our website to additional country locations. We will be able to replicate our rules across different countries but overlay them with specific country-based rules and fine tune them as needed.”
