Church House Bookshop

The brief

The Church House Bookshop team wanted to build on their online success and update their website – both design and features - improve usability and put in place technology for the future. Previous successful projects with Baigent reinforced the team’s confidence in our expertise, which combined with Site Manager’s ease of use and our competitive budget resulted in the entire project being undertaken by Baigent: visual design, technical development; integration with back-end databases and fulfilment.

Our approach

A simple, understated design directs visitors to products and key website tools: search, catalogue and enquiries. The buying process has been carefully designed to minimise basket abandonment and regular visitors to the real shop will feel at home through use of imagery and branding. The site combines:

• Full e-commerce facilities
• Powerful search of 30,000 titles 
• Enquiries tools for users and staff
• Usability key to design
• Affiliate scheme enabling parishes to earn money
• Bestseller and new books features
• From my bookshop book recommendations
• Backend integration with Bestseller 2 and for order management

Behind the scenes
The entire site is managed by staff using Site Manager Content Management and E-commerce Elements from Baigent. These are integrated with back-office systems, including Bestseller 2, to enable them to seamlessly manage product details; stock control; order fulfilment (including telephone orders); website enquiries and use Site Manager's powerful search engine to instantly find that one book in 30,000.

Results

Sales are up dramatically! Improved usability has helped customers buy, and the new site has attracted a wider audience. In the back-office, the fulfilment process has been streamlined. It’s so successful that we intend to direct our 'offline' mail-order work via the online system.”
David Green, Electronic Projects Manager