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How we reshaped an iconic Toronto gift shop’s online customer experience.
Client
Drake General Store
Scope
User Experience
eCommerce Development
Launched
December 2019
Overview
The Drake General Store is a traditional hotel gift shop in Toronto, self-defined as a classic general store, a flea market stand, and a museum shop all rolled into one. We were approached by the Drake General Store to help re-evaluate their online customer experience and how to improve their overall eCommerce structure.
The Challenge
Create an online shopping experience that mimics the in-store one.
The original navigation architecture had too many options for DGS’s large catalog of varying products, which lead to disorder and user confusion.
The in-store shopping experience at any DGS location was total opposite of that, and we knew we needed to come up with a solution that made online shopping as breezy as in store shopping.
Strategy
Emphasize on UX and move to Shopify.
We focused largely on User Experience with the primary goal of ushering users towards the checkout page. One of the simplest, yet most impactful, shifts we made was a reorganized, logically restructured navigation bar that made finding products easier than ever.
Another very important shift was our migration from a dated version of Magento to a faster, more scalable platform, Shopify.
Mobile Responsiveness
Allowing shoppers to shop at any time, in any way.
The older version of DGS’s website lacked responsiveness on mobile devices. Considering most of their traffic came from their social media channels, we took a mobile-first approach to ensure all content, collections, and products were easily navigable on all devices.
Outcome
Increased customer loyalty and retention.
Within the first few weeks of launching, DGS saw a spike in conversions and customer retention. Meanwhile, they saw a huge dip in bounce rates, the rate of which users leave the site after visiting just one page.