Case Study

Brief

big:interactive were appointed by Littlewoods, the multichannel home retailer, to provide a more focused technical approach to their online activities, that encompassed back and front-end solutions for their ecommerce site BargainCrazy.com.

Strategy

The first step was to fully optimise the existing website to make an immediate difference to both the customer experience, which involved updating the technology from Windows to Linux and upgrading the ecommerce application, ePages. This immediate win allowed for the focus to shift to the overall website design and providing a framework for Littlewoods to manage their content. The design and content management features were updated to make them more flexible and to give Littlewoods the freedom to create and run promotions related to the changes in stock items that they hold.

Execution

The design and content management features now give complete control over the website homepage to the Littlewoods design team, so they can deliver a fully integrated promotional campaign, such as for the World Cup, where they can change everything right down to making navigation tabs appear like football goals. However, to reduce the load on the design team, the website can quickly be switched to “automatic mode” where some predefined functions pull in content from across the site and display ranges of products. This flexibility means that they can pick and choose when and where to put their resources.

Results

The initial success was with the product import system which had its processing time reduced from 4 hours to 30 minutes, with exports to their internal systems also shortened to just 30 minutes from a crippling 7 hours. This freed up server power for delivering the customer experience. A result of the overall improvement has meant a consistent increase in online orders over the past two years, and increased flexibility for Littlewoods to respond to the ever changing product lines that they carry.