How do you build a new website for a loved Australian brand, launch it with an immediate boost in traffic and conversion rate on all devices including mobile… and delight customers?

Talk to FIRST.

Strategy 

UXD

Design

Development

When it comes to selling books, Dymocks is known and loved by Australians. It’s a reputation that has been built over 140 years through a country-wide network of stores run by book-loving staff ready to help customers find the perfect book for friends, family or their own delight.

The Dymocks website was delivering on that reputation and had growing sales, but the leadership at Dymocks knew that it could be even better. Better on mobile, better at helping people find the right book, better at helping people buy in-store and online, and better at meeting the expectations of customers in an increasingly online world.

This was a project that gave FIRST the opportunity to work collaboratively with Dymocks across our multiple disciplines. This included:

• helping to determine a business case with evidence-based targets to support investment
• site navigation, on page journeys and conversion paths, refined through user testing to a high confidence level
• design across multiple devices to not only meet the functional requirements, but delight users
• development focused on delivered outcomes yet with the attention to detail required in a complex build
• pre-launch and launch activities to ensure that development and design would result in an increase in search engine position and traffic
• post-launch refinement to optimise the site

The result? A new website with an immediate increase in traffic and conversions from the day of launch. This included a significant jump in conversion rate from users on smartphones — a key focus of the project.

Technical solutions

FIRST implemented a complete eCommerce and CMS solution for Dymocks. This included complex data pipelines for calculating stock and availability for millions of SKUs, integration with loyalty programs that span both online and in-store, and integration with internal customer and retails systems for processing orders.

Kentico was selected as the platform of choice for the Dymocks website. Dymocks online staff benefit from powerful content management capabilities. The platform also readily supports the building of custom functionality and integration with third-party systems.

A strong agile development methodology with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is followed by FIRST. This was used for delivery of the site to launch, and also ensures that new functionality and ongoing improvements can be implemented and delivered on a daily basis without interruption to the site.

High performance and availability for the site was paramount in FIRST’s architecting of a completely cloud-based hosting environment. The load balanced platform offers auto scaling to ensure both the base day-to-day load can be handled along with traffic spikes when popular new titles are released. The environment is designed to meet demand today and growth in the future.