Making shopping seamless for United Carpets and Beds customers

The brief

UC&B approached us initially to support their existing website. However, it quickly became clear that the website would need significant upgrades in line with their rebrand and that supporting these changes wouldn’t be cost-effective in the long term. 

Following an Elementary website audit, UC&B saw the opportunity to migrate its existing site to a more flexible, scalable solution. Crucially, the new solution needed to allow its sales and marketing teams to create a seamless shopping experience that took sales online and generated leads for individual stores.

A typical ‘basket’ had to account for multiple customer journeys with different outcomes. For example, a customer purchasing a carpet would need a quote and directions to their nearest store, while a bed could be purchased directly online.

The solution

We migrated the UC&B site to a custom Magento 2 build using the new Hyvä frontend theme. However, with complex purchasing options to factor in, there was much to consider before we started the design and build.

To ensure we created a cohesive customer experience, we conducted a thorough discovery and ideation process in collaboration with the UC&B team. This process helped us to identify customer personas and develop user flows before putting together page layouts and wireframes and moving on to the build.

The new build was tailored to the UC&B requirements identified during the Discovery and UX phases.

The challenge

Ultimately, we needed to create an environment that made it easy for shoppers to carry out various actions in one transaction. For example, a customer redecorating a bedroom might purchase a mattress and bedframe and order a carpet sample online but must visit a store to view carpets in person.

To make this possible, we introduced custom functionality, including:

• Product pages with custom elements and dynamic options
• Automated key CTA messaging attribute settings
• Bespoke integration for creating quotes
• Basket checks, with pop-up messaging on mixed baskets
• Product recommender questionnaire
• Store finder with 25-mile radius
• Sample ordering system with up to four free samples
• Free home measure booking system
• Different payment options, integrating with WorldPay Klarna, PayPal and Novuna Finance

We collaborated closely with UC&B throughout this process. Much of its data was hardcoded into the existing site, meaning the internal team had to get involved with data entry and updates. To make this easier and to ensure we met UC&B deadlines, we carried out mass exports of base data and imports of new data.

The results

Following the launch of the new site, UC&B has experienced an impressive performance uplift. Google rankings for carpet-related searches moved up an average of 36 places in November from August, and sessions increased onsite to 48,000 extra users in 10 weeks. 

Driving measure requests to stores was a key objective of the project, and we’re pleased to say that visits to store pages increased by 185% year on year. This uplift exceeded expectations for Q4 and gave store staff, already adept at converting leads, the opportunity to increase sales.

We’re also pleased to report that improvements to site content, messaging, and CTAs have now extended to an improved Knowledge Hub. Previously, the content was there but hidden away. The new hub brings all relevant content together in one place, allowing for the cross-linking of products to support lead generation.

The UC&B team can inform, educate and direct customers more effectively, while customers benefit from a seamless, cohesive shopping experience.

Overall, feedback has been very positive, and we continue to work with UC&B on regular hosting, maintenance, and new development.