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Eason bookstores are ubiquitous on the Irish high street, but found themselves struggling to compete online.
Eason worked with UNRVLD’s newest acquisition, Made to Engage, to level up their online offering – integrating multiple legacy platforms, connecting payments and personalising for the user to deliver a competitive e-commerce experience.
Eason’s existing platform was more encyclopaedia than bestseller. Over time, it had become unwieldy and disjointed. Their team was frustrated, and it was difficult for Eason to compete with similar businesses online – a major problem when the pandemic forced their physical stores to close.
They needed a back-to-basics approach, unlocking the full potential of Eason’s Optimizely stack and integrating all aspects of their UX, from commerce and content to payments, loyalty programs, and gifting. Using a range of data channels, we then worked to help Eason deliver the same personalised, warm experience their stores have always been famous for, online.
Shopping for books is an immersive experience. Customers know what they like, but they don’t always know what they’re looking for. As well as personalisation to help Eason’s online shoppers find things they love, we used Optimizely to load search autocomplete suggestions, ensuring they were styled in a way that was as useful to customers as possible.
By making these simple improvements to the site’s search functionality, we saw online revenues increase by an impressive 18% in the very first week.
While we did see immediate results for Eason – including increased festive revenues of 30% in year one - this was never supposed to be an overnight transformation.
Over multiple investment cycles, Eason committed to a process of continuous improvements that saw their online platform continue to evolve and grow.
To date, Eason has experienced an astonishing 500% uplift in online revenues and their conversion rate has increased to an impressive 9.5%.
Far from being the end of the story for Eason, the pandemic forced them to write a bold new chapter in this illustrious company’s history. And the adventure continues - now that Eason’s online platform is thriving, they’re able to tap into valuable new sources of first-party data that are driving their continued evolution.
Optimizely Experiments is the logical next step in helping Eason to further refine their user experience, so they can continue to delight and inspire book lovers, just as they have done for over 100 years.
