Strandbags is gearing up for a big few weeks of online shopping as consumers snap up steeply discounted products during its Click Frenzy and Black Friday sales. The luggage chain plans to offer multiple “doorbuster” deals on its e-commerce sites in Australia and New Zealand, where it will slash prices on certain products for a limited number of hours. It’s a far cry from what the retailer was doing this time last year, when the e-commerce team was simply trying to keep its websites from cr
crashing.
“You can’t work like that,” Stuart Freer, Strandbags’ chief digital and technology officer, told Inside Retail. “You want to focus on the offer, the sales and the customer experience, not how much memory you need to put in place.”
This is just one of the reasons Freer decided to bring forward the deadline to replatform Strandbags’ websites earlier this year. Instead of launching two new websites at the end of October as originally planned, he set a new deadline of mid-August.
“There was a sharp intake of breath from the team,” Freer said, noting that the project only kicked off in April.
To make it possible, he told the team to focus on creating a minimum viable product first, and adding more functionality later.
“We did the design phase in five weeks, and by late May, we were into development sprints,” he said.
The speed of the project required the team to make quick decisions about which solution providers to use and sometimes abandon features and functions if they couldn’t be integrated in time.
“We said to ourselves, ‘Let’s not spend months going around in circles. Let’s have a look, get some advice, make a decision and move on,’” Paul Erskine, Strandbags’ head of digital and data delivery, told Inside Retail.
New look and feel
The main goal of the project was to bring Strandbags’ digital offering up to speed with consumer expectations. The previous websites had been cobbled together over time and weren’t stable enough to support services that are now considered standard, such as click-and-collect.
On the new websites, which are based on Shopify Plus, customers can see real-time stock availability at nearby stores, and eventually, they will be able to place orders online and pick them up in-store in less than four hours.
Customers can also find the products they’re looking for online more easily, thanks to updated navigation and category options on the new sites.
“Previously we had a very organised category split aligned with how the business thought about it, talked about it and reported about it, but customers didn’t align to that,” Freer said.
“We used [data] to explain that ‘suitcases’ are still a very valid term for customers, even if we prefer to use ‘luggage’. No one uses the phrase ‘purse’ anymore. It’s just a ‘wallet’.”
These changes have led to increased conversion rates from organic traffic, since customers are actually landing on relevant product pages, and because the pages include better product descriptions, as well as reviews and recommendations.
New payment options and the ability to add loyalty vouchers at the checkout have also had a positive impact on conversions.
“The average transaction value has gone back to what it was in 2019,” Freer said.
Prior to the replatforming, Strandbags’ average transaction value had fallen by $25 due to border closures during Covid-19.
The new sites mimic the look and feel of Strandbags’ bricks-and-mortar stores, which underwent a revamp in 2019.
“When you walk into our stores there are two worlds: there’s the left-hand world, which is travel, and the right-hand world, which is fashion, typically handbags,” Freer explained. “Now, when you look at the webpage, you have the same two worlds.”
Broader transformation
For Freer, the rush to replatform Strandbags’ websites was worth it. The online business in New Zealand has already tripled in size. And with the return of travel in Australia, he expects sales to increase even further.
It is just the beginning of a broader digital transformation at the luggage chain. Freer is looking to speed up the supply chain by increasing the amount of automation and conveyor belts in the warehouse and enabling suppliers to ship some products directly to stores.
And Erskine is working on a major data project that will allow various departments at Strandbags to create reports to make more informed decisions.