King & McGaw Developers

After a period of beta testing, user testing and painful analysis, last week we migrated WorldGallery.co.uk to Kubrick, the new platform we’ve been working on in the London office. Kubrick’s primary objectives are textbook e-commerce, but the technology and processes are a bit more interesting (which I will write about later)

Improving conversion rate

When you have a product catalogue as extensive as WorldGallery, it’s a challenge to help users find the product they want to find. I think this is particularly true of art products which are often difficult to categories.

The primary focus has been a new category structure, and adding the capability for users to navigate directly to artwork, artist or category pages via a new search auto-suggest feature. The result is a more curated user experience.

• Key tech: Rails, Sinatra, ElasticSearch, JSON

Improving AOV

We have a massive range of frames and a brilliant team of master framers, and frankly we need to do a better job of getting our customers interested in frames. To do this, we’ve integrated framing directly into the main product page and made it near-instantaneous to navigate between various types of unframed, canvas or framed products.

• Key tech: Backbone, JSON

Increase traffic

We’ve vastly simplified the structure of the site (focussing on artworks, categories, artists and artworks), resulting in one authoritative URL for each page (rather than rewrites which can result in multiple URLs for a single entity).

For example, the “Modern Art” category used to be available via a number of URLs like these:

• /mt/Modern-Art-Prints-51-2.html‎
• /category/modern-modern-59.html‎

All of these should now redirect to the one “true” modern art category: /art-prints/modern-art. This is better for users and better for Google.

• Key tech: Rails, Rack::Rewrite

We also had some secondary goals in this development:

• Make the site mobile-friendly for the 25% (and rising) of users that access our sites on tablets or mobile
• Improve engagement (measured in time on site, number of page views and return visits)
• Improved monitoring
• Automated testing on everything
• Increased speed of development

We’re already seeing some positive results and look forward to migrating some of our other sites over.