In 1905, Spiegel mailed its first catalog to women across America. Just twenty years later, the fashion and furniture retailer had 10 million customers. Soon after that, the Spiegel catalog was the first to introduce European trends to the American public. For the past 140 years, Spiegel and Newport News have been committed to meeting customer needs and desires with collections of versatile, unique apparel and functional, fashionable home products.

CHALLENGE

When Spiegel reemerged as part of the newly formed Spiegel Brands, Inc., the company set out to completely redesign the Spiegel and Newport News sites to make it easier for shoppers to find products, better merchandise their products, increase conversion, and reduce abandonment rates.

In order to determine how to streamline the shopping process on the Spiegel site, the company conducted several tests on the old site to determine how shoppers navigated and where they experienced trouble. For example, one analysis revealed that first-time shoppers had very low conversion rates. The "Idea Resource," a content-rich section offering shopping tips and advice, was difficult for users to find, but those that did find it had a 30% higher conversion rate than those that didn’t.

Spiegel also sought more revenue opportunities in the form of merchandising and promotions. Operating on a homegrown platform with limited merchandising capabilities, they needed better tools to merchandise their products to customers.

SOLUTION

Fry helped Spiegel effectively simplify the shopping process by streamlining navigation, providing more product information, building merchandising tools, and increasing search engine optimization.

Fry’s usability experts reworked the site’s global navigation to engage the customer and improve the shopping experience. They eliminated redundant links and positioned top-level categories such as Collection and Category to be more accessible. Fry built an outfit collection display so that shoppers could view the individual pieces of an outfit for purchase. Customers can view an entire collection or set of tips about the merchandise with a clear and easy way to navigate to a product page where they can place an item in their cart. In addition, the new one-click shopping feature allows the shopper to add an outfit to the shopping cart on the same product page, on which she can also see alternate views and sizing charts. The use of Scene7 for product imagery increases the richness of the images and provides Spiegel with the means to easily manage images. All of these improvements, including clearer category definitions and better organization of product content, reduce confusion and encourage customers to keep shopping.

Since it was a significant revenue generator for the site, Fry redesigned the “Idea Resource” section with clearer links to products. Fry’s creative team also removed clutter from the home page and redesigned category browse pages to clearly display headers and the products being viewed to display on the left navigation to remind the shopper where she is on the site at all times. A "view all" option was added to category pages to make it simple for the shopper to see more product thumbnails at once. Fry most recently redesigned the Clearance section to simplify navigation and improve usability.

To build Spiegel’s merchandising capabilities, Fry added site clarity tagging to give the company a way to track shoppers’ behavior at the cart level. This feature allows Spiegel to market to users based on abandoned carts, cart contents, etc. Fry also integrated with Amazon and improved natural search engine rankings on the sites to further optimize revenue for both Spiegel and Newport News.

RESULTS

Positive results of the redesign were immediately apparent. Shoppers are more engaged in the site with a 19% decrease in home page departures and a 14% increase in page views per session. A 15% decrease in onsite search sessions and a 45% increase in products added to the shopping cart from a product page prove the efficiency of the new shopping experience. Overall sales increased as a result of a 13% increase in average order value. Cart abandonment rates decreased by 20%, and conversion rates increased 59% and 43% for new and repeat visitors respectively, providing the company with double digit year-over-year sales growth.

"After comprehensive testing of our site, it was clear to us that we needed to simplify the shopping experience for our customers. Fry led the way in making recommendations for simple design changes that allowed our users to feel more engaged in shopping, and the results have been tremendous." - Tony Chivari, Senior Vice President, Marketing and E-commerce Spiegel Brands, Inc.