BEST NEW ONLINE RETAILER
PROJECT HISTORY
Our aim for BWS is to provide a connected and seamless retail experience for our customers. The digitalisation of BWS was an ambitious project, with our proposition built around customer convenience through leveraging one of Australia's largest network of stores.
But we didn't stop there.
We also wanted to deliver a revolutionary browsing experience for our customers with a curated range of products tailored to the local community. Our online store provides live stock-on-hand information, allowing customers a clear view of product availability within their chosen store, whilst also allowing customers to lock in prices and buy in bulk when we have great specials on offer.
Launched on the 24th October 2016, the project went live at the busiest time of the year. The launch was a success and we brought the new face of BWS to market serving our target audience of beer, wine and spirits customers across Australia.
TECHNOLOGIES USED
We selected technologies to support our responsive and adaptive design ensuring our customers are delighted with a consistent experience.
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AngularJS - Single page application allowing customers to conveniently browse the site without having to refresh upon each click.
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Akamai CDN - Best in class Content Delivery Network (CDN) accelerates delivery of content to achieve faster page loads and a more responsive experience for any device, anywhere.
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Akamai IM - Proudly the first to implement Image Manager (IM) within Australia. Image Manager allows us to serve optimised images tailored to our customers device, network bandwidth and location.
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Microsoft Azure - Fully hosted in the Azure cloud, the BWS site has the backend capacity for seamless production deployments and dynamic scalability in response to peak or low traffic demands, meaning greater speed to market and smarter infrastructure spend. We have also introduced a fully modular ecosystem providing cutting edge Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) framework enabling a fully agile product development environment.
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eCommerce - Nobody knows our customers or our business like we do so we developed our own eCommerce platform using open source tools. The platform allows us to create customer segments and personalise our offering through targeted promotions and dynamic content.
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ZenDesk - Industry best support and ticket management system well integrated with our digital platforms. Our customers are given a unique ticket every time they submit a query to ensure a speedy and timely response.
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SkuVantage - With over 5,000 products on the site and many more to come, Australia's leading Product Information Management (PIM) system SkuVantage, allows us to not only house all of our products, but also easily enrich and share product information across all of the Woolworths banners, whilst leveraging there extensive vendor portfolio to ensure information is up-to-date and accurate.
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RichRelevance - Delivering the right recommendation to the right customer at the right time. A cloud-based solution, RichRelevance's 'Recommend' module, delivers personalised product recommendations through the use of a powerful machine-learing engine.
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BazaarVoice - Giving customers a voice. Bazaarvoice, a market leader in user-generated content, enables customers and staff members alike to read & write reviews product reviews.
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Pre-Render - Considering our javascript framework, Pre-Render assists web crawlers to access all available content, furthering strengthening our visibility within SERPs.
Site Usability
The new BWS website is both accessible and reliable with a responsive mobile first design backed by industry leading backend and content delivery technology partners in Microsoft and Akamai. The user experiences a clutter-free, clear and intuitive interface with customer-centric navigation, relevant product recommendations and one-page checkout for desktop.
BWS customers are mobile first and so are we — and that’s just the beginning.
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Clean and simple, customer-centric navigation -
Best-in-class search — smart, faster, more relevant -
Smart Product Display — based on in-store and online purchase history -
World class, Australian first, images served by Akamai -
Simplified checkout for desktop -
Enhanced, enriched data to inform and deliver a more relevant proposition -
Customer and staff ratings for product reviews -
Responsive, reliable and easy to use -
Favourites based on purchase and browsing history -
Simple reorder function for favourites
Customer Experience
The customer experience is central to the design approach BWS has adopted. It has been all about the customer, providing a seamless yet rich multi-channel experience that navigates our complex business and gets them closer to the products they want.
1 hour click & Collect
Our one-hour Click & Collect guarantee (our best time is 3.01 minutes) puts BWS at the forefront of retail service with this industry-leading proposition. We were able to achieve this through an instant and transparent communication of order status across our operational and fulfilment network.
Personalised Recommendations
Customers get more relevant product recommendations based on their shopping and browsing behaviour.
Simplified User Journey
We simplified how our customers' experience and our complex business functions across multiple channels and our 1295 store network.
Stock Information
Knowing that one of our BWS stores might stock a product isn’t enough. We deliver clear, live stock information based on customers’ cross-channel purchase history.
Progress Tracking
We’ve enabled SMS tracking so BWS customers know how their order is progressing and when it is ready to collect.
Site Design
Partnering with global technology leaders, BWS serves fast, rich and relevant personalised content that aligns online and in store sales and enables greater capacity to evaluate attribution across multiple channels to support business marketing and sales functions. Supporting this is a clear and intuitive site that combines best practice design principles with industry leading technology that puts the customer at the centre of the experience.
Simplified Checkout
Our simplified checkout for desktop focuses the shopping process to a few essential clicks without leaving the page. This simplified process improves customer experience and crucially leads to fewer shopping cart abandons.
Clear and Simple Pricing
A new pricing scheme that is clear, simple and consistent. It avoids the confusion associated with multiple offerings and pack sizes of the same products for purchase and price comparison.
Collaborative and Collocated Teams
BWS digitalisation has changed how our back office works too. Development teams and business stakeholders work directly and more collaboratively in a dynamic collocated environment that keeps customer experience at the heart of what we do in technology and business.
Project Performance
Moving BWS online has been a great success. Visitors to the site increased by 50% with similar increases across other metics such as store locator views, new sessions and an impressive 68% increase in page views. Further to our drive for greater overall customer experience, performance in the digital space is reflected through a significant increase in time on site for customers who made a purchase hitting 20 minutes (18 minutes for mobile), which shows the consistent consumption and engagement of our offering through our expanded product range and depth in product information.
50%
INCREASE IN NEW USERS TO THE MOBILE SITE
58%
INCREASE IN STORE LOCATOR PAGE VIEWS
48%
INCREASE IN NEW SESSIONS
68%
INCREASE IN PAGE VIEWS