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Starting as a small family business, Abbyson has grown over the last 30-years to become one of largest furniture manufacturers in the United States, without losing sight of their family owned and operated values. They hold an incredible breadth of inventory, and provide furniture for every room in the house.
When designing an e-commerce site, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. If you do, you'll more than likely end up with something the visitor won't know how to use.
Abbyson’s old site lacked was any form of e-commerce, making it difficult for someone interested in furnishing their house with Abbyson furniture to make a purchase. Potential purchasers would use the website to research the products they wanted to buy, and then needed to find a retailer who carried Abbyson’s product line. However, no retailer carried all of Abbyson’s products which left buyers to piecemeal their furniture from a variety of retailers. The goal of allowing Abbyson to sell their furniture direct to consumers is what drove our strategy.
We were invited to do our kickoff meeting at their headquarters, where we learned more about their story, mission, and family roots, and were able to see their business in action.
During our discovery meeting, Abbyson provided great references to competitor websites for us to review. With direct to consumer sales becoming an increasingly competitive space, we knew it would be very important to position Abbyson appropriately. We also dove into their technical requirements and desired 3rd party integrations, such as SnapEngage’s live chat bot, Lever job postings, payment options, and offering financing through Affirm.
When we jumped into the strategy phase, we knew it would be essential to utilize an online shopping structure that users are familiar with and understand. However, by mixing their story in with the customer shopping journey, we were able to carve out a path that was uniquely Abbyson.
The majority of our time spent on UX design was put towards wireframing the flow that users would follow to find the product they are most interested in. On the homepage, we offered users multiple browsing paths, such as a featured product carousel, the option to browse by color, and style inspiration pages. On the product list page, we gave users access to easy filtering where they were able to further distill their search by price, style, color, material, and customer rating.
Taking this one step further, once a user found a product they were interested in, we wanted to provide as much information about the product as necessary for users to feel comfortable in their future purchase. Since users would be buying their items online and wouldn’t get to see it in person, we knew we needed to recreate what they might have experienced at a showroom. We did this through incorporating engaging product videos, high-quality images, a detailed product description, customer testimonials, details and dimensions in a visual format, and the ability to learn more about product quality and customer support offerings.
Abbyson had strong brand guidelines for us to use, which was instrumental in guiding our style for the website. Applying their colors, typography, and imagery styles across the site was clutch for uniting their online presence with other marketing material they had already created.
We knew from the start we were going to code our custom designs on top of Magento’s robust e-commerce platform. Their framework enabled us to seamlessly program the filtering systems on product list pages, define attribute sets, and allow different product configurations. Built-in reporting, product, pricing, and inventory management allowed us to focus our efforts on the little details that would really make Abbyson’s online store stand out from the competition.
With a brand new custom designed e-commerce website, Abbyson was ready to sell their furniture direct to consumers. By weaving the story of their unique family roots into the shopping experience, we provided Abbyson with a site ready to unlock the next chapter of their business.
Abbyson’s new site has provided a new sales channel for the company. For us at SPINX, not only were we able to work with one of the top furniture brands in the United States, but we were thrilled to help them create a new sales channel for Abbyson through their brand new e-commerce site.
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