Ecommerce is vital to the Natural History Museum, as an effective means of generating income and building stronger relationships with visitors.
Introducing the Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum promotes the discovery, understanding and enjoyment of the natural world. The beautiful museum buildings, in South Kensington, house world-class collections, regularly changing exhibitions and cutting-edge research projects.
The challenge
The Natural History Museum asked us to build an online store to integrate with their existing website. The main body of the site, branding and CMS had already been developed by a third party. In this situation we would need to work with the other agency to fully integrate our ecommerce systems/functionality into the Museum’s design, look and feel.
What we did
We worked with the Natural History Museum team and their third party CMS/design providers, to integrate the shop into the Museum's existing framework. We achieved this by supplementing the Museum’s in situ systems with components from our own ecommerce software. Web Service technology enabled us to link the Museum’s disparate CRM, stock and ticketing databases so that shop sales, donations and e-tickets can be processed. We mapped user journeys and applied cross selling techniques to encourage movement back and forth between article pages and shop elements, so there’s always somewhere to go next.
The results
Our collaborative approach to the Natural History Museum’s ecommerce project has resulted in a shop that seamlessly integrates with the over-arching online and offline brand experience. In monetary terms the ecommerce store has been very successful, with the introduction of e-ticketing in April 2007 roughly quadrupling revenue compared to the previous year.