Introducing Stanfords

Established in 1853, Stanfords is the UK’s leading specialist retailer of maps, travel books and other travel accessories. Their flagship store in Covent Garden, London, has been trading in its current location for more than a century and today carries the world’s largest stock of maps and travel books under one roof.

The challenge

As a leading authority on maps and travel books, Stanfords needed an online shopping experience to match their offline levels of expertise and service. With thousands of titles, Stanfords also required a sophisticated yet simple way to search their products. Other key aims were to substantially expand the volume of visitors to the site and to increase revenues by converting a higher percentage of visitors into customers.

What we did

To generate increased on-site revenue we began by building a search engine friendly website, using landing pages and editable META tags to increase traffic levels. Once on-site we provided visitors with an effective way of searching Stanfords’ catalogue, via a bespoke navigation tool. This tool allows for multiple combinations of search queries within the topics of destination, subject interest and type of product. With the product in the basket it was important to maximise conversion via a smooth and user-friendly checkout. We’ve also integrated email and promotional functionality to assist Stanfords in creating long-term rewarding relationships with loyal customers.

The results

Stanfords has an impressive basket conversion rate of 54.64 per cent (measurement taken from 1 January to 10 June 2008), and the company’s conversion of visitors to customers is 2.87 per cent (the industry average conversion rate being 2.1 per cent). This promising conversion rate has helped Stanfords to steadily increase its monthly turnover, while the site also reaches out to new audiences online.