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Portaltech helps increase online revenue and transaction volumes, alongside over 33% increase in website visitors over 12 months

Portaltech helps increase online revenue and transaction volumes, alongside over 33% increase in website visitors over 12 months

 

The Post Office announced that it has worked with UK e-commerce systems integrator and consultancy, Portaltech to refresh and redesign its website.

 

The provider took the new website designs and translated them into HTML templates, implementing all the new coding that was required to ensure the website was easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate, simple, clean and engaging.

 

The Post Office provides a range of services to its customers, from mails and telephony, to travel money. More than 2.1 million people have been attracted to its financial services arm through a range of great value products including car and home insurance, savings, mortgages and a credit card. Many of the Post Office’s products are available through its website, as well as through its network of 12,000 branches – the largest retail network in the UK.

 

Updating website for current needs, future growth

 

Hema Maisuria, digital channels business manager at the Post Office, explained: “We want all of our customers to get everything they need, and more, from our website. A focus of the new design was to ensure we were as accessible as possible to our customers, and therefore able to meet all the future ways they may want do business with us. We have recently finished a yearlong project to completely refresh our website, www.postoffice.co.uk, to make it simple to use and easy to understand. We have also ensured that it is fully DDA [Disability Discrimination Act] compliant.”

 

The project was undertaken in several stages. The initial phase evaluated the existing information architecture and was undertaken via a card sorting exercise with several customer groups across all existing Post Office service categories. This resulted in re-categorising the Post Office’s products/services into seven subsets to make it simpler and easier for customers to find what they were looking for. A digital design agency was engaged to rework the core page templates and each design phase was tested with a range of customer groups. All of the content was rewritten and restructured to make it more accessible and easier to understand.

 

Changes have tangible impact on traffic

 

As a result of these changes The Post Office is enjoying impressive website visitor growth: In the 12 months to December 2009, there were 40.7 million visitors, of which 22.7 million were unique. This is a growth of 33% and 27% respectively compared to the same period in 2008. Monthly, the site is now attracting 3.2 million visitors, of which 2.2 million are unique, a growth of 11% for both. And both metrics have increased month on month between 20% - 29% since November 2008 – which was the start of several phased pushes of the new templates and content.

 

The website has also received Web Accessibility Accreditation (DDA compliancy) from the Shaw Trust.

 

Andrew Walker, Portaltech chief executive, commented: “It is impressive that 71% of the customers that were researched found the site visually appealing. We are proud that we can work with our customers to develop best-of-breed solutions to bring the best value and results to their businesses.”