Charlotte Olympia updates online merchandising
By Retail Technology | Friday April 4 2014
New rich media content management capabilities enables well-heeled new online shop of designer retailer to showcase brand and enhance shopping experience
Charlotte Olympia, the luxury shoe and accessory designer, has overhauled its online presence with the help of the Amplience Adaptive Media Platform (AMP) to update its online merchandising.
The Amplience platform enabled the company’s small e-commerce team to create detailed, rich interactive e-commerce layouts and publish them to the site without technical training.
High-end design capabilities
“Using Amplience we can quickly and easily pull together animated carousels, interactive look books or creative inspirational content within an hour,” said Bruno Oghittu, e-commerce director at Charlotte Olympia.
“In contrast to the week or more it used to take when relying on external designers and coders, this saves our small team both time and expense when it comes to media production. At the same time we’re able to create a far more engaging experience for our customer that matches up to our playful brand image.”
Browsers navigate through the world of Charlotte Olympia from exclusive shoppable campaign imagery to showcase carousels of eye-catching designs and video, with elaborate product categories and listings. Editorial features such as ‘Caught in Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘Made in Italy’ – a short film celebrating the intricate craftsmanship behind the making of a modern classic Paloma – help drive customer engagement.
“We’ve been very pleased with the results,” added Oghittu. "Our feature 'Who’s wearing Charlotte Olympia,’ for example, has seen average engagement levels of 34% while conversion to product page has been up to 10%.”
The new merchandising capabilities have also enabled Charlotte Olympia to offer a more streamlined the customer journey. Browsers can use a ‘quick view’ of products or add directly to their bag from carousels, video or other editorial layouts. The adaptive templates have also allowed the retailer to integrate social channels such as Instagram into the homepage.
Engaging and attractive content
The new transactional store adapts to smartphone, tablet and desktop screen sizes and resolutions, while the imagery, animations and videos across the site are served ‘on the fly’ by Amplience Dynamic Media. This means that, instead of manually creating hundreds of different image variations for different uses on the site and across different channels, images and videos such as Charlotte Olympia’s ‘Made in Italy’ video on the homepage, are dynamically rendered on-demand from one master asset in a size and format appropriate for the requesting device. This approach improves search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking and supports the ability of the site to cope with increased traffic.
“Dynamic Media has transformed the speed at which we can create and deliver rich product content,” concluded Oghittu. “Using this solution has saved approximately 85% on image and video asset management time and cost. It also has enabled us to deliver campaigns more frequently than we could have done so in the past.”
