Business owner Nicole Hines and her team were tired of answering the same customer questions over and over again.
She wanted to change her ecommerce store to make information more easily available for her customers and to free her team up to do other work.
Foldabox is a longtime ShopCreatify client, and we worked with Hines to do the redesign.
Redesigning a site takes a lot of work. Hines and Quintin Schnehage, the redesign project leader from ShopCreatify, both stressed how important it is to do it for the right reasons. A main goal of this redesign was to make the site more intuitive for customers. It aimed to answer their questions before they even asked them.
The updated site boasts a sleeker look and makes the most important product information more visible for its customers. On top of that, the back-end was updated to make it easier for Foldabox founder and managing director, Nicole Hines, to manage.
Foldabox, a luxury gift box ecommerce store, recently launched its redesigned website.
All Foldabox customers need to know the size of the boxes. Previously, this information was contained in the information tabs at the bottom of each product page. Diagrams with dimensions on them were included in the product photo albums. Despite this, Hines still received many queries about the box sizes.
To resolve this, ShopCreatify built a size calculator which is prominently displayed on each product page. Customers can easily see the dimensions of the outside and the inside of the boxes. They can also toggle between metric and imperial measurements depending on which they’re more comfortable with.
Foldabox' custom box size calculator that allows customers to choose metric or imperial or view a line drawing.
The redesign also included a notification on all product pages to give customers an indication of delivery turnaround time and additional services offered by Foldabox. Options like boxes with printing, logos, or customized closures are now easy to find and explore.
“All these tweaks have been incredibly valuable,” says Hines. “The secret to relaunching a website is to focus on what needs to be improved. It’s really important to focus your attention on what your customers are asking you. Because what I would change would be different to what the customer really needs to have answered. If you’ve got dozens of them asking exactly the same question, then that’s what you need to fix. The rest of it is all nice to have.”
At first glance, the newly launched site doesn’t look vastly different from the previous version. The logo has remained the same, and so has the color scheme. The site’s layout also looks similar. But the subtle changes to the design make the site look cleaner and more visually appealing.
Schnehage describes what he did: “If you hover over the images on the old site, they’re just a static block. There’s no real magic happening there. On the new site, there’s a zoom effect. It’s a bit more interactive and the titles are clearer. Overall, it’s more appealing for the user.”
Foldabox has both a UK and a USA site. The redesign was done on the UK site, and the US site will follow within the next year.
Another big part of the redesign was to update the site to a new theme. This makes it easier for Hines to make certain changes to the site herself, without the help of ShopCreatify’s developers. Schnehage explains: “Shopify’s theme editor used to be quite basic. But they’ve evolved and improved it to make it much more user friendly for merchants.
“Previously Nicole didn’t have much control over the content on the homepage and different sections. There was a lot throughout the site that was fairly custom. Whenever Nicole wanted to add a new feature or change something, she had to ask us to do the changes in the code.”
Now Hines can drag and drop sections, on the site’s back-end, to change the order that they appear on the homepage. She can also easily add new product ranges or color swatches by herself.
Although getting used to a new system takes time, Hines says she’s been very happy with how it's working.
“The management on the back-end is certainly easier. Luckily, Shopify is pretty intuitive. I find it quite easy to navigate the website, in terms of adding products and linking things.”
The Foldabox redesign was a collaborative effort. Hines knew what she wanted. But the ShopCreatify team had also made recommendations on what would make the site management easier and benefit business. Hines and Schnehage kept in contact with each other throughout the redesign process, which took a few months.
“What I’ve always enjoyed about ShopCreatify is the collaborative working arrangement,” says Hines. “It’s about putting ideas together and then finding the best solution. They’ve always been really good at coming back with something that works well. They are also mindful of what’s feasible within the theme and coding of Shopify.”
Schnehage says that ShopCreatify makes a point of understanding its clients and their businesses well before diving into big redesign projects. Hines finds this approach valuable.
“You need to work with somebody that understands what you’re trying to achieve and helps you get there. What ShopCreatify have done for our business has been absolutely key to our success,” she says.
Part of what makes this relationship work, says Hines, is that she gives the ShopCreatify team the time and space it needs to do good work. “You don’t take your car for a service and then tell the guy how to fix your car. Let people do what they do well.”
Schnehage says it’s important to ShopCreatify to empower its clients to do as much as they can themselves.
“We want to give our clients as much autonomy as possible. If they want to add a new collection of products to the site, they shouldn’t have to ask us to do it for them. Shopify is designed to be user- and merchant-friendly,” he says.
This means that Hines, who has a monthly service agreement with ShopCreatify, can use that time for more complex work. “If Nicole wants something that will require a lot of coding, development, or design work, or to do technical maintenance, she can use our time for that instead. We want to spend time on the things that are going to really make our clients’ lives easier and make them money."
This is the second redesign that ShopCreatify has done for Foldabox. The first one, in 2016, moved her site from a dated, custom front-end to a theme. The primary goal was to improve mobile responsiveness. After the store was relaunched, Foldabox UK’s revenue doubled, and Foldabox USA saw a nearly 200% increase in sales. Read more about the 2016 redesign and what Hines thought of it here.
It’s difficult to say what impact the most recent redesign has had for Foldabox on a business level. The new site only launched in September 2020. Foldabox’s volume of business has nearly tripled compared to the same time last year due to Covid-19, making it hard to gauge results.
“Because of Covid-19, nobody can make any sense of the figures,” says Hines. “It’s such an unprecedented scenario. Working backwards to see what conversions are doing and trying to make any sense of it, is almost impossible. It’s been completely skewed.”
The increase means that naturally, the business is receiving many more customer questions than usual. This makes it tricky to establish whether the changes to the site have answered common customer queries. “The number of calls about those common questions has decreased,” says Hines. “Every time we’ve relaunched the website, we’ve answered more and more potential queries.”
Despite having just been redesigned, Hines is already busy with new features for her store and has ideas for future changes.
She wants to improve the alt-tag information that appears when customers hover over images. This will allow customers to see descriptions of what accessories and color schemes have been used in product shots. Her and ShopCreatify are also busy updating the Foldabox printing app.
The redesign, like the 2016 one, has improved the site’s mobile responsiveness. This was done by improving the way images are uploaded to the site. Hines is always looking for new ways to improve mobile responsiveness given that more than half of the site’s traffic is from mobile devices.
She jokes that work on a website is never truly finished. “The notion that once a website launches with its revisions you can walk away for two years and put your feet up, is a fallacy. A website is a constant, ongoing evolution. There’s always something you can add, tweak, or improve. The job is never done.
“It’s like this never-baked cake. You never actually get to put the cherry on top because you’re always going back to improve the recipe!”
Get in touch with ShopCreatify if you need assistance in redesigning your Shopify site.
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