Calendar Club delivers improved customer experience and increases online sales with eCommerce solution from Maginus eCommerce

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Calendar Club delivers improved customer experience and increases online sales with eCommerce solution from Maginus eCommerce.

Calendarclub.co.uk launched in Autumn 2003 as part of the company's multi-channel retail business which includes mail order and high street shopping channels. Now, with over 2,700 titles in its range, it is Europe's biggest online calendar shop. Calendar Club supplies wall calendars, desk calendars, planners, diaries and annuals for every interest and occasion including top categories such as football, family, dogs, animals, models and humour.  The business prides itself as a company that offers a first class service both online and in-store.

 
Calendar Club is a Devon-based business that has been trading since 1998, supplying calendars, planners, diaries and annuals through its own website, www.CalendarClub.co.uk, and via Amazon and eBay market places, as well as in over 300 seasonal high street shops during the three month lead up to Christmas and over the New Year period.

Challenges

Calendar Club needed a new website to improve the customer journey and despite the business enjoying year on year growth, it needed a website that also supported its' longer term plans.
 
The company selected Maginus to build a new website in 2009 to help improve its customer service capabilities and expand its existing online offering.
 
Helen Winterbourne, Ecommerce Manager at Calendar Club said, "We needed a new website as our old site had poor usability as well as a lack of CMS control and flexibility. It also had limited SEO capabilities. We needed to address this so the site could match our own ambitions."

The solution

Calendar Club selected a new e-Commerce website from Maginus. The new website, originally designed and built by Maginus, helped to deliver an improved customer service offering and vastly improved SEO capabilities. Calendar Club were then able to successfully design the website as it is today owing to the flexibility of the Maginus platform.
 
Helen said, "We were attracted to Maginus' offering for a number of reasons: the product has the flexibility to allow us to change the site ourselves smoothly and quickly; it also has strong SEO capabilities such as friendly URLs and XML sitemaps; finally we can make use of shopping channels like Google Shopping to help drive more revenue."

Benefits

The Maginus solution has provided the business with a host of benefits.
 
Helen added, "The Maginus eCommerce solution provides us with much more control than our previous site, and we are now able to effectively manage the design, layout, content, merchandising and promotions in-house with ease.
 
The new website is very user friendly and as a result of this we have seen a reduction of 25% in customer enquiries coming in to our call centre. Customers can now search for specific products and view them using the Zoomify feature including close-up views of front and back covers for each calendar thereby simplifying and enhancing the customer experience.
 
We are looking to increase our online market share substantially over the next few years through further developments in social media and with a continued partnership with Maginus."
 
Helen continued, "We selected Maginus because of their previous eCommerce experience, their ability to meet our budget requirements, and the speed at which they could implement the solution. Another benefit Maginus provides is a user group where all Maginus customers using the eCommerce solution meet to share experiences and discuss potential improvements which Maginus then takes into consideration. We thought this was a great example of Maginus' commitment to its customers."
 
Calendar Club take full advantage of the strong SEO capabilities built in to the Maginus platform. The use of user defined page titles, meta tags, descriptions and friendly URLs has resulted in a rise of 150% in organic traffic and an increase of 27% in unique visitors. This has allowed Calendar Club to reduce PPC spend by up to 50%.  As a result of these improvements revenue from natural search has increased by over 70%.
 
Going forward the business wants to be able to look at click and collect, m-commerce, multivariate testing and further integration with other online shopping channels. Helen concluded, "Maginus is allowing us to provide a better service to our customers and provide the tools to help us take the business forward."