ShopPBS.com views site redesign through the eyes of its audience
Good retail web site redesigns are as much about function as they are about form. When ShopPBS.com, the business-to-consumer e-commerce unit of Public Broadcasting Service, decided to work with GSI Commerce Inc. to redesign its web site a top priority was developing new features that matched the needs of affluent older shoppers.
In some months ShopPBS.com receives up to 700,000 visits, particularly after PBS airs a much-anticipated program such as “The War,” a new documentary by Ken Burns. But on the old site, which PBS last redesigned in 2003, it took the organization’s core customers – affluent men and women 55 and older – too long to find products and make a purchase. If, for instance, a shopper wanted to search for a film on British drama the internal search engine would return all 360 titles in the ShopPBS.com inventory. “The old site search was confusing and one of the features we wanted to improve,” says PBS vice president of home entertainment and partnerships Andrea Downing.
ShopPBS.com, No. 368 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, was originally built in-house using Oracle hardware and software and later moved to a GSI platform. But by 2007 it was clear that ShopPBS.com needed better technology and improved features that would make it easier to showcase products and reduce the time it took shoppers to find a product. In conjunction with GSI, PBS marketing and merchandising managers spent eight months crafting a new design plan. Today the new design is reducing by 50% the time it takes visitors to locate a product and complete a purchase.
For instance, the new ShopPBS.com features parametric navigation and sorting, which filters video products by attributes such as price, production year, title and whether or not a program has already aired on PBS. This is particularly helpful when visitors want to see lists of videos only in DVD or only in the older VHS format, Downing says. PBS and GSI also introduced advanced shopping tools and product pages with more detail. Most product pages now feature advanced zoom, video clips and an e-mail a friend button. Other buttons let visitors and shoppers check on product availability and view previously purchased items and similar product recommendations.
A key priority before GSI developers even began making design changes to the web site was creating a new site taxonomy that classified all of PBS’ 4,500 SKUs into the right category. “We spent a lot of time making sure that what should be in the history category is now there,” Downing says.
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