From physical mega-store to successful webshop

In 60 years, family-run business Obelink grew from a one-man business to Europe's largest camping and outdoor shop. With a shop area of no less than 72,500m2 full of tents, awnings and camping items, a visit to the shop is also a complete day out for many customers!  

Although Obelink's customers are spread throughout the Netherlands (some also come from Belgium and Germany), the centre of gravity was clearly around the shop in Winterswijk. The physical shop is a success, now to conquer the rest of the Netherlands and Europe.

Fun fact: some customers even come to the shop with the motorhome to spend the night and go shopping at Obelink the next day.

A digital strategy for the future

You can't conquer a market without ambition, and Obelink certainly has it: to be ahead of the competition within 7 years by keeping up with new technology and trends. And thereby also attracting a new market. 

But there was a challenge: 'digital' wasn't really in Obelink's DNA yet. So how do you achieve online success?

To realise these growth ambitions, Obelink knocked on Concept7's door. Together we drew up a plan to design a user-friendly webshop.

Three steps to a user-friendly web shop

We divided the project into three steps. First, a comprehensive strategy phase focusing on the customer's needs. Then we developed a prototype for the webshop, product configurator and blog pages. To conclude, we conducted user research on the product configurator.

1. Strategy: how do we support our customers online?

For Obelink, we visualised the strategy (both offline and online) in a strategy map. We summarised the user insights from the qualitative research we have created personas and a comprehensive klantreis. 

To gather insights for the strategy and customer journey, we conducted observations and in-depth interviews on location in the mega-store. While observing, we looked, for example, at whether visitors use smartphones in the purchase process. We also observed whether the three target groups defined actually visit the shop:

• starting families

• elderly people 60+

• young people 18 to 30 years

• .

We also interviewed some customers in the store to find out what their wishes and needs were in terms of digital. Among other things, we wanted to find out whether they had already used the web shop, what their expectations were of a web shop and what they encountered on the website.

The research clearly showed that Obelink customers see the physical shop mainly as a pleasant day out where they can feel and see the products. The webshop, on the other hand, they use to orientate and order.

The preference for shop or online for purchasing a product is related to the size of the product (large versus small) and the investment (expensive versus cheap).

2. The prototype: user experience and usability first 

On the e-commerce platform, Obelink ran into a few things:

• Filters and product options worked cumbersomely;

• The platform was not responsive, making management difficult;

• It was difficult to provide good advice on service and matching items.

So, how can we give different groups of customers, throughout the customer journey, a user-friendly and typical Obelink experience in the webshop?

How to find the right product in the webshop?

At Obelink, there are several products that are used in combination with another product. Think of awnings, canopies and side walls for caravans and motorhomes. This requires putting the products together in a configurator.

Putting these products together was complex and did not succeed for most customers without help from an Obelink employee. Staff are available in the physical shop, but there was no one on the webshop who could help immediately. 

The result? The configurator was not well understood and put people off. As a result, customers contacted customer service because they couldn't figure it out. Or they ordered the wrong product. And that's not good, of course.

As a solution, we developed a product configurator that we tested with users.

The new configurator guides the customer step by step to the right product based on his/her needs. In doing so, the user receives help with questions where necessary. At the same time, customers with an understanding of the products can always search independently.

Inspiring visitors and enhancing findability

To support the new webshop, we also designed a blog page and developed content strategy for Obelink.

With the blog, Obelink wants to inspire visitors with high-quality information. In this way, Obelink demonstrates its expertise and its online position is strengthened.

In doing so, we also defined a brand personality: 'Obelink as the helpful uncle who visits the campsite four times a year, knows you personally and gives you useful tips about camping'. Using the brand personality as a basis, we looked at how to optimally deploy content with Obelink's resources and people to address (potential) customers in the customer journey. With the goal:

• save costs

• generate more sales

• more repeat customers

• generate more leads

3. User research: How do customers experience the webshop?

Normally we do user research, such as eye tracking, at our office, for example in the UX lab. But to get the real Obelink feeling, we took all our equipment to the Achterhoek. For example, we carried out a eyetrack survey with customers in the store to test the user-friendliness and desirability of the new webshop and product configurator.

The survey found that the webshop and configurator were perceived as user-friendly by the respondents. They understood how to click through the webshop and configurator to find a product. 

On the other hand, we saw that the product texts were not always understandable. For example, confusion arose about the dimensions of awnings. On the product overview page, we found out that it was not clear to users that they can click on the arrow icon at 'Sort by'. Following these test results, we adjusted the design.

The configurator does not directly cause customers to buy something, but they come to the shop better prepared through this tool.