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August 22 2008
IR's Weekend Web Crawl: Take part in this week's tour of the latest ecommerce sites of interest
Join in with Internet Retailing's first ever Weekend Web Crawl, a chance to look around the latest sites that have been given a new look and, perhaps, find some inspiration...
For Internet Retailing's first Weekend Web Crawl, we're taking a look at six ecommerce sites, all of which have just undergone a redesign or upgrade.
The first stop is fashion retailer Oasis, whose website has been redesigned by marketing agency Story Worldwide in a bid to establish the brand as a fashion destination and to making the purchasing and checkout process easier. The site's features include a blog, called the Fashion Journal, which provides news from the worlds of fashion and travel.
"The new Oasis website reflects the sophistication of our customers, providing them with a well-designed, user friendly website, where they can browse at leisure or quickly and easily find what they need and place an order," Oasis' Julien Shirley told Brand Republic. What do you think?
Our second stop is at the newly upgraded site of academic bookshop Blackwell which, the company says, is phase one of a new digital strategy. The new site is designed to "deliver a more customer focused experience by drawing on the pleasure of buying and browsing in a bookshop and translating this into the site's navigational journeys."
A new affiliate programme has been launched and, says Blackwell's director of e-commerce Claire Zuurbier, "This refreshed presentation is just the first stage of a number of releases planned over the next twelve months. Forthcoming phases incorporate a variety of digital media and social networking tools but all will have the customer at the heart of the changes and will continue to maximise and reflect the multi-channelled nature of Blackwell's business."
Stop three is at HostelBookers.com, where the team has taken the low-cost concept of hostels and applied it to online video with a series of in-house produced videos that prove you don't have to bring in an expensive production team in order to add moving pictures to your site. Cleverly, HostelBookers has leveraged the distribution of its vids by also making them available on TripAdvisor.
Stop four stays within the travel sector, this time at Cheapflights.co.uk which, after 12 years in business, has undertaken a complete overhaul of both the front and back end of its website. The site retains its clear and simple looks but now includes new features such as more than 450 destination guides (produced in-house and exclusive to cheapflights.co.uk), detailed airline guides, enhanced search functions, hand-picked deals and new fare filters — by date (including by peak/off peak seasons and specific months), by price, by event (type in Beijing and pull up Olympics), and by supplier.
Also worth a gander this weekend if you haven't had a proper look before are the now launched Comet redesign and hmv's customer ratings and review features, designed by Code Computerlove.
Don't forget to let us know what you think by leaving us a comment and, if the site has a place where visitors can leave comments like Comet did a couple of weeks back, be sure to leave the retailer a comment on their site too.
Finally, if you'd like us to come and visit your site on the next tour, or you know of an ecommerce site undergoing interesting changes, simply email editor@internetretailing.net or leave a message in the comments section and we'll be sure to include details next time.
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