Burkes Outlet upgrades to increased conversions & scalable multi-site solution
Burkes Outlet
Brandenton, Florida
Clothing Store
Introduction
Burkes Outlet, a privately held retailer owned by Bealls, Inc., had an Optimizely eCommerce website that wasn't achieving its desired results. The site had high bounce rates, low conversion rates, speed issues, many site processes were manual, and Bealls needed to launch new digital commerce websites for their other brands.
Solution
To increase online revenue, reduce operational costs, and ensure ongoing support, maintenance, and enhancements, Burkes Outlet sought a trusted Optimizely partner and selected Luminos Labs to provide resources and guidance to their internal marketing and technology teams. A full audit of the website allowed them to prioritize and quickly remediate some of the smaller issues, immediately improving the website experience for customers.
“Since partnering with Luminos, their team has completely knocked out our list of bugs and even found some great things we could do to enhance our website – getting us some quick wins by going after the low-hanging fruit.”
Quick Improvements
Performance Enhancements
The Burkes Outlet website immediately fixed inventory processes, refactored code, cached specific data in the shopping cart, and improved the Mini Bag / Mini Cart load times.
User Experience
The website was updated to include content personalization using GEO-IP and user experience notifications (ex: the site notifies visitors when accessing external systems to reduce the bounce rate). Bealls also improved click-throughs to the Product Detail Page (PDP) from Product Name and Brand Name links throughout the site.
Legacy Site Issues
Burkes fixed the Tax Calculation and Fixed Payment gateway time-out errors, and the solution was migrated from Everweb hosting to DXC hosting, making the necessary changes to support Azure.
User Notifications
When a product is in low stock, the last remaining item, or if the site removes a product from the cart due to selling out, a user will receive a notification. After this implementation, Bealls saw an increase in sales in particularly driving demand for low stock products.
Product Widgets
The Burkes Outlet website utilized Episerver Find to create product widgets that provide enhanced personalization. The site displays recently viewed products (PDP/Top Categories), related products (PDP), and recently removed products (Shopping Cart) to returning visitors. Users can also filter products by predefined properties (color, brand, price, etc.). The Burkes team can easily edit the product data, and select the types of products to prioritize (new arrivals, now trending (based on the sold number), clearance, regular product).
Loyalty Feature
The Burkes Outlet website uses a loyalty system where visitors can earn points and rewards based on spending online or in-store. Users who join the loyalty program can view their points and rewards in a My Account Loyalty Dashboard, and when checking out, members can select to apply their points to purchase for a discount.
Multi-Site Capabilities
When the project started, the only eCommerce website Bealls had live was burkesoutlet.com. Their updated solution now supports a Multi-site CMS that allowed Bealls to scale to its other brands. Now they have three separate sites that share similar CMS and My Account pages with Burkes Outlet.
Beallsoutlet.com
Homecentric.com
Bunulu.com
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
The website was updated to be CCPA-compliant, transparent with consumers about the personal information they collect and how they use it.
All visitors will have a CCPA policy cookie banner displayed in locations the law is applicable. The system also keeps track of the privacy policy content's version number (if a user returns to the website and already accepted the policy, no banner will be displayed unless there is a new version of the privacy policy). It provides a Personal Information Request where users can request to Know or to Delete data. This information is sent to a Bealls internal API to manage the requests (will manually send an email to the customer to confirm they have made that request).
The website has a custom CCPA admin tool used to manage the requests. For a "Know" request, a document is returned to the user with the data found (a predefined document template with predefined user data). For a "Delete" request, all the data associated with the user is deleted, and receive a notification of the removal.
Results
Since the project launched, BurkesOutlet.com has seen very positive results, including:
Increased conversion rates
Increased revenue through mobile devices
Decreased bounce rate
Reduced maintenance expense
The new website provides a better customer experience (Cart, Checkout, and Loyalty), content personalization using GEO-IP, user notifications, and the CMS framework scaled to multiple sites. Burkes Outlet continues to work with Luminos Labs to optimize their digital commerce experiences.