Following their acquisition by Sunrise Records in February 2019, hmv have been working with Ridgeway as their digital agency to upgrade their existing ecommerce solution and provide a more streamlined user journey.
The upgraded website went live in November 2019 in time for the peak season of Black Friday and the Christmas period.
Ridgeway has worked in partnership with hmv since 2015 when the home of entertainment launched its very first ecommerce store. The online store has gone from strength to strength with traffic, transactions and revenue are increasing year on year.
The new solution has been built in the latest version of Kentico, V12, which provides the team with enhanced features which have been carefully crafted to deliver content to users quickly.
Stocking over 61,000 products, the new platform is built using the latest tech stack which provides improved performance and reduced load times, with pages responding in less than 0.105 seconds. With over 80,000 pages Kentico offers hmv an ideal, technically robust platform to cope with a site of this size whilst delivering great site speed and performance.
In addition to the platform upgrade, hmv needed a more streamlined checkout journey, particularly for mobile users. The Ridgeway team have designed and built a faster checkout which shortens the journey from up to four to just two steps.
The new checkout also features a summary banner, a delete option and the ability to modify product quantity for a more user-friendly experience. A basket upsell feature has also been added displaying “Have you considered” products. This has been custom built and is based on the product catalogue data to encourage users to explore more products before purchase.
Black Friday is the busiest day of the year for the hmv team and this year was no exception. The site seamlessly handled over 150,000 users on the day itself with a peak of 1,440 concurrent users.
On average the site was handling over 6,000 users per hour and achieving an ecommerce conversion rate of 3.75%. The hmv solution is hosted with Microsoft Azure to ensure a flexible and functional solution allowing the site to manage these huge peaks in traffic with ease.
Terry Roffey, Retail and Ecommerce Applications Manager, says:
Performance plays a major role in our success. Having a high-performing site is vital to engage and retain our customers. The upgrade to Kentico V12 has meant we are able to provide the fast, smooth online experience our users expect.
Simon Cole, Managing Director, Ridgeway says:
It has been a pleasure working with the hmv team over the last 5 years and see their ecommerce site go from strength to strength. The latest version of Kentico will provide even more opportunity and the team are reaping the benefits already.
The hmv team will continue to work with Ridgeway on lots more exciting developments in 2020!
About Ridgeway
Ridgeway is an award-winning digital agency, building beautiful websites and providing impactful digital marketing services that drive commercial success.
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