About The Project
While most agencies wouldn’t be as excited to take on a project in the automotive industry that is a e-commerce site, we were enthusiastic to get to work with such a project. This client was in an industry that didn’t receive much attention to information design, product beauty or relationship care that we were proud to bring to the industry.
Scope
Our List of objectives were rather simple. Create a site that clearly communicated product advantages and product variety, connect with consumers in a personable way, and create a site that stands a head above the rest in the same competitive category.
Challenges
There were numerous challenges associated with this project that were both unique to the business model and fun to think through. We were fortunate enough to have a limited, narrowed product list that the client wanted to manage, though we did not have a ready-to-go database of product information to pull from, so we were instructed to pull from the main manufacturer’s site for details, names, photos and other product attributes. The other challenge was that the client wanted to manage their entire list and still be able to link directly to the manufacturer to fulfill the order, maintain the product pricing, and provide the technical information so that the client could focus on having his site easy to maintain. Another challenge was to stand above the rest in the competitive category, but still connect with the same technical-minded people that tend to purchase the performance products.
Results
After a survey of the client’s competitors, we realized that where we could stand out above the rest was to use the client’s years of experience, knowledge, and insight to help make the site a resource of trade information while still organizing the technical details of the product and helping to better communicate each products unique features. We did a lot of information design throughout the site to help make communication to the consumer much easier to read, follow and digest no matter what technical level they were at. We incorporated social avenues and knowledge sharing features to help the client’s experience come through and help guide customers down the right, insightful path. We implemented a blog to allow the client to share their experience and give basic how-to articles about common vehicular maintenance, and included a car maintenance tips section to share the client’s broad knowledge. We were able to utilize twitter as an avenue for customers to follow to get updates on the newest how-to articles, new products offered, and general tips as the client published more and more.
