Calendar Club Ecommerce Case Study

Retail & Omni-channel ecommerce for this leading gift provider.

Calendar Club specialises in retailing calendars, diaries, planners and gifts during the busy Christmas shopping season. With roughly 1,100 titles and an extended range of over 6,500 products online, they are the largest retailer of dated product in the UK. Their shops and mall units have been a common sight in shopping centres and high streets across the UK and Ireland from the end of September to mid-January since 1998 and they've been online since 2003.

"The platform is more stable than our old one, and it is managed, so it takes the support pressure off our development and IT teams. It has more functionality than our old platform so should increase sales. I think it has given us a very good base to do further development on as and when we need to."

Ecommerce & Operations Director, Calendar Club

Project Highlights

Hosting
Fully hosted solution with infrastructure designed to cope with huge increases in the volume of site traffic and orders at certain times of the year, due to the seasonal nature of their business
Sophisticated Search
Sophisticated site-search capabilities through Elasticsearch including custom configuration and additional metric enhancements based on customer-tested scenarios
Click & Collect
Collect & Collect from between 200-300 stores. As a seasonal business, many of the stores are pop-ups, but they can easily turn that fulfilment option off to certain stores and at certain times of the year
MOTO/Call Centre
Built-in call centre allows admin users to setup/view customer accounts and process orders on their behalf, as well as aiding customer service to provide online support. Also features enhanced customer search and postcode look-up
Seamless Integrations
Seamless integrations with numerous third-party systems including their bespoke ERP, Trust Payments (including PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, & PCI-PAL), Ometria, Feefo, Loqate, Royal Mail, HotJar, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager & Google Analytics
Local Collection
Additional, Local Collect fulfilment option enables users to pick up orders from any Post Office branch or Royal Mail Customer Service Point in the country
Advanced Promotions
More advanced promotions engine than their previous platform enables them to configure new bundle and offer types to drive up AOV and conversions
Redirects
Redirects automatically set up from last year's calendars to current versions, helping conversions and avoiding bounces
Content Management
Advanced content management giving them complete control over content, including navigation, with more dynamic and personalised elements

Project Integrations

Project Overview

Having traded online since 2003, Calendar Club have a well-established ecommerce operation alongside their stores. As the stores are seasonal, the website is their sole order driver throughout a large part of the year - people still want to buy calendars in the middle of the year believe it or not! Also, now their range has expanded to include gift lines such as stationery, mugs, socks and more, there is demand for non-dated products any way, making ecommerce primary to their business.

Replatforming

With an online presence now spanning twenty years, Calendar Club have moved between various different platforms over the years before settling on an enterprise system a while ago. Despite being billed as an enterprise solution (complete with the enterprise price tag), things were not as they expected. The platform was restrictive, functionality was lacking (basic promotions engine, a lack of flexibility for creating content, no recently viewed items, wishlists or refer a friend, no scheduled updates, no Apple Pay), the site was fragmented, and it left them feeling rather underwhelmed and frustrated.

Once the pandemic hit and the site became their only sales channel it underlined the issues even more. The decision was taken to replatform as it was no longer a case of 'making do', the website was too important to their revenue. They chose to replatform to tradeit as they liked the platform, the price, the timelines, and the 'feel' of the company. They also liked that the platform was well established, constantly upgraded and maintained.

Traffic Spikes

Due to the nature of their business, and the fact it is highly seasonal, Calendar Club experience an intense peak season where site traffic spikes aggressively and orders can reach almost 12,000 a day. That meant that both the platform and the hosting infrastructure needed to be extremely stable and able to scale.

Search

Being able to find what you are looking for is a standard user requirement across any site but, given their product range, was especially important to Calendar Club. As a result, Elasticsearch was configured for on-site search, whilst special attention was paid to redirects so last year's calendar pages would automatically redirect to this year's versions of the same thing.

Resources

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

CALENDAR CLUB

SOLUTIONS DATASHEET

RETAIL ECOMMERCE

SOLUTIONS DATASHEET

OMNI-CHANNEL RETAIL

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