Tripling Silver Cross online turnover through continual experience improvement

Silver Cross is a British nursery brand known for its prams, pushchairs and nursery products. If there is one thing Silver Cross loves more than the products it makes, it is the mums and dads who buy them.

Origin worked with Silver Cross for more than a decade, continually improving every touchpoint on the customer's journey to purchase.

Silver Cross set out to become a major e-commerce player in the nursery sector. That meant a website that made it quick and easy for busy parents to find the right product, feel confident about it and buy without friction, on any device.

We started with the customer. Together with Silver Cross, we took apart the user experience of the website to understand what really mattered to its customers, which led to a rethink of the site's overall look, feel and design.

Rather than one big fix, we focused on the small details across the journey. Each improvement delivers a modest benefit on its own, but together they add up to a significantly better shopping experience.

Responsive, user-centred design. A redesigned site, built mobile-first, including editorial content such as 'The Edit' and supporting email campaigns.

AI search. Many customers arrive knowing what they need, such as a pushchair and car seat for a newborn or furniture for a toddler. Cludo's intelligent search uses machine learning to keep results relevant and gives the e-commerce team analytics on what people search for, including searches that return nothing. That shows demand for products customers expect but Silver Cross does not yet sell.

Social integration. Parents love sharing photos of their children. Integrating Photoslurp brings user-generated content onto the site through feeds, hashtags and social buttons, building loyalty and authenticity.

Frictionless checkout. Working with Loqate, we added type-ahead address capture so customers no longer face a long form. Addresses are verified at the point of purchase, so the data entering the CRM is accurate from day one and deliveries reach the right place first time. With a missed delivery costing around £17 on average, that is a real saving.

It all ran on our Umbraco CMS and a bespoke Microsoft CRM system, with the data used throughout the customer lifetime, from product registration to warranty and marketing.

Since its latest overhaul in Q4 2019, the Silver Cross site has tripled its turnover, and that was before lockdown. Conversion has soared on both desktop and mobile, pages load faster and checkout is quicker. Silver Cross became a top performer in the nursery sector online.

• Average checkout time reduced by 10 seconds