New Site Improves Usability, Navigation for Beren Shoes

To compete in the modern online marketplace, Arthur Beren Shoes realized it needed certain Website functionality. While its site already allowed customers to shop by designer and style, as well as by size and width, “customer feedback and competitor research convinced us to seek additional functionality to support shopping by color and heel height,” says e-commerce manager Bruce McCurdy.

So the shoes cataloger/retailer redesigned its site using D.M.insite’s Mercury Platform. The revamped site, unveiled on June 15, uses uncluttered design with moving images and featured content prominently displayed on the home page.

The new platform “allowed us to create a multifaceted navigation system that provides our customers with the capacity to use all of these in combination, producing a display page that reflects each customer’s specific preferences,” McCurdy says. The faceted navigation allows customers to drill down to just the designers, styles, colors, heel-heights and sizes that they wish to see.

The Mercury Platform eliminates the dependency on traditional IT and e-commerce software providers who often provide rigid frameworks with little room for customization, McCurdy says.

The new site now allows customers to create accounts to facilitate order history and order tracking, McCurdy says. “These customer accounts allow our site visitors to log in and prepopulate the new one-page checkout page if they choose, but we retained the ability to shop ‘anonymously’ for those customers who did not wish to store their personal profiles in our system,” he says.

In either case, McCurdy notes, “we do not retain credit card data as part of our efforts to protect our customers’ privacy and financial security. Beren Shoes also added support for customer reviews and more detailed fitting advice to help enable shoppers to make informed purchase decisions, he adds.

Site navigation is significantly easier, McCurdy says, noting that the site’s structure was reevaluated to focus on the elements “most relevant and germane to our customers.” “This included elevating the site’s sale section to greater prominence, “and promoting our broad selection of shoes available in widths not often carried by our competitors,” he says.