Antykwariat Grochowski – 300% sales growth after a store redesign

Client

Antykwariat Grochowski

Antykwariat Grochowski is one of the largest and most respected antiquarian booksellers in Poland. Across 20 years in business it has won numerous awards, including Favorite Bookshop in Warsaw. Antykwariat Grochowski sells books above all, but its range also includes vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, paintings, engravings, prints, photographs, postcards, decorative pieces and assorted curios.

The challenges

1. Lifting conversion and making ad campaigns profitable by optimizing information architecture, the product page, the cart and checkout.

2. Holding conversion high as cold traffic grew.

The owner of Antykwariat Grochowski came to us with a low online sales problem. For some time he’d been watching the online store sell very little relative to the enormous potential of 60,000+ products, a strong brand and a highly recognizable brick-and-mortar shop.

The Antykwariat team had initially planned to scale sales by growing traffic and spending more on paid marketing. But low conversion made those campaigns unprofitable. As our initial analysis showed, a great many users landing on the Antykwariat Grochowski site left after a few seconds, never added to cart, or abandoned the order process.

The Antykwariat Grochowski team came to understand that their main goal should be finding out why users weren’t converting, then redesigning the store around what the research showed. Before raising ad spend, they had to start from the basics — plugging the holes conversion was leaking through.

What we did

Optimizing the store

Step 1. Research
We started work using our own conversion optimization methodology. The starting point was asking ourselves 3 key questions:

• Where are the biggest conversion problems? Which parts of the store leak conversion?
• Why is conversion leaking in those places?
• What specifically can we change in the store to solve these problems and lift conversion?

To answer those questions we ran in-depth research into the website, the brand and Antykwariat’s customers. It covered interviews with management and customer support, analysis of customer feedback, expert review and Google Analytics, plus other qualitative and quantitative studies.

The research identified problems with the clarity and readability of the design and copy, with value communication, with friction and with credibility.

Here’s what we learned:

• what matters to customers buying used books and records,
• how they search for and compare products,
• what concerns and doubts they have before buying,
• how visitors moved through the site and which elements helped them convert and which didn’t,
• how best to design the product page to maximize add-to-cart actions
• how to design the information architecture so users find the information they need easily and comfortably
• what needed adding to the new site to improve clarity, cut friction, communicate value better and build credibility.

Step 2. Design
After completing the research and documenting everything we’d learned, we decided to go with what’s called a radical redesign (even though in most cases, for existing online stores, we recommend an evolutionary redesign).

An evolutionary redesign is a process where you change your site’s appearance gradually and A/B test each change. Say you have an idea to add a countdown to the product page: “Order within X hours and we’ll ship today.” Before you commit that change to the site, you A/B test its effect on transactions, add-to-carts and so on. That way you have real proof that making that particular change is a good idea. Then you research and test the next one.

A radical redesign means reworking the site’s entire appearance without testing each change individually.

When do we recommend an evolutionary redesign?
When your current store works “well enough,” is profitable, and you have many returning customers who are used to the current interface.

When do we recommend a radical redesign?

• when your site’s current interface looks amateurish,
• when the research turned up a great many problems and conversion killers, but traffic to your store is so low that A/B testing every change would take years.

Antykwariat Grochowski faced that second problem. The research identified plenty of issues costing the client money, and testing each change reliably made no business or mathematical sense. A radical redesign was the right call here.

In the next steps we produced sketches and then wireframes with the final design of the Antykwariat Grochowski store, grounded in the research findings.

A word of caution here: radically reworking a store’s appearance often ends badly. We’ve spoken personally with many e-commerce owners whose sales fell after a revolutionary redesign. If you don’t have solid evidence that a radical change of appearance is right in your case, don’t make it.

Step 3. Build
Our developers then built the changes we’d designed, we ran quality assurance and switched the new store template over to live.

Growing site traffic

The store redesign noticeably improved the user experience and grew sales. Once we’d plugged the holes conversion was leaking through, the Antykwariat Grochowski store was ready to scale.

Antykwariat began gradually raising marketing budgets. Campaign profitability was very good, so we kept adding budget. At the same time we continuously monitored whether growing cold traffic stayed profitable.

Despite a substantial increase in cold traffic to the site, the conversion rate held at a markedly higher level than in previous years.

Results

Growth from 5,210 orders in 2022 to 16,286 in 2023

Year-over-year order comparison (we began working together at the end of 2022)

Sales growth since the redesign (we shipped the redesigned store template in January 2023)

Conversion rate up from 2.66% in 2022 to 2.92% in 2023, despite site traffic more than doubling

A word of caution.
The Antykwariat Grochowski case study is an exceptional instance of very fast growth. Growth that dramatic in 2023 came from a combination of store optimization and rising marketing budgets, together with high brand recognition and a very strong product offer.

Results like these would not have been achievable through conversion optimization alone, or through campaign optimization and bigger budgets alone.

Our problem had always been conversion optimization on a site whose design left a loooot to be desired. We tried improving the site’s ranking ourselves, but it never came to much.

Digispot has handled our site since the start of 2023. For laypeople like us it mattered that we understood, at least at a basic level, what had to be done to the site to make it convert better. Our questions were often trivial, and we always got thorough answers — and gradually we started to understand how all of it works.

Right at the start, Digispot improved the design of our store, which runs on Shoper. That alone, after one month of the new site being live, improved sales by tens of percent.

Once the site was optimized, we focused on growing traffic from paid campaigns. Digispot runs our Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns, and they feed into the store’s results very positively. A year after we started working together, online store revenue was up 300% — which probably speaks for itself. 

Working with Digispot is excellent above all because you get the impression nothing is impossible. For every problem that comes up they don’t just propose a solution, they build it themselves. Every week we get reports summarizing current matters. And if we need to, arranging a meeting or an online call is never a problem. 

Digispot handles our e-commerce end to end, so there’s a great deal we simply don’t have to worry about. I’d recommend them to anyone running an online store. They’ll certainly find things to improve that, under their care, will produce positive results — especially if you’re set on a long-term relationship.

Piotrek, Antykwariat Grochowski