Case Study: Independence

Independence Educational Publishers is dedicated to providing learning materials to help schools and colleges navigate the challenges of teaching Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) lessons. This is a crucial, and sometimes sensitive area of student development and Independence publications provide a wide-ranging and balanced resource to teachers.

Challenge

Independence had invested in a bespoke website many years ago and while this had provided a good return on investment, changes in online technology and also to the PSHE syllabus meant that it was a good time to renew the company site and online shop.

Over the years, guidelines on teaching PSHE had evolved from its inception as ‘life studies’ or ‘pastoral learning’ and the new Independence website, including its catalogue of publications, needed to reflect this.

Rather than replicating the catalogue of publications, a complete overhaul was required that aligned all of the Independence books with the themes and learning units that comprise the PSHE syllabus. This, along with a simpler sales journey were identified as key levers to increase book sales through the website.

Solution

By involving Realnet in the scoping process from the very beginning we were able to advise on the best options for navigating the catalogue in the most user-friendly way possible. Categories and sub-categories were used to group publications into themes and topics while product tags allowed more granular filtering by learning unit. A site search linked to products and categories was also implemented to provide a secondary means of searching the online bookshop.

With experience in both Shopify and the WordPress/WooCommerce platforms for delivering online shops, the client was able to select the option that best suited them in terms of stock, order and invoice management. The completed website was built using Shopify as this was perceived as offering more ‘out of the box’ features for managing payments against invoices, common practice among educational institutions such as schools, academies and colleges.

Ultimately, the website needed to improve book sales as well as promoting the online subscription model delivered by the sister website (Issues Online). Hand in hand with the PSHE-aligned catalogue restructuring was the need to provide information about Independence and their products (publications) in a straightforward with a clear and simple sales process.

Ecommerce and online marketplace integration

Ecommerce Website Design

SEO

Increase Sales

Increase Visitor Interaction

Results

The new Independence Educational Publishing website gives teachers and librarians an intuitive buying experience with a simple but effective means of selecting and purchasing the right publications for relevant parts of the PSHE programme.

Visit The Independence Website