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A successful website redesign is no simple process. Building an ecommerce website for a brand beloved for its personalized service is a new challenge altogether.
The Original Mattress Factory is a regional manufacturer and retailer of mattresses and box springs. Since opening its first location in Cleveland, Ohio back in June 1990, the company has followed a simple mission: “Great Beds. No Bull.” This dedication to thoughtfully made, honestly priced products has earned The Original Mattress Factory numerous lifetime customers throughout the regions they operate in.
Of course, all those fans need somewhere to go for their mattresses and box springs. As companies like Casper and Purple drove more of the mattress market to the internet, it was time for The Original Mattress Factory to give consumers a place to find their products online. That’s when the company turned to Aztek to help them enter the ecommerce world.
The Original Mattress Factory had a few key challenges for their new website.
The Original Mattress Factory prides itself on courteous, friendly, and knowledgeable customer service. Why should their website be any different?
It was critical that the Original Mattress Factory’s website comes as close to their in-store experience as possible. To do that, we had to focus on a few key goals.
For decades, The Original Mattress Factory has strived to be as friendly, honest, and transparent as possible. A big part of that process is educating customers about the products they buy.
Appropriately, The Original Mattress Factory had a lot of valuable content on its old website. However, this educational material needed to be organized in a way to make everything functional, easy to use, and easy to navigate.
Our team developed a navigation structure that focused on key educational hubs – Mattress 101, Care & Maintenance, and Our Story. Each of those main navigation items gave users a clear way to navigate this information and learn about the mattress buying process, flip reminders, and other valuable topics. In addition, we built in site search to provide another way for users to find the information they need to make their purchasing decisions.
When The Original Mattress Factory opened its first location, customers could finally see how their mattresses were made with their own eyes. It’s really important that Original Mattress Factory customers can see what they were paying for inside and out, so it was essential that the new website was able to show how each mattress is constructed.
If you go to a physical store, The Original Mattress Factory has mattresses that are cut in half on display. We wanted to have a similar experience online, so each product image has an exploded view so that people can see what’s inside the mattresses and box springs. These additions allowed The Original Mattress Factory to be as transparent as possible and true to their values.
The Original Mattress Factory doesn’t want to sell you any mattress, they want to sell you the right mattress. As such, it was important to provide users with a product filtering system so that they could tailor their mattress search around their exact needs.
The Original Mattress Factory’s product filtering required a high degree of customization. Users have several different attributes they can use to filter products, and each one behaves a little differently. Aztek was able to customize many of the product detail pages to fit The Original Mattress Factory’s business logic and give users the tools they need to find the perfect products for them.
While an ecommerce site was a natural evolution for The Original Mattress Factory, the in-store experience is still a major part of the business.
We still wanted users to head to one of the company’s 12 factories and 100-plus showrooms across the country if possible. That’s why we included notable calls-to-action on every page to help users find a store near them. Now users could choose for themselves if they wanted to go through the in-store experience themselves or place an order without ever leaving their home.
One of the major challenges associated with building an ecommerce website is merging online best practices with a company’s existing business rules. Simply put, it’s not easy to build an ecommerce website for a business with established, custom business logic.
The Original Mattress Factory had several specific business rules that just wouldn’t mesh with an out-of-the-box ecommerce solution. Fortunately, Aztek prides itself on working with companies to understand their custom business rules and workflows.
This level of expertise allowed us to build a custom ecommerce website that allows The Original Mattress Factory to blend those specific business rules with online best practices. To do this, we addressed some key areas involving their existing ERP and business processes.
It’s important not to forget about your old customers when you develop a new website. The Original Mattress Factory had tens of thousands of customers in their systems that would regularly receive flip reminders, sweepstakes forms, and other valuable information.
In order to keep these existing customers engaged, we laid out the landscape of everything that needed to be brought over during the redesign. For example, we tied flip reminders to an email system to keep customers regularly updated about their existing mattresses.
We worked with The Original Mattress Factory to identify additional touchpoints and features that would be carried over to the new site. This way, they could retain any custom business rules that would impact their existing customer base so that they wouldn’t lose past customers.
While addressing old customers’ needs was one piece of the puzzle, creating a seamless ordering experience was another. Arguably the most complicated part of building an ecommerce website is handling what happens when a customer is ready to convert their cart into an order.
Ecommerce is not just about taking an order – it involves everything that happens during and after a customer makes a purchase. From the development side, the biggest challenge was merging their physical store procedures with ecommerce best practices. These processes include planning around:
To create a custom solution that works for The Original Mattress Factory, we worked with their sales team, accountants, ERP developer, shipping team, and other experts. The order conversion process impacts multiple aspects of a business, so we had to ensure the physical and digital parts of their sales process functioned properly after an online sale.
Perhaps the trickiest part of this puzzle was addressing a complex shipping situation in an ecommerce setting. Mattresses and box springs are large items – you can’t just place them in a box and send them to the post office. The Original Mattress Factory needs certain information during the checkout process to appropriately calculate tax, determine which factory would serve the customer, and identify delivery methods.
Aztek’s solution was to build an entirely custom module around these shipping needs. We customized the cart and the checkout process to accommodate the geographically based nature of shipping calculations. These adjustments allow The Original Mattress Factory to provide shipping quotes quickly and accurately for excited buyers.
The Original Mattress Factory’s ecommerce website also needed to address some key post-order touchpoints. These touchpoints provide buyers with important updates for their orders – what to expect when you place an order, when it gets scheduled for delivery, etc.
Aztek worked with The Original Mattress Factory to ensure that these custom touchpoints were baked into the ecommerce website. Every time an order changes status, The Original Mattress Factory can send out important updates to keep buyers informed about their orders. The system will also trigger a survey email that will go out a week later. These extra touchpoints just add another layer of attention and detail to a company with a reputation for great customer service.
Going into the website redesign process, The Original Mattress Factory knew it needed to tap into a new market. With a stunning new ecommerce website from Aztek, that’s exactly what The Original Mattress Factory did.
In the past, the Original Mattress Factory served a hyperlocal audience based around their 12 locations. The new website allowed them to expand that audience to not only reach new customers, but also past buyers who moved away from The Original Mattress Factory’s regional reach.
Since the completion of the redesign, The Original Mattress Factory’s website traffic has more than doubled. This growth was made possible because Aztek focused on building a site that focused on creating a great user experience. By maximizing the company’s existing educational content and building a quick-loading site to support it, more users were able to find The Original Mattress Factory in new markets.
Another major benefit of building an ecommerce website is that it enables a brand-new way to sell products. More than two years ago, The Original Mattress Factory had no ecommerce presence. This new sales channel is now a reliable part of their business.
Even more importantly, ecommerce sales have steadily increased since the site first launched and is now a significant portion of the company’s overall business. The new website has not only already paid for itself many times over, but also provides an increasingly bright future for The Original Mattress Factory’s online efforts.
One critical result was one that The Original Mattress Factory couldn’t have foreseen – providing the company with an avenue for sales during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While regional fans of The Original Mattress Factory will largely head to stores to experience the mattresses in person, that wasn’t always possible in 2020. The ecommerce site gave the company a means to still serve their customers when physical locations were temporarily closed.
Just because a new site has launched doesn’t mean the work is over. Maintaining a website is a never-ending task, especially for a business that hadn’t focused on ecommerce for nearly three decades.
Between ongoing changes to online best practices to identifying new opportunities to bring the in-store experience online, Aztek continues to work with the Original Mattress Factory on ways to improve the website.
“It’s definitely become a partnership at this point,” says Colleen McCarthy Branche, Digital Marketing Manager at The Original Mattress Factory. “Aztek has been easy to work with and I always appreciate their expertise on how websites work and how to make improvements. They understand our business, which is good because we’re not like a lot of other businesses or retailers. They get who we are and what we need from them.”
Making the move to ecommerce is a complicated process. We’re able to understand your custom business rules and workflows so that we can deliver an ecommerce site that’s built for your exact need. Contact us today to work with a company that can help you make the jump to ecommerce.
