The Italian bookstore and publishing house La Feltrinelli built a strong reputation on the quality of its publications and the singularity of its in-store experience. Founded in Milan in 1954, the company plays a significant role in Italy’s cultural environment, and its brand has long been synonymous with a passion for literature. In an increasingly digital world, La Feltrinelli needed to translate its empire of ink and paper, brick and mortar, into the online sphere. They approached frog design to create an innovative, high-quality Internet shopping experience that was consistent with the history and positioning of the brand.
Bookstores house a multitude of pleasures: the new book found while browsing covers, the great recommendation offered by a shop clerk, the sign announcing an in-store reading by a favorite author. Yet at the same time, today’s customers carry a strong set of expectations for efficiency and ease, developed over years of Internet shopping. frog sought to incorporate all the idiosyncrasy and sense of discovery of the in-store experience within a new online space, encouraging users to browse, search, share recommendations, and – of course – to buy.
frog’s team marshaled a wealth of knowledge in e-commerce design to analyze potential interactions. We mapped the ideal customer journey, marked by four main stages – user entrance; browsing and searching; product details and selection; order completion and check-out – then identified the key elements at each stage and assimilated it all into a consistent experience flow.
frog united the experience of browsing and searching by presenting books, movies, and music within a consistent page structure, its layout dominated by the cover art of its merchandise: the warmest part of the shopping experience. The prominence of the covers replicates the feeling of strolling past bookshelves and avoids the undifferentiated strings of black and blue text too prevalent among online stores. Here, a beautiful book jacket still has the ability to startle and delight. The “search” and “browse” functions are uniquely unified: users sort merchandise through a system of filters and keywords, allowing for both precision and felicitous discovery.
Customers can also create bookshelves and write reviews to publicize their connoisseurship of literature, music, and film. By cataloguing the tastes of users, the site is able to offer increasingly targeted marketing in the form of personal recommendations, helping users discover new media that way. At the same time, it creates a community of users, an ecosystem in which customers swap titles and authors with the ease of a local gathering. The shop clerk is never without an interesting new title to suggest; the young reader never in short supply of recommendations.
The user’s shopping cart is always onscreen and can be easily edited without exiting the main page, preserving the narrative of shopping and preventing the “online-ness” from interrupting the pleasure of browsing. The purchasing path itself exists within a single page, eliminating the need to refresh or click through a labyrinth of separate sites. The result is an improved conversion rate: browsers more often become buyers.
A brick-and-mortar bookstore is more than a commercial space – it’s an established social forum. Many even have cafés. frog brought the same spirit of interaction to La Feltrinelli’s online store, laying the groundwork for expanded social functions in the future. Registered users can write reviews and rate products, add personal tags, and collect their favorite books, albums, and films on a bookshelf, fostering the ability to meet other users with similar tastes while nurturing the “long tail” effect; the contents of a bookshelf can also be exported to personal blog pages.
Like few other online bookstores, laFeltrinelli.it preserves a profound sense of connection with its physical counterpart. The membership program, which already has 1.5 million subscribers, is fully integrated into the website’s marketing and content structure; customers who have a Carta Più can log in at the site, and those without one can create a membership once there. And, for those customers who still want the real thing, a store locator, powered by Google maps, is right at hand.
