HMV E-Commerce Website Development

The Home of Entertainment Goes Digital

HMV is a long-standing British retailer that has been at the forefront of the music, film, and games industry for over 90 years. Taking its first major steps into e-commerce with a loyal following, HMV was looking to bring its in-store experience to the online market. We’ve brought the brand’s thousands of products online with best practice UX design and fast page load times to cope with huge levels of traffic across peak periods. Handling millions of pounds of orders, it’s essential that the e-commerce store offers a secure platform for users and can cater to the evolving needs of the business.

Encouraging Shoppers to Explore

In order to provide the best possible customer experience, simplicity is key in showcasing the store’s products. We’ve achieved this through a clean, uncluttered interface with hero imagery of striking album artwork and photography. Clear and prominent calls to action and navigation arrows are visible in the brand’s pink on the homepage slider encouraging users to navigate between slides and pages to engage with more products. We’ve developed an omnichannel experience by introducing Click and Collect, and enabling customers to collect loyalty HMV points online for consistency no matter where the customer interacts with the brand.

Speed Is of the Essence

Stocking over 18,000 CD, 3,000 vinyl, 16,000 DVD, and 5,000 Blu-ray products, the site is optimised to load the huge number of products quickly, with pages responding in less than two seconds. With almost 82,000 pages and 44,500 SKUs, Kentico offers an ideal, technically robust platform to cope with a site of this size whilst delivering great site speed and performance. Our Kentico E-Commerce Accelerator product provides enhanced functionality over the core Kentico product, enabling us to deliver the project faster and at a lower cost than our competitors.

There’s Only One Direction

The site deals with some huge peaks in traffic across periods including Black Friday and Christmas, so our team is always on hand to prepare and support. During Black Friday last year, the site seamlessly handled 2,500 users at the same time, demonstrating the site’s ability to cope with large volumes of traffic. Our favourite example of this is when One Direction unexpectedly tweeted their 29 million followers, directing them to the site with an exclusive release of their new album. Thanks lads!

Empowering the HMV Team

The site was developed to be as flexible as possible for the HMV team so that they can amend content simply via the easy-to-use CMS and keep the thousands of products and promotions up to date quickly and efficiently. We’ve optimised this functionality, enabling new content to be pulled from a third party feed, completely automated and categorised so that the client only needs to publish the content, saving time and administrative overheads.

Scoring Great Results

From a standing start, the website has delivered and is going from strength to strength. From October 2016 to February 2017 compared with the same period in the previous year the site has achieved:

• 67% Increase in transactions
• 76% Increase in revenue
• 69% Increase in basket size

Speeding Up

We identified opportunities to improve the page load time by speeding up the basket page and the caching process on the search page. Once implemented, we’ve seen fundamental improvements to user behaviour on these pages. The figures speak for themselves – we’ve seen a 38% drop in basket abandonment, a 17% increase in pages viewed, and a 1.23-second improvement in average page load speed.

Gaining Recognition

HMV has been delighted with the results and has since won an E-Commerce Award for Excellence in the ‘Best Electronics, Computing, DVD, Film, Games, Music & Toys eCommerce’ category in September 2016. The site has also won ‘Best E-Commerce Site’ and ‘Largest Site of the Year’ in the Kentico Site of the Year awards in March 2016.