Candy company Jelly Belly will relaunch its Web site this week, in a move to make the site more consumer friendly.
“This is a site that is much cleaner in look and feel than what we have today,” said Jason Marrone, e-commerce marketing manager for Jelly Belly.
The site was redesigned and rebuilt completely in-house, Marrone said. The project began six months ago and the company expects the site to go live the night of July 29, 2008.
Site improvements include guided navigation search. On the new site, users will be able to search by color, taste, container or price, Marrone said. “It gets the consumer to where he or she wants to be much faster,” he said of the new feature.
For example, one of the taste categories is “icky.”
“What comes up under ‘icky’ is some of our deliciously icky jelly bean flavors, such as skunk spray and baby wipes and ear wax,” Marrone said.
The company also took steps to better optimize the site by rewriting copy to use more of its key terms. URLs were also kept as short as possible, Marrone said.
To improve the buyer experience, Jelly Belly also added higher resolution product photos with “zoom-in” technology, Marrone said. With these improvements, the company decided to expand its “beanwear” merchandise and apparel on the site by 80%.
“You’re now able to zoom in and look at the fabric of a shirt or look at different views of an item,” he said.
In addition, the registration requirement to make a purchase has been eliminated. Based on Web site analytics, the company noticed that many potential customers tended to drop off at the point where they were asked to register, Marrone said. Without the registration requirement, the check out process will be much more streamlined, he added: “We anticipate that we’ll have a significant impact on conversion and our average order value or amount.”
