Kernowcraft

Kernowcraft Rocks and Gems is a true generational passion, first established in 1967 by the current owners' grandparents. They supply high quality gemstones and jewellery-making supplies to students, hobbyists and professional jewellers. Expertise and knowledge, along with dedicated customer service, is at the heart of their success.

Kernowcraft.com was an early adopter of SelectCommerce, our custom e-commerce platform, launching on it in 2008. They had enjoyed several years of success, and were established as a leading supplier online, but technological advancements and changing customer expectations meant they had to transform to remain competitive.

Webselect and Kernowcraft collaborated to rebuild the site and templates addressing limitations, implementing new features, leveraging the platform's latest features, advances in UX and user journeys as their customer base has continued to grow.

Following Kernowcraft's huge success online, our team identified a number of performance and UX improvements. One of the main changes to their user journey evolved from the COVID pandemic, when they suddenly found their user demographic had shifted to include many more people who were just starting out in the hobby than it ever had before.

This led to the problem of users struggling to find the items appropriate to their level of skill and expertise from the vast array of products, beads, wires, stones, components and tooling available from Kernowcraft.

This difficulty meant users were having to work too hard to find what they needed, which was impacting potential sales. That gave a key objective of improving search and categorisation to help guide these new users to the products they needed.

We also improved aspects of returns, offers, the payment gateway and payment authorisation, all of which had been identified as bringing reduced overheads in administration, improved customer experience and stock management.

Updating the site templates also gave us the opportunity to modernise the website throughout, focusing on world-class performance optimisation, overcoming bottlenecks to ensure fast loading times for an improved browsing experience and to meet modern user expectations about how quickly pages should load. We also wanted to optimise the website to provide a higher-quality mobile experience, catering for the increasing number of users accessing the site through smartphones and tablets, which now makes up more than 70% of Kernowcraft's traffic.

We were able to bring our 25 years of experience in building high converting e-commerce websites to this project. Also, having worked closely with Kernowcraft for more than 10 years we have a deep understanding of their business and their pain points.

The rebuild of Kernowcraft.com on the SelectCommerce platform was executed through a structured process of assessment and planning. Led by a project manager, a dedicated and highly experienced team was wrapped around the project. We then conducted a comprehensive assessment of the existing website, including page weights, load times and mobile performance. This informed the planning phase, where the project objectives, timeline, and key deliverables were defined.

Collaborating closely with Kernowcraft, our design team developed a refreshed design that combined aesthetics with intuitive navigation. We used Baymard Institute research on best UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) practices to ensure conversion and engagement were maximised across devices.

Moving to the latest version of SelectCommerce involved upgrading the platform and carefully migrating existing data. This ensured that product information, customer records and order history seamlessly transitioned to the new environment.

Performance Optimisation: The website's performance was enhanced by implementing techniques such as image compression and code optimisation, leading to fast loading times and a smoother browsing experience.

The revamped Kernowcraft was then launched, with a carefully managed transition to protect existing SEO ranking and minimise disruption to staff and customers.