Playing with technology in the digital age

CLIENT

 The National Theatre

INDUSTRY

Hospitality

CAPABILITIES

Magento Implementation
Custom Interface Design
Catalogue Migration
Print-on-Demand Services

VISIT STORE
Modernising the National’s bookstore by adopting a new platform to enhance visitor’s online shopping experience.
Consumers expect brands today to deliver a modern digital experience so they can shop whenever they want, wherever they want, using whichever device they want. To refresh the National’s online bookshop we deployed a Magento cloud-based solution to offer online visitors a fast, polished user experience on the device of their choice.

REFRESHINGING THE NATIONAL’S ONLINE BOOKSTORE

The Royal National Theatre located on London’s South Bank was founded in 1976 to make entertaining, challenging and inspiring theatre accessible to the general public. It is one of the UK’s most prestigious publicly funded arts venues, welcoming over 750,000 visitors to more than 30 shows each year, from re-imagined classics to modern masterpieces and contemporary works by up-and-coming writers.

The company also tours extensively throughout the UK in collaborations and co-productions with partners across the country.

While the National Theatre generates the majority of its income from ticket sales for shows and learning programmes, their online bookstore needed to be refreshed to address trends in mobile behaviour and ensure their ecommerce platform supported the company’s development goals.

FLEXIBILITY IN A FULLY RESPONSIVE STORE FORMAT

To give the new online bookstore a fresh look, we developed a responsive design, enabling shoppers to buy a wide range of merchandise from books to playscripts to prints, gifts, stationery and clothing using a device of their own choice.

We worked with the National Theatre’s team to migrate their catalogue over to the new Magento platform, and created a bespoke product creation template in their admin panel to reduce the amount of fields and time taken to publish new products. This feature also enables attributes such as variations in size and colour to be mapped easily across products.

We also created an interface to help staff to manage category showcase and landing pages, designed to work alongside Magento’s inventory and order management controls.

INTEGRATING PRINT-ON-DEMAND SERVICES

The National Theatre has offered ‘print-on-demand’ services for fine art prints and posters from their archive to customers in collaboration with King & McGaw for some years, but the ordering system required manual input from a member of the National‘s team.

We made a wider selection of prints available to consumers, and automated the fulfilment and delivery process by creating an order feed which pushed purchasing data to King & McGaw’s fulfilment team for processing.

We also created a customised category landing page on the new Magento site, enabling visitors to quickly navigate to the most popular prints from a range of over 600 designs. Purchases could then be added to the shopper’s basket at checkout along with other goods selected from the online store.

A NEW BOOKSTORE AT THE HEART OF THE THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE

247 Commerce has successfully enabled the National Theatre to offer a modern ecommerce exerience to online shoppers using the digital device of their choice.

Powered by Magento, the National Theatre’s new bookshop provides a stylish and seamless shopping experience for patrons, and a polished user interface for staff who now exercise a high level of control over the National’s ecommerce operations.

Visitors can purchase merchandise from the National’s shop using any digital device, as well as order high-quality framed or unframed artwork tailored to their personal specifications.