Winning an AVN Award for Best Retail Website doesn't mean you have to stand pat. Not for Adult DVD Empire, which has re-launched its site with a new design the company says is more customer-focused than ever.
The major change, the Empire said, was the overall structure and navigation, with the menu bar changed significantly, including new tabs like a Bargains tab to give customers one-click access to the Empire's bargain section; and, an Editorial tab, leading customers to all the Empire's reviews, articles, and more.
“We were faced with the problem of effectively communicating such a diverse product offering to customers," said Empire director of adult operations Mike Barry. "We offer so many different ways to buy adult products – DVDs, VHS, and sex toys, plus [Video-On-Demand] streams and downloads, DVD rental, used DVD sales and buyback, content Websites. Not to mention our wealth of editorial content – reviews, articles, interviews, and affiliate programs – that it becomes very difficult to clearly communicate that to the user within the normal boundaries of an ecommerce Website. So we did what we do best – re-invent the boundaries.”
Consider the item pages. They got a full overhaul, too, where an individual title can be bought in multiple formats and the new pages are layered in a way to organize all options for customers cleanly, said the Empire. Not to mention a brand-new layout for search returns which the Empire calls the Grid View: a user selecting it gets their search results shown as a grid of boxcovers rather than the standard line-by-line search return.
Marketing director J.T. Smith said the new site approach is letting the customers dictate the methods with which they are most comfortable using to get the product they want.
“We all sat down and talked about what we could that would make the majority of users feel good about shopping at our site, and the one thing we kept coming back to was that people know what they want but don’t always know how to get or what is available to them,” said Smith. “So we developed a homepage that allows the user to go directly to the products that most appeal to them, i.e. ‘What turns them on’. And that is the first thing you’ll see when you visit the new site – What turns you on?”
"We found ourselves at a point where we were no longer merely a DVD retailer," Barry said. "We needed a site that represented that idea."
