For some time now, we’ve been promising you an overhaul to our AllTheAnime.com store front – we know it’s been a long time in coming, but we’re finally ready to launch our revised site (in good time for our Christmas Sale from 1st-12th December too), and we’re excited to share it with you!
The new site has now officially launched, so you can simply go and check it out for yourself, but if you’re interested in learning a little more about what’s changed then read on!
A little background
First up, it’s worth us talking briefly about how our online presence has changed over the years. Following the launch of our online store, for a few years our store was simply a sub-domain of the web site, with our blog serving as the front page. As our online store grew, so it ultimately shifted to become the mainstay of the site – visit AllTheAnime.com and our store is now the first thing you’ll reach, in keeping with the community’s wish to find our latest products as their first and foremost desire.
However, a lot has changed since then – we’re now putting a substantial number of films into cinemas, and we’ve launched our own music label to bring you great anime soundtracks on vinyl and digitally. Plus, AllTheAnime has now become a home that truly lives up to its name, with a huge range of anime products above and beyond those produced directly from us. And finally, usage of our store on mobile devices has continued to increase, making improved mobile useability one of the key tenets of our efforts.
Thus, it’s time to refresh what our site looks and feels like, and these are the goals and changes which have driven this refresh.
Discoverability
The most important thing to us is that you can find what you need on the site – whether it’s information, products, or maybe even something you don’t know that you want to know yet. Our new site is designed to address this with the following improvements:
Recommendations – having a perfect recommendation engine is the white whale of any online store, and it’ll never be perfect for a number of reasons, but our new store has an overhauled recommendation system to try and surface products that will be of the most interest to you, so if you’re looking to discover your new favourite anime we’ll do our best to show it to you.
Search – as per the above, we’ve also overhauled search functionality, so this should be both quicker, cleaner and more accurate. We’ve also switched up how we store some of the important data in our back-end to aid with this new search functionality and make it a more seamless part of the site as a whole.
Accurate information
We know that when you make a purchase with us, you want to be able to easily see what you’re buying – how much it costs, when it’s being released, and so on. Our new-look site also lets us create more information-rich product pages, which gives clearer information on whether a product is a pre-order, release dates, likely shipping times and so on.
Again, this is a work in progress as we find and refine use cases, but we’re aware that customers have often missed important messaging on product pages in the past and we fully expect our new product template system will allow us to mitigate these changes.
Hub pages
With our old site design, we could create a collection of products, but that isn’t really enough to convey everything important that we want to make clear, especially in an age where we’re handling and celebrating some of the biggest properties in anime. Thus, a primary desire for the new site was to create “hub pages” that can be a home to everything we’re doing around a particular title – for example, it might offer up all of the products we have on sale around a series or director, but also links to the soundtracks on Spotify, news of new releases, information and articles, and so on.
This element will be an on-going work in progress, but at the heart of the new store we can create rich, interesting pages that can play home to our great catalogue of content, regardless of its medium and format – you’ll be seeing these pages crop up and grow over time.
An update on shipping costs
With this update to the site, we’re also implementing one other major change to our store.
Ever since the launch of AllTheAnime.com as an online store we’ve offered free shipping for UK orders, but as I imagine any of you who have sent letters or parcels over the past couple of years will be aware, shipping costs have increased exponentially across all services and couriers in the UK.
While we’ve seen and absorbed multiple cost increases over this period, unfortunately the time has come where this simply isn’t sustainable, and as a result we’ve taken the difficult decision to implement shipping costs for UK and Ireland orders – this is now in place effective immediately, with a shipping cost of £3.50 applied to orders at checkout.
However, to minimise the impact of this, we’ve also implemented a policy where all UK and Ireland orders over £50 will qualify for free shipping – this will be available at all times (and not just during sale periods), and will be automatically applied at checkout.
It’s also worth mentioning at this point that our Anime (Un)Limited scheme will continue to be available, offering a 10% discount on all orders as part of our annual subscription – sign-up is still available to all of our customers here.
That just about covers everything that you need to know – we’d love to hear what you think about the new-look store, whether it’s what you like, what you think could be improved or any bugs or issues you encounter, reach out to us via all of the usual channels.
As ever, we have lots of exciting products in the pipeline, and of course you’ll be able to find all of them on our store in due course, so stay tuned through the remainder of this year and beyond!
