How Tech for Growth helped Bath business boost its online sales
The Silver Shop of Bath is one of the oldest independent, family run businesses in the city. Established in 1952, they sell a huge range of exquisite sterling silver jewellery and inspired gifts for every occasion.
The owner, Guy Douglas, is passionate about providing customers with high quality service and competitively priced products and they have a loyal customer base, being ideally situated in the centre of Bath, which also benefits from tourist traffic.
The business has always had a website, but online sales were low and represented a small part of their total income. However, they knew it was an area which had the potential to bring in more revenue, if they got their online presence right.
In the Summer of 2024 Guy’s wife Hannah, who helps to run the website for the business, applied for the Tech for Growth programme.
Hannah says “After I applied, I initially had a call with Lucy Paine from techSPARK about our website and where we felt we needed support. We were aware that some of the signposting wasn’t clear online and that we needed to make it easier for customers to find specific items of jewellery. I also knew I needed to maintain and update our SEO, but didn’t really understand how to do this”.
Lucy introduced The Silver Shop to Jenny Claxton from Red Spark Digital, who provided free digital support, funded by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority. Jenny started working with The Silver Shop in September 2024, and with Christmas looming, it was a priority to make the website as efficient as possible to boost Christmas online sales. Hannah had initially wanted to focus on SEO, but Red Spark Digital carried out a website audit, which flagged that the biggest issue was converting traffic into sales.
Hannah explains, “Jenny found that the site was performing quite well on SEO and acquiring traffic, with just a few minor issues to tidy up, but that it was converting the traffic into sales which was a bigger priority. The site analytics put the conversion rate at 1.48% which is below the ecommerce average of 2.5%, so it was clear that there was an opportunity for us to improve this.”
Hannah continues, “Jenny suggested that instead of in-depth SEO, we use the bulk of the time to work on fine-tuning the user experience around products, buying and checkout. I could see that this new plan would still help us move towards our aims of more online sales, so I was happy to adjust the scope of the project.”
Over the course of the fully funded support, Jenny worked on improving the user experience journey on the Silver Shop business website. She helped them to create a mega-menu, to make it more straightforward for customers to find what they were looking for. Time was spent optimising the SEO, as well as making some other small but significant changes, ranging from removing large photos which were slowing the website down, to implementing custom meta extracts to improve site rankings.
Hannah finishes, “Fast forward four months, since the website went live with Jenny’s changes, we have had a 45% increase in online sales, which is incredible! Not only that, but our conversion rate, which was 1.48%, is now 2.88%, which is well above the ecommerce average of 2.5%. We are hugely grateful to Tech for Growth and the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority for the support we have had, and to Red Spark Digital for the difference Jenny has made to our business.”
The owner, Guy Douglas, is passionate about providing customers with high quality service and competitively priced products and they have a loyal customer base, being ideally situated in the centre of Bath, which also benefits from tourist traffic.
The business has always had a website, but online sales were low and represented a small part of their total income. However, they knew it was an area which had the potential to bring in more revenue, if they got their online presence right.
In the Summer of 2024 Guy’s wife Hannah, who helps to run the website for the business, applied for the Tech for Growth programme.
Hannah says “After I applied, I initially had a call with Lucy Paine from techSPARK about our website and where we felt we needed support. We were aware that some of the signposting wasn’t clear online and that we needed to make it easier for customers to find specific items of jewellery. I also knew I needed to maintain and update our SEO, but didn’t really understand how to do this”.
Lucy introduced The Silver Shop to Jenny Claxton from Red Spark Digital, who provided free digital support, funded by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority. Jenny started working with The Silver Shop in September 2024, and with Christmas looming, it was a priority to make the website as efficient as possible to boost Christmas online sales. Hannah had initially wanted to focus on SEO, but Red Spark Digital carried out a website audit, which flagged that the biggest issue was converting traffic into sales.
Hannah explains, “Jenny found that the site was performing quite well on SEO and acquiring traffic, with just a few minor issues to tidy up, but that it was converting the traffic into sales which was a bigger priority. The site analytics put the conversion rate at 1.48% which is below the ecommerce average of 2.5%, so it was clear that there was an opportunity for us to improve this.”
Hannah continues, “Jenny suggested that instead of in-depth SEO, we use the bulk of the time to work on fine-tuning the user experience around products, buying and checkout. I could see that this new plan would still help us move towards our aims of more online sales, so I was happy to adjust the scope of the project.”
Over the course of the fully funded support, Jenny worked on improving the user experience journey on the Silver Shop business website. She helped them to create a mega-menu, to make it more straightforward for customers to find what they were looking for. Time was spent optimising the SEO, as well as making some other small but significant changes, ranging from removing large photos which were slowing the website down, to implementing custom meta extracts to improve site rankings.
Hannah finishes, “Fast forward four months, since the website went live with Jenny’s changes, we have had a 45% increase in online sales, which is incredible! Not only that, but our conversion rate, which was 1.48%, is now 2.88%, which is well above the ecommerce average of 2.5%. We are hugely grateful to Tech for Growth and the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority for the support we have had, and to Red Spark Digital for the difference Jenny has made to our business.”
Tech for Growth is a West of England Mayoral Combined Authority initiative, delivered in partnership with Business West and techSPARK to help SMEs in the region adopt new technologies and improve digital practices to improve productivity and sales. The West of England Growth Hub is the West of England Mayoral Combined Authorities' SME business growth support service.