The Snug Books - Ecommerce Website
Based in the beautiful village of Olney, Buckinghamshire, is a tiny new bookshop called The Snug. This shop, and a ‘book bus’ called Grace, is owned by our lovely client Rose who is on a mission to bring children’s literature to life.
We’d already worked with Rose to launch Grace the Bookbus - a cherry red mini bus that visits local villages and schools giving children a space to relax, read and learn. The Snug shop gave Rose a more permanent base, but she wanted to set up an online shop for customers to access her children’s books far and wide.
It couldn’t have been timed more perfectly given the lockdown, as The Snug and Grace the Bookbus was on hold making this the only portal to access to the books.
The Squarespace Ecommerce platform has all the facilities needed for an online shop, such as inventory control, payment plug ins and service emails. It also has a beautiful and flexible front end, which meant that the shop can have a look and feel that worked for the client, and also still display information about the physical shop and the bookbus.
Design-wise, the site needed to be vibrant, happy and inviting. We delivered this through a rainbow colour palette, large images and an easy navigation. Rose and The Snug Books has a strong focus on special educational needs so it was important that it was disability compliant. We managed this with a blue background making it easier to read text, and fonts large enough to view on all devices. Our sites are always AA compliant so work with screen readers.
One of the challenges we faced was the number of products - with over 1,500 items of stock it would take time to input all this information into the inventory. But nothing worth doing is ever easy!
With 1,500 products we also had to find an easy way to browse and filter. We solved this with a series of tags and categories that linked to specific overview pages. This also allowed more categories and tags to be easily created in the future. Squarespace functionality offers a product display so that individual books of interest could be added anywhere on the site, and added to the basket directly.
The back end of Squarespace Ecommerce sites work with Stripe payments, which connects directly to a bank account making the set up straight forward. It also allows for Paypal set up, so customers had an easy checkout option.
This project has been thoroughly enjoyable, not only to allow us to see exactly how flexible Squarespace can be, but also for a wonderful trip down memory lane when we came across books from our own childhood.
The Snug Books now sells nationwide and also internationally so if you are looking to purchase Children’s Books and want to support an independent book seller, visit www.thesnugbooks.co.uk. We know we will!
