Amen Shop Design

Amen opened in Bristol, UK, in 2004. The physical store has accounts with some of the largest fashion names in the business and some of the smallest and most difficult to find. Items arrive from Australia, the States and small towns in Northern England our international readers may never have heard of. Their philosophy is simple: if its good they will stock it. If its hard to find or limited edition even better.

The company needed a web site that integrated seamlessly with their physical store. They became one of the first installations for GrowStore and a perfect test case for us to develop the functionality of the software even further.

Integrating the Online and Physical Stores

GrowStore allowed them to manage the stock for both the physical store and the online shop all in one place, in one simple interface. They could simply log on to their web site and see everything they needed. So no matter what trade fair they were attending, whether it be Paris or London, the buyers would always know exactly how much stock was available and therefore how much remaining shelf space and online shop space remained.

Payments

GrowStore was also integrated with PROTX merchant services allowing the business to accept and process secure online payments direct to their bank account. The package included in-built accounting tools with easy access to reports and help.

Order Tracking

GrowStore's integral order tracking was built in as standard with the ability to monitor transactions and view customer information at the click of a button.

Marketing

A useful mailing list manager was included with the ability to send email or SMS to customers who had registered.

Design and Usability

The design is an original concept developed by Gow and Amen jointly. The physical store lives in a building rented from the Church Of England and the playfully irreligious theme is continued within the web site. We used renaissance imagery and colour-ways to define the look and feel with design clues from the physical store decoration.

Usability was a crucial factor - the web site needed to be simple to navigate and easy to search for items. We achieved that . The flexibility of unlimited categories and sub categories integrates flawlessly with the site search facility which makes finding items fast and effortless.

The site is a XHTML 1.0 / CSS 2 build using the latest interoperable technology and W3C standards. Work continues on both the store software and the user interface. When this study was being re-written for the new Grow weblog the site was being re-developed with the latest iteration of GrowStore and the physical store was closed for 2 weeks for the annual Amen 'pilgrimage'. Current location of the Amen team: unknown. Expect more from these retail entrepreneurs soon!

• See the Amen Shop live. Store has closed.
• GrowStore
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