Hemswell Antique Centres, the largest of its kind in Europe and just a short drive from the centre of Lincoln, are home to four large buildings, two coffee shops and hundreds of thousands of antiques. Hemswell Antique Centres attract thousands of visitors every year, to the centres themselves and online.
Background
The Brief
Having worked with Hemswell Antique Centres since 2011 and as part of TJS’s ongoing commitment to all its clients, we examined ways to maximise Hemswell’s online opportunities. Our aim was to present the company with additional sales channels and the means to drive more traffic to the website.
Our Solution
We identified Instagram as a channel experiencing massive growth and, as a visual medium, it was the perfect platform to showcase Hemswell’s products. However, with hundreds of thousands of items for sale in any one day and the potential for hundreds more to be added onto the website by individual dealers, the sheer amount of time it would take to update these products manually was prohibitive.
TJS’s solution was to create a fully automated feed for Hemswell Antique Centres that pulls through all of their active and available website products every hour. The feed pulls specific data fields from each product and presents it to Facebook as a ‘product catalogue’.
Once this was in place, Instagram was then configured to pull in these products. This enabled new Instagram posts to be created quickly and feature as many tagged products within the image as required. As a result, Instagram followers of Hemswell Antique Centres can now instantly see the price of tagged products in the images, and link directly through to the website to start the purchasing process.
This automated feed has placed Hemswell firmly ahead of its competition, giving the centres a huge advantage, and it has contributed to a 62% increase in online sales in the last year.
If you want to explore Instagram as a sales channel and would like to find out more, please contact Richard on 01507 525500, today.