Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild built Waddesdon Manor 120 years ago on a hill 60 miles from London, in the style of a French 16^th century chateau. He was an inspired collector and the house was designed to accommodate his exceptional French 18^th century furniture, Sevres porcelain, English portraits and Renaissance works of art. When Ferdinand died in 1898 he left Waddesdon to his sister, Miss Alice. In 1922 the house passed to James de Rothschild, her French cousin. James inherited a substantial part of his father Baron Edmond’s great collection and brought this to Waddesdon. In 1957, in order to ensure its future perpetuity, Waddesdon was bequeathed to the National Trust by James de Rothschild, although his widow, Dolly continued to manage the house until her death in 1988.

Waddesdon has gone from strength to strength and today attracts on average 350,000 visitors per year.  Whilst visitor numbers are excellent it’s really important that Waddesdon seek to build upon other revenue generated areas of the organisation.

Towards the end of 2008, Waddesdon Manor decided to move away from their managed ecommerce system. They were looking for a shopping cart that was easy to use, scalable, rich in features and performance allowing Waddesdon to implement new products from new initiatives. This included a recent project where Waddesdon commissioned the Royal College of Art (RCA) student designers to create a range of products to be sold in its shop. These exclusive items are now available on the new Waddesdon Manor Online Gift Shop.

As well as efficiency the new system would also allow Waddesdon to move away from their current ecommerce subscription model, which attracted annual costs.

Due to their energy and experience in delivering ecommerce solutions Generate UK were chosen to project manage and deliver a new online shop.  To achieve all of the objectives highlighted above Generate UK worked closely with Waddesdon Manor to understand:

• Design and branding requirements
• Waddesdon’s backend ordering and fulfilment processes,  to understand how the shopping cart would fit in would fit in with the rest of the business
• How the products should be represented on the site and to the search engines
• The products and categories to help structure and implement easy navigation rules

The shopping cart scales to support an unlimited number of products and can quickly and easily be managed by anyone without HTML or other technical skills. It even integrates directly with Royal Mail for real time delivery prices, which can be rolled out across the store or changed per product.

Kim Hallett, Head of Sales and Marketing commented; the online store is a fundamental part of our business, the old system was exceptionally hard to use and made our lives miserable! It was important that when we changed to a new system it was flexible, dynamic and easy to use, whilst improving the backend sales process. It was also important that the new site look great and improved our search engine rankings. Generate UK guided us through the whole process and made the project really easy. The shopping cart is fantastic to use and we are already benefiting through a great new look and improved sales figures.

Please click here to visit the Waddesdon Manor Gift Shop