Exclusive Books' Customer-Focused E-Commerce Rebuild

CLIENT CONTEXT

Exclusive Books’ online store

Exclusive Books has been one of South Africa’s leading booksellers for 70 years. In 2015, Realm Digital rebuilt its original website and served as its technology partner for eight years. By 2021, the online store had become the highest-performing store in the Exclusive Books chain, ahead of every physical location.

The site had evolved quickly to keep pace with demand, and Exclusive Books wanted its future growth guided by a single, deliberate plan. It wanted a digital storefront that felt as considered as its physical stores, particularly for students, a core part of its customer base, who needed a faster and simpler way to find and buy books online.

The website was no longer a secondary channel, and every unresolved issue in the customer journey now hit Exclusive Books’ primary revenue driver directly.

THE CHALLENGE

A live, revenue-critical rebuild

The brief was to rework the customer journey on a site that was live, central to the brand, and carrying real revenue, without breaking what already worked.

A store that could not go offlineThe site carried more live sales than any single physical store, so any rebuild had to happen without disrupting day-to-day trading.

A brand built over 70 yearsThe new design had to modernise the shopping experience while keeping the brand identity customers already trusted.

Demand outpacing the planCOVID-19 accelerated online shopping across the industry faster than most digital roadmaps are built to absorb, so the rebuild had to hold up under immediate demand rather than a future projection.

This work had to be done from inside a live system, alongside day-to-day support requests and seasonal spikes like Black Friday.

REALM’S APPROACH

The rebuild

Realm’s team rebuilt the customer-facing journey end-to-end: registration and sign-in, browsing and search, the product catalogue, and checkout. Each step was redesigned around how customers moved through the site. The underlying platform Realm had already built for Exclusive Books stayed in place, avoiding a second, unrelated migration risk.

Registration, browsing, and checkout

The rebuild simplified registration and checkout, expanded and cleaned up the product catalogue, and improved the stability of the underlying platform, all while preserving the visual identity customers recognised as Exclusive Books. Checkout and account flows were rebuilt in full, which is what made the resulting speed and reliability gains possible.

Mapping the journey

Before writing any of that code, Realm ran structured design thinking workshops with Exclusive Books: empathise, define, ideate, and test. Personas were interviewed and mapped end to end, including students, and the rebuild addressed the friction points these workshops surfaced.

A partnership built for responsiveness

When Exclusive Books decided the rebuild needed to happen, it didn’t need to brief in an unfamiliar team or wait for anyone to get up to speed on a live, revenue-critical platform first. Because Realm and Exclusive Books had worked together continuously since the initial rebuild, the new build happened alongside day-to-day platform support. When Exclusive Books partnered with Uber Eats early in the pandemic to deliver books to customers at home, or when Black Friday created sudden spikes in demand, the same team that had just rebuilt the platform was in place to respond immediately.

Building a roadmap for what comes next

Once the rebuild was live, Realm and Exclusive Books moved into a formal digital strategy engagement: a current-state assessment followed by a roadmap, giving the business a structured plan to guide future investment in the site.

THE OUTCOME

The measurable impact

Following the rebuild, Exclusive Books saw a measurable shift in how customers engaged with the site.

What changed:

Traffic and page views increased by over 40% following the rebuild
Bounce rate fell by close to 3%
The website retained its position as the highest-performing store in the Exclusive Books chain
A digital strategy roadmap gave the business a structured basis for future investment in the site

WHAT THIS TELLS YOU ABOUT HOW WE WORK

The long-term relationship

Realm had worked with Exclusive Books for numerous years. The same team that rebuilt the platform kept working on it afterwards, which is why Realm could respond immediately when the business needed it most.

When the site’s growth eventually needed a longer-range plan, Realm and Exclusive Books moved into that work together. The partnership adapted as the business grew, rather than restarting from scratch each time something new was needed.

Understand before you buildWorkshops shaped the brief before a single line of code was written, so the rebuild addressed what was holding customers back.

One team, start to finishThe team that scoped the work also wrote the code, so nothing was lost in a handover.

Partner through pressureBeing embedded in the business meant Realm was already inside the system when demand spiked without warning.

“You can’t just be a tech partner. You have to think more like the business, and the business must think more like you, a tech partner. The meeting of minds is where the magic happens, and you need to be aggressive in implementing solutions.”

– Simon Bestbier, CEO, Realm Digital