Brotherhood Books

About the Client

Brotherhood Books is a social enterprise of the Brotherhood of St Laurence (BSL), a social justice organisation working alongside people experiencing disadvantage to address poverty in Australia. Founded in 2009, Brotherhood Books sell donated second-hand books of all genres through their online bookstore.

Challenge

The Brotherhood Books website is one of Australia’s largest online booksellers - stocking more than 60,000 books. When the BSL team initially approached us they were dealing with a very problematic website. The large, existing Magento instance wasn’t performing well, had bad user experience, and the potential to do damage to the BSL brand. They were keen to rectify this and reached out to us for consultation and support to provide a robust, sustainable digital solution for their online store.

Solution

Taking over control and management of the site, we immediately put in measures to stabilise it. This involved migration to hosting under our control and updating the core Magento instance and extensions. Substantial work was carried out debugging and fixing errors, which included updating libraries/dependencies, and refactoring code to optimise performance.

Collaborating with BSL, we implemented solutions to enhance performance and functionality, which ultimately provides better user experience, and delivers for customers. With flexible, scalable hosting we were able to manage short-term issues (addressing large spikes in traffic, and website drops outs in particular) while implementing a strategic long-term solution, retaining website performance throughout.

Once the site was stabilised, we were able to shift focus and concentrate on enhancements, ongoing maintenance, and improvements. It has proven to be a very stable website with a 150% increase in website sessions since 2019.

Results

• Enhanced capability that allows Brotherhood Books business to grow and remain viable

• Improved user experience through optimisations deployed

• Integration with third-party systems (as required)

• Interface updates (as required)

• Training of BSL staff using the system

• Ongoing support for BSL staff

• Ongoing system and security maintenance

• Ongoing hosting, maintenance, improvements, and updates