September 01, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Online Jeweler Blue Nile has historically been successful because of how easy it was to buy a variety of jewelry and diamonds that have quality comparable to Tiffany & Co. Quickly, the site founded by Mark Vadon, attracted a male demographic looking for a comfortable online diamond and jewelry shopping experience, where they could also get a great deal. Of course, the recipient of these items, the majority of the time, are women. It is that segment of online shoppers that Seattle based Blue Nile is looking to obtain with the redesign of their ecommerce website. This strategy has been utilized more often lately where online merchants revamp their storefront in hopes of capturing additional customers to help their business combat slower growth in bad economic times.
Blue Nile is taking a big step as this new website design will be the first in roughly 10 years. It no longer has a left hand navigation and now focuses on the main navigation living at the top of the site with interactive drop down menus. This left them more room to have larger imagery of their items and promote more of a luxury feel to attract that female demographic who is also drawn to Tiffany & Co. for the very same reason. They also improved their Build Your Own Ring® tool which allows users to customize an engagement ring from a huge selection of settings and diamonds. This tool has long been one of the features that men enjoyed because it put them in control of all of the aspects of the diamond and setting. Only time will tell if the aggressive move in a slower economy will prove to be successful for Blue Nile.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
I would rather buy from a better jewelry company that actually has a store location and is family owned and operated… I have been working with Jonathan at JoshuasJewelry.com for over several of my jewelry purchases for the holidays and gift ideas, and he comes through for me every time… Big jewelry companies dont give me the 1 on 1 experience…. I really enjoyed that from my own jeweler… and their website has soooooo many gift ideas to choose from… very easy to navigate and understand as well…