Marrying an affinity for scaling ecommerce with evolving technology, World of Books is dedicated to inspiring customers to read more and waste less. With over $200 Million in revenue in 2024, World of Books is on track to be the world's largest and most sustainable dedicated online bookstore. The company prides itself on providing a positive buying experience in addition to enabling customers to conveniently sell their pre-loved books, music, games, and DVDs via the World of Books Sell Your Books app.
As the team navigated a new direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel, the business found it needed an agile partner who shared its data-led, experimentation-first mindset, and could provide them with the flexibility to commit precious engineering time and budget to the things that added value to the experience. Enter Shopify.
World of Books has seen:
- Improved site speed and performance
- 10% increase in conversion rate
- Significantly more efficient integration of highly dynamic pricing and stock levels
Challenge
The team at World of Books were dealing with a legacy software platform that was becoming too costly to merely keep up with. From a budget perspective, much of the engineering and development team’s time was spent maintaining, fixing, and correcting their tech stack, which was stalling product development.
Facing the challenge of increasing costs on one hand and technical limitations of improving their product on the other, World of Books sought a platform that could support new features that would help to drive customer engagement.
Knowing they needed a partner who shared their experimental approach, the World of Books team brought Shopify on board to help materialise their vision. Through Shopify, they have started to optimise their customer experience, and drive business value at the same time.
Less bespoke, more customisable
World of Books’ legacy system was years old, using an outdated codebase that required substantial time and effort just to keep the lights on. Their creaking tech stack contained separate tools for vital but onerous tasks such as tax calculation, customer notifications and directing customers to the appropriate storefront, just to name a few.
The team saw that by replatforming to Shopify, they could move to an event streaming based, modern architecture, better suited to an enterprise with a vast inventory and a global audience.
Consolidating all these tools into a single package significantly reduced maintenance costs and boosted our productivity. It allowed us to focus on what truly matters, rather than managing disparate systems.
A prime case study is how World of Books handled integrating new tools. In the case of a third-party tax tool, previously they had to invest significant resources to create a custom integration with their other systems – for example, the checkout. Today, new tools and features can be set up out of the box and instantly integrate with other parts of the platform. What’s more, rather than requiring months of development time, these features can be added rapidly, meaning more time can be invested in other areas that will help satisfy customers – product search, or the quality of book listings customers interact with, for example.
World of Books made use of the Shopify app ecosystem to replatform rapidly and effectively. Aiding their workflows, they use apps including Bespoke Shipping, or Localize to translate product attributes for different markets. Shopify Flow, which creates custom ecommerce automations with no‑code building blocks, helps World of Books deal with Customer Service Events at scale like fraudulent orders, and gives them the flexibility to automate repetitive tasks, so they can focus on other critical tasks.
“What I’d like to emphasise, is the extensive toolbox Shopify provides, supplemented with the wide range of apps, which can be easily leveraged without requiring custom solutions,” says János.
And in place of a limiting, bespoke front-end solution, World of Books deployed Shopify’s templating language, Liquid, all but overnight removing the challenges they once faced on frontend scalability and had to deal with in-house.
“It was a key selling point for us that we can focus on the right problems instead of focusing on housekeeping,” János adds.
The current setup strikes a great balance between code and no-code/low-code solutions. From an engineering perspective, this allows us to focus on the internal platform, while the low-code options enable stakeholders to carry out their work with minimal engineering support.
New found flexibility and insights
A large part of the process for improving the website was A/B testing – helped by Shopify’s vast library of apps and integrations – as well as interviewing customers to gather feedback, before implementing Shopify tools to gauge how customers were engaging with the site.
Shopify gives you that agility that every enterprise brand needs. We can move really quickly and really understand how our customers are engaging with our product in a data-led way, and that’s really powerful for us.
With the help of Shopify, the business built a new infrastructure in a matter of months and compared it with the legacy system – and Shopify came out on top, with a CVR increase of around 10% across all regions tested.
Shopify “was key to our ability to move at pace. We knew how the new site is performing against the legacy one and we had the data to drill into the differences, like search results and add to cart behaviour,” explains János.
“We were able to measure performance across all relevant metrics, all the way from sessions to search, add to cart, checkout entry, conversion, revenue per session and unit economics too.”
Strong partnership
Key to the speed at which World of Books were able to replatform was Shopify’s collaborative approach.
“We had a very supportive relationship,” János continues. Due to the size of our catalogue, we sometimes ran into problems over the migration process that needed support from Shopify engineering. Thanks to the technical support we got, these got resolved.”
Shopify’s engineers maintained daily communication, which significantly accelerated the transition.
“The Shopify team was very supportive during the migration period, temporarily increasing our rate limits, assisting us in properly representing market-specific prices and addressing a high-priority bug we reported,” he adds.
Ultimately, this partnership led to a replatform that drove customer satisfaction and engagement – selling the right books at the right prices through a simple and easy customer journey.
Results
Having started out selling via third-party websites like Amazon and eBay, World of Books eventually made the leap and began investing in a D2C channel. With Shopify in its corner, the business now has an even more powerful vehicle for selling independently from third parties, and providing the team full ownership of the customer journey.
Shopify has since powered World of Books through peak sales periods while still allowing the uploading and pricing of millions of products on a daily basis, enabling the company to scale without disrupting trading, and even boosting conversions by 10%. Frontend site performance has also improved compared to the previous platform.
And not only has Shopify supported World of Books in upgrading the business’s tech stack, it’s brought a human touch through support from its solutions engineering team, who the company entrusted with its global site and helped to provide a full picture of every stage of the funnel. Since Shopify’s experts had an innate understanding of the business from the get-go, they didn’t need to be brought up to speed – making the journey that much smoother.
A tip I’d give to other brands for migrating is around the stakeholder piece – reminding people of why the replatform is a good idea. Change is unnerving. It takes time and costs money, but if you can channel it into the vision and the ‘why’ of the organisation, it helps. For us, it came down to the audience we serve: value-seeking book lovers.