The Rocking Horse Shop has been designing, making and restoring traditional wooden rocking horses from our Yorkshire workshop since 1976.
Although the craftsmanship behind our horses remains proudly traditional, our website has to support customers, woodworkers and collectors throughout the world.
Our product range is far more complicated than that of a conventional online shop. A customer might be purchasing a finished rocking horse, configuring different materials and finishes, arranging the restoration of a family heirloom, reserving a place on a carving course or sending a large timber pack overseas.
Each journey requires different information, delivery calculations and ways of managing the resulting enquiry or purchase.
Building our new digital platform
Our previous website had reached the end of its useful life and could no longer be safely extended to meet the needs of the business.
We therefore worked with The Digital Hub, a Yorkshire-based digital development company, to design and build a completely new website and e-commerce platform around the way The Rocking Horse Shop operates.
The new platform brings our products, courses, restoration services, customer accounts, international deliveries, content and website management together within one connected system.
It was created specifically for our business rather than adapted from a standard shop template.
Protecting our history
Moving to a new system meant protecting decades of important customer and trading information.
The Digital Hub migrated 29,493 previous orders and 925 customer records into the new platform. Existing customers can continue to access their order history through their new website accounts.
The product catalogue, images, content and important website addresses were also transferred. More than 400 redirects were created to ensure customers and search engines could continue to find pages that had existed on the previous website.
This was especially important for a business that has traded online for many years and has customers returning to us to purchase additional products, arrange restorations or find information about earlier purchases.
A shop built around our products
Our new website allows customers to configure a rocking horse by selecting options such as size, timber, finish, mane and fittings. Prices and delivery weights are recalculated as those selections are made.
The worldwide delivery system considers the customer's destination, postcode and the complete weight of the configured basket. This allows customers in the UK and overseas to receive an appropriate delivery charge during checkout.
The platform also supports multiple currencies, customer accounts, wishlists, gift vouchers, Stripe and Klarna payments, course bookings and restoration enquiries.
Our AI concierge
Visitors can also use our AI concierge to ask common questions about horse sizes, timber, plans, accessories, restorations, courses and delivery.
The concierge draws its answers from information approved by The Rocking Horse Shop and knowledge accumulated through nearly 50 years of making and restoring rocking horses.
It helps visitors find useful information at any time of day and directs them to relevant products or pages. Our experienced team remains available whenever a customer needs personal advice about a horse, restoration or special project.
A website our team can manage
An important part of the project was ensuring that our own team could manage the website without relying on a developer for everyday changes.
Products, images, course dates, delivery rates, articles, announcements, FAQs and the main website content can all be managed through our private administration system.
The Digital Hub continues to support the platform, provide hosting and security, and work with us as the website develops.
You can read the detailed technical story behind the project in The Digital Hub's Rocking Horse Shop case study.