Affordable Art Fair

These micro-sites promote SEO and link the buyer’s journey of discovery from artwork to gallery and vice versa. Buyers can discover what other artworks a gallery stocks, which artists it represents, and if the gallery is attending any physical art fairs.

We leveraged Visii to create personalised product recommendations for buyers. It uses AI technology and data points such as browser history, past orders, wish lists, search queries, and marketing channels to guide buyers from browsing to discovery to purchase.

Visii technology was also used to create an intuitive image search feature that allows novice art collectors to browse visually by clicking on images they like. It then uses deep learning and custom AI to provide users with more personalised search results and recommendations. Standard display conditions, such as number of reviews, stock levels, best sellers, and IP locations, are also included in its algorithm.

The new shopping cart feature is able to handle complex transactions that involve multiple currencies, multiple sellers, different stock levels, various discount rules, and automated shipping cost estimates that are based on product groupings. Reminder emails with a discount code can also be sent to buyers who abandoned their shopping carts.

This feature allows AAF admin to add product categories based on niche markets, such as ‘Ready to hang’ prints, or seasonal holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, to the filter navigation. This makes it easier and faster to optimise platform navigation.

It can also generate product lists based on different product and seller attributes, such as when the product was added, price, medium, and seller type, to support ads on Facebook, Pinterest or Google.

Sellers can manage rules for a variety of promotion types in their seller dashboards: threshold promotions, content promotions, scarcity promotions, multi-unit promotions, closed list promotions, and delivery discounts.

They are also able to set opening and closing dates, limit promotion aggregation, limit the coverage of a promotion (10% off per customer or 10% off on all transactions), and exclude certain products from promotions.

Migrating 50,000+ product SKUs, 13,000+ users, and 100,000+ other data points is not a trivial affair. Existing buyers would be unhappy if their order history or wish lists went missing. As would sellers, if their product pages with carefully created descriptions and images disappeared.

CobbleWeb was able to preserve the integrity of all legacy data which was successfully incorporated into the category structures of the new marketplace platform.

Users are now able to favourite or unfavourite individual product listings, as well as follow or unfollow artists and galleries. These low-friction curation tools support the exploratory nature of AAF’s marketplace model.

Many artworks share common product attributes such as medium, material, dimension, framed or not, artist name, etc. During the discovery phase we identified which product attributes to use as flags when a seller adds a duplicate product.

AAF works with some very popular galleries whose artworks generate a lot of traffic. They wanted to leverage this by being able to select and present the top-performers on the home page, as well as in artist and gallery listings. 

CobbleWeb proceeded to build a curation system that allows popular galleries and artworks to be automatically displayed on appropriate site pages.

AAF wanted to be able to manage the marketplace fees on a variable basis, using either a percentage-based or fixed amount commission structure, which could be set globally or per seller.

CobbleWeb used Stripe Connect to build Affordable Art Fair’s preferred commission-based payment flow. For enhanced security, Stripe’s machine learning-based fraud prevention application, Radar, was implemented to provide notifications of high-risk transactions.

The AAF platform required more than 40 transactional email types. We combined Mandrill and MailChimp so that administrators can easily customise the triggers, parameters (e.g. product information, buyer location), content and layout of each template.

Our transactional email systems are able to pull data from multiple external sources such as Mandrill (automated email triggers) and databases (e.g. client details).

When users subscribe, information, such as their user location and buying profile, is sent to the ActiveCampaign marketing automation tool. It allows the marketing team to create segmented email lists for more personalised newsletters. 

The ability for marketplace admins to log into (assume) user accounts can be useful to troubleshoot issues. It allows them to see the account dashboard from the user’s view for phone assistance or action issues such as profile edits.
We’ve made sure that the AAF admins can take control of any user account by simply clicking a button from inside their admin dashboard.

The AAF admins required a productive way to manage different types of content: blog posts, information pages (e.g. returns policy), and lead generation pages. The home page had to display extracts from the blog. 

Instead of building a CMS from scratch, we integrated WordPress into the platform. This allows AAF to leverage plugins that extend WordPress functionality, such as publishing tools and sending lead generation data to a Salesforce CRM.