Helping a publishing house to continue
its growth into international markets
Custom e-commerce solution
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Industry
Academic publishing
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Location
Ukraine -
Working together since
June 2015
Business Perspectives is a publishing house specializing in academic writing. Since 2003, it’s helped both young and accomplished scientists to publish their works in influential journals.
The challenge
The digital age brought massive changes to the publishing industry. Business Perspectives chose to adapt their business model by building an international digital platform, where people could read and download individual articles, as well as subscribe to scientific journals and monograph publications. They aimed to reach beyond the local audience and create a convenient sales funnel.
We had an existing site for Business Perspectives with a complex catalog of scientific journals and articles. It brought traffic, but we wanted to serve the science community in the best way possible, so came up with multiple ideas for custom features. While supporting our first site, MindK began working on a new platform from the ground up.
The solution
We teamed up with Business Perspectives to transform the website into a powerful E-commerce system tailored to the scientific community. To improve the company’s bottom line, we focused on great product presentation, monetization strategy and custom features for author engagement.
We started with a full gap analysis, pointing out where content, structure and overall UX of the existing website fail to match the ideal experience journey.
Re-structured content
With a new portal, complex catalogs of journals and articles have turned into
a familiar interactive user journey with
a search, dedicated journal pages and table of contents.
To streamline content publishing and save costs for the client, we transitioned Business Perspectives to a content management system designed to minimize operational effort. Besides improved UI and UX, the redesigned portal is optimized for search engines and has social media and email alerts integrations which means better promotion for authors and their scientific work.
Digital sales enablement
Understanding the goals that each type of visitor has when using the Business Perspectives portal, we came up with ideas on how to present and monetize published content.
With a map of ideal experience for each visitor type, we organized all site materials into a lucid flow and seasoned it with custom features to convert visitors into clients. As the user chooses a journal or article of interest, he/she can get a preview, buy it, subscribe to the whole journal or even rent an article for a fraction of the cost.
Gamification for authors
To encourage the authors to publish new work, we created an interactive leaderboard, where users can sort authors’ by their ranking. The one who tops the board wins more readers attention.
With a brand new solution, Business Perspectives leveraged an opportunity to better serve the scientific community. It is both a one-stop shop for high-quality manuscripts, and
a promotional platform that makes scientific works visible for society.
To reflect the Business Perspectives mission in a more holistic way, we integrated the main platform with the JIC Index website, helping promising journals in their quest for best publishing practices.
Support for promising journals
With the JIC Index website journals can get
an independent assessment regarding international standards, coupled with guidelines for promotion into the international scientific environment.
Outcomes
- A GDPR-compliant web portal with granular consents and two-factor authentication.
- Thoughtfully redesigned content, structure and UX to meet the ideal experience journey.
- Custom monetization features to fit the needs of each visitor type.
- Streamlined checkout and payment processing using the PayPal gateway.
- Gamification elements in the form of author leaderboards with dynamic visualization of author rating (based on the number of publications, views and downloads).
- SEO and social media promotion enablement.
- Company-wide and digital alignment around its mission and business goals.
Services provided
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Discovery phase - Business Analysis
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Project management - Front-end development
Tech stack
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Joomla CMS for managing content -
ZOOcart for a seamless checkout -
AngularJS for crisp visualization of author leaderboards
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Wkhtmltopdf for fast HTML to PDF converting - MySQL as a database
Value delivered
The e-commerce portal we built for our client allowed them to grow their online presence and reach a truly global audience. They can now earn from selling articles and journals as well as provide promotion opportunities for upcoming authors. More than 5 thousand scientists from 80 countries have already used the platform to publish their works.
21K+
users a month
450K+
free and paid articles downloaded
We were constantly in touch throughout the whole project. I’ve never had to question their availability or transparency. They’re a very flexible and responsive team, willing to take on suggestions and implement changes quickly.
