Phil Groom visits the website of the newcomer to UK Christian retailing and finds something well worth visiting...

www.koorong.com

Koorong has landed here in the UK, picking up the Wesley Owen brand, eight stores and the website, www. wesleyowen.com. As I write, no major changes have been introduced at www.wesleyowen.com: the site is still essentially a clone of stldistribution.co.uk (or vice versa). Whether Koorong will remain satisfied with that or will wish to establish their own look and feel across the site now that the link between Wesley Owen and STL has been formally broken remains to be seen, but in the meantime www.koorong.com is well worth a visit in its own right.

Koorong.com is big, boasting “over 150,000 Christian products: Books, Bibles, music, DVD and more”, that more including clothing, giftware and jewellery. With such a massive range available, the site needs powerful search facilities and comprehensive navigation, and both are evident: a basic search box is built into the site header with advanced search only one click away, and standardised navigation bars link to the main sections. Within each section, a menu in the sidebar offers subcategories; search results are delivered rapidly and presented neatly with further options to refine the search or sort the results; and new titles or items on special offer are flagged up in the search results.

Clicking through the search result to an item's 'Product Details' page reveals most of the standard bibliographic data, customer reviews and other information you'd expect, but whereas www. wesleyowen.com simply indicates whether an item is available or otherwise, www.koorong.com provides the actual quantity available, broken down store-by-store. If Koorong can bring this functionality to Wesley Owen, customers will be able to find out at a glance whether or not their nearest branch has the stock they're looking for: no more follow up phone calls needed for anyone who prefers to call and collect or who wants to buy multiple copies.

A panel at the bottom of each page provides further navigation options including links to a site map, the company's privacy policy and their fairtrade policy, a particularly welcome initiative which defines “minimum standards that all suppliers must adhere to in order to trade with Koorong”, applauded by JustAct as “an Australian-first (or even world first) in the Christian goods industry”. It would be good to see this policy extended to and explicitly stated for Wesley Owen.

With a project of this size and complexity some gaps or out of date material are almost inevitable, but these appeared to be few and far between, the most obvious instance, unfortunately, being the website help section which - at the time of my visits - featured screenshots and descriptions that related to an earlier version of the site.

Without a doubt, koorong.com is one to watch; and if Koorong decide to develop wesleyowen.com along similar lines then we'll have another powerful presence in the UK's online Christian marketplace, one fit to challenge even eden.co.uk's dominance.

On facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/ Koorong-Music-DVDs/185014816334

On twitter: @koorong and @koorongmusic