A few months ago, we were approached by an electronics company who was in the process of planning an expansion into the European marketplace. As a part of their expansion, they were interested in auditing their eCommerce platform for any problems that would prevent them from launching the online portion of their expansion plan.
After contacting us, we performed an audit of their site that revealed several potential issues, the most important being that it was based on OpenCart 1.5, an outdated platform released in 2013. There’s a saying – “if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” but expanding into new markets can prove challenging if you plan to sell products online through a storefront that isn’t up to current web standards. Customers are always seeking the easiest path, and will simply leave items in their cart in search of a site with a slicker interface or better checkout experience.
We discussed potential options with Batterfly, and ultimately they asked us to bring them up to modern eCommerce standards. It should be noted that older eCommerce frameworks like OpenCart aren’t easily updated. We would have to install a whole new framework and set it up to meet their needs – a large task, but a much better option than trying to make their outdated site “fit.” We committed to bringing them the results they were looking for.
We had two months to get the job done.
Rather than trying to bend 2013-OpenCart to our will, we created a fresh installation of the latest and greatest: OpenCart 3.0.3. This gave us the flexibility to tweak the framework using modern UI practices. We installed themes and plugins as needed to suit Batterfly’s specific business needs and goals – which were all centered around improving the user interface and optimizing the checkout experience to maximize their sales conversions.
In addition to building a cutting-edge storefront on a modern framework, we implemented several quality of life improvements to optimize the user experience on both desktop and mobile. Their original site was not mobile friendly – OpenCart 1.5 wasn’t developed with responsive design in mind!
We also grouped their products into 4 categories based on expected customer behavior and used this knowledge to turn their enormous 43-element navigation bar into 4 cascading dropdown menus. This significantly reduced clutter and allowed us to use their front page to do what it is supposed to do – showcase their world-class products, not the size of their sidenav.
Finally, we performed small optimizations that will drive search engine optimization and conversion rates. We brought their page load time down to 3 seconds! This is huge, considering that every second of load time loses you up to 20% of your potential conversions! Additionally, Google penalizes websites that take longer than a few seconds to load – but these are dense topics that are better covered in another article.
Finally, we added Klaviyo marketing to their site, allowing them to analyze traffic and how customers move through their site. This will allow them to optimize their purchasing flow and create special targeted marketing campaigns that will maximize conversion rates.
We performed this in 4 weeks, half of the required timeline.
Batterfly extremely happy with the results, but more importantly – they can move forward with the confidence that they have a world class dev team supporting the launch of their new website. When they decided to trust a developer with their international expansion, they chose to trust Foridev. Who will you trust when it comes time for you to develop a new website?
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