Today we've asked our partner PushON to tell us how they build online shops from scratch, what platform they choose, how they extend it and what Amasty modules help them cover the needs.
PushON are Magento Solution Partners of many years standing with a full-service e-сommerce team in Manchester. They work across B2B, B2C, D2C, have particular experience with complex integrations, and they look forward to helping with any challenging projects.
Case Study: Fitness Store
Who are PureTec?
PureTec are a healthy living brand devoted to providing the means for their customers lead healthier more fulfilling lives.
This isn’t just about selling products, it’s about being engaged with that audience of advocates and providing them with as much rich information as possible. They had built their quite considerable success primarily through marketplaces; Amazon and eBay however, they wanted to create a deeper relationship with their audience, and the marketplaces simply could not facilitate that.
What was the project about?
PureTec already had a website in place on a great domain, www.exercise.co.uk but they needed the website to do so much more. This was more than just a build, it was the foundation stone of a brand strategy. E-commerce is so much more than just tech and so PushON went through a thorough process of understanding who the audience are, the very essence of the brand and the commercial drivers of the business. The essence of the marketing strategy was content-driven:
- being useful and relevant leads to superb consumer engagement and of course, relevance leads to citation; links from other websites and social shares.
- citation, in the form of links, leads over time to ranking well in organic search for relevant search terms.
We run deep immersion sessions when we start a project. It’s as much for the client as the agency. The client doesn’t always know what they know or often what another department is committed to or needs to achieve. These immersion sessions are away from client premises and distraction. It enables all parties to gain a deep understanding of the project and achieve ownership of every relevant deliverable. It’s critically important that the client brings the key stakeholders to engage in that session and with the project. From that immersion session with PureTec we were confident that Magento 2 Commerce Open Source was the right platform for the exercise.co.uk development.
We were confident that Magento 2 Commerce Open Source was the right platform.
Magento 2 is the global leading e-commerce platform in our view. That’s why we’re committed to being Magento Solution Partners. It has rich core functionality and scalability up to enterprise levels. In particular, we like the extensibility that has facilitated the Magento ecosystem. There are many providers of trusted verified extensions but we only work with a select few. The best of the best. Where we have certainty of quality and of support we should need.
There are many providers of trusted verified extensions but we only work with a select few. The best of the best. Where we have certainty of quality and of support we should need.
Amasty have been our extension provider of choice for many years. The extensions are robust and the support services are always rapid and thorough in response. We use a core range of extensions that just make our e-commerce websites a little easier to use.
In the case of PureTec, we deployed the following:
How we used content was a core element of the project. Providing useful information for the target audience that helped them with their lives was an essential part of building relationships and getting found. For example this post about morning workout with kids.
But we must also remember that we need to support meaningful transactions. One of the significant barriers to conversion with respect to the purchase of exercise equipment is fear; fear of not understanding how to use that equipment. This also leads to a wealth of search queries. To address that, we provided easily accessible digital manuals, hence the Product Attachments extension. The organic search campaign based on this rich content proved to be extremely successful. The following Searchmetrics graph indicates a particularly strong organic search growth over the previous 10 months:
It's also important to ensure that we serve the right content at the right time. Part of that requirement is regionality. To effect that we deploy Geo IP Redirects.
As well as marketing considerations, Amasty extensions support us with a good practice where we want to extend Magento's native capabilities. Security and accountability are always a key consideration but with the advent of GDPR, securing an e-commerce website both externally and internally is simply essential. External attacks often rely on forcing user access to the e-commerce website.
Admin Actions helps us understand how the website is being accessed by whom and from where. Additionally, it helps us understand what has been done. These are complex systems and with the very best of intentions, it’s possible to make mistakes. Being able to forensically assess a series of actions provides an accountable approach to remedial activity.
Collaboration and training run through what we do as an e-commerce agency. Our clients need to grow. Deploying an e-commerce platform as powerful as Magento 2 is not a trivial matter; it impacts the organization.
As mentioned, it starts with the Immersion session. This builds the relationships with all the key stakeholders and develops an understanding of their challenges in whichever department they have responsibility for. This allows us to work with the client to train them and help them plan for success.
Though it wasn’t a core part of the deployment of the website for PureTec, we spent a good deal of time helping them with marketing. This was a new channel for them. PPC, SEO, and content were key to the project. After all, a website is only genuinely of value if it has traffic that is relevant.
PushON have weaved SEO efforts from the start of our development of Exercise.co.uk, their SEO team have given me sound advice and guidance on SEO best practices. They produced a huge strategy document in the early stages of development that aligned perfectly with a huge content marketing effort, this ensured the created content had significant SEO benefits from the start. Their SEO team plugged in through the various stage of development to ensure the site is developed around SEO as opposed to going back in and trying to make the site more SEO-friendly, their mobile-first approach has made the largest impact to our SEO efforts as it plays an ever-increasing role in how well a website ranks. Without PushONs’ guidance, I feel confident that Exercise.co.uk would not have the well thought through SEO strategy in place that it does now.
Consider also wherein a business that a significant digital transformation can impact:
- Accounts
- Reporting
- Warehouse
- Fulfillment
- Marketing
- Brand
- PR
Referring back to the critical importance of the immersion process, once an initial view of business need is established, fully bought in project management and communication strategy is essential to effective delivery. And that delivery is improved by collaboration. We spend a significant amount of time putting the right project toolset in place and making sure the client can use it. In any project of complexity, there will be exceptions and change. Expecting deviation and having an understanding in place to be able to deal with that deviation make a significant difference to project execution. Having those tools and communications in place provides an accountable approach to remedy. In this case, there was significant complexity about volumes of “Content”. Bear in mind that content may be many things:
- Images
- Video
- The written word
- Audio
The marketing team, in particular, has an interest in the deployment of these assets.
The development team is of course involved and especially an SEO will be involved. The quality of communications and specification of that content will impact the project.
That the Puretec project proceeded so well as evidenced by the growth of its organic search position demonstrates the value of a well-run project.
If the topic of developing a new Magento online store on a turn-key basis is relevant to you, leave your questions below and we'll be happy to help you out!