Great Little Trading Company

Challenge

Despite their success, CEO and owner, Jamie, knew that the platform GLTC had used to reach this level wasn’t going to carry them further on toward their goals. There were several limitations on how far their old platform could take their business. First and foremost was the lack of control over their site.

"We were restricted to strict release cycles that needed to be planned heavily in advance," explained Jamie. "The website itself was becoming dated and functionality that had been on our wishlist for some time still wasn’t progressing."

Adding products, creating content, launching new sales and promotions were all being held back by the workflow of their existing site. It wasn’t a matter of technical expertise either, they just didn’t have the tools to do what they needed to do. The business itself was held hostage by the very platform they used to reach their customers.

Besides being inaccessible to employees, there was a deeper lack of functionality. Even when they could arrange development time to release updates, they couldn’t always accomplish the things they needed. For a store as large as GLTC, there were a number of tools missing from their businesses toolkit when it came to selling online. Not having these tools held their online sales and their business back.

• Guest checkout
• Third-party payment integrations
• AB testing capability
• Product sets
• Product collection options
• Sale and discount notifications

Solution

Picking a new platform

Shopify Plus is the most accessible ecommerce platform on the market, but Jamie knew that to get the results he wanted for the company, he would need outside expertise, saying “We knew early on that we wanted to do a bespoke web design and add in new functionality and for that we would need Shopify experts - it was way out of our capabilities.”

For a company as large as GLTC, a simple redesign wasn’t enough. They needed a partner who could help them through a major transition with several complicated moving parts:

• Bespoke site design that reflected the brand and product range while driving sales across multiple product collections
• Data migration including hundreds of products, thousands of customers, and a decade of order history
• Integration with GLTC’s own warehouse, as well as other suppliers and dropshippers
• Integration with multiple analytics providers and marketing partners
• In-depth Google Tag Manager integration

UX and design

Research and planning are too often overlooked when designing websites. Many think that making a website look good is all that matters. While it helps to be pretty, user experience is what drives revenue for online stores.

How does the site function? Does it work well for its intended purpose and audience? Working together, UWP and GLTC carried out extensive user testing that uncovered potential problems in their existing site.

Focus groups showed that consumers needed better navigation and product sorting options. Heatmaps and analytics data brought more insight into how visitors were using the site.

Trading copy-heavy pages for a more visual focused layout and cleaner, clearer use of text made the new site layout more effective and easier to use.;

Data migration

Hundreds of products with variants. Thousands of customer accounts. 10 years of B2B and B2C order history, complete with notes, discounts, and shipping specifications.

Some stores can do DIY data migration when they replatform, but for GLTC, that was never an option. There was simply too much critical data, and the migration had to work. There was not only data within Shopify, but CRM data, warehouse and third-party distributor systems, and other third-party systems and tools.

Working with Shopify Plus developers, we established a plan to make the data migration as smooth as possible. First, product data was moved from Magento into the Shopify ecosystem Each product has several data points that had to be carefully transitioned:

• Descriptions
• Images
• Sizes
• Variations
• Tags
• Metadata
• Vendors

Once products were in place on the new site, we were ready for customer data:

• Names
• Account IDs and passwords
• Emails
• Contact and shipping information
• Associated third-party data

After customer data was migrated, it had to be reconciled to make sure that everything was accurate and formatted so that it could be recognised by Shopify’s systems and third-party partners. Multiple addresses, duplicate accounts, and dead emails all had to be removed or reconciled.

To bring existing customers into the new system, they would have to activate their account and set a new password. Once products and customer data were in place, it was time to move the extensive order history for each customer:

• Purchase histories
• Order notes
• Discounts
• Vendor tagging
• Currently active orders