Magento® e-commerce website for The Electrical Showroom

The team at The Electrical Showroom initially approached b4b to update their electrical components shop to the latest version of Magento®. The website was using a version that was due to be retired by the vendor and we were tasked with making the switch to ensure minimal impact on sales. Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform and at the end of June 2020, all sites using version 1.x had to update to version 2.

The Electrical Showroom operates in a competitive market, alongside traditional high street names such as Currys, Argos, John Lewis and online sellers like Amazon.

We designed a more user-friendly shopping website for The Electrical Showroom that increased conversions with a countdown timer to increase urgency and a one-step checkout for simple transaction completion. These measures contributed to a 130% increase in order conversion rate.

The scope of the project increased to include a rebuild of the site. To achieve this we completely rebuilt their website securely migrating product, order and customer data between the databases.

This needed to be done methodically due to the large amount of data involved and the complexities of handling personal data.

We performed several test migrations before switching the site live to ensure the database was operating as expected.

We also had to address some user experience issues we uncovered as part of the build and had to maintain their brand identity while improving speed and the user journey on mobile.

The performance of the Magento admin panel was a key element in the success of the project. Now, store administrators can download large numbers of orders simply and quickly so they can facilitate orders and upload tracking numbers.

We installed a countdown timer to increase urgency and a one-step checkout for simple transaction completion. These measures contributed to a 72% increase in order numbers and a 130% increase in order conversion rate. Organic traffic is up 162% year on year.

Now the site is launched, we are working with The Electrical Showroom to make ongoing improvements to increase sales and performance further.

As part of our design and user experience process, we analysed user behaviour using Google Analytics, Hotjar Heatmaps and Behaviour Analytics tools to better understand the current user experience.

We found that shop visitors were frustrated with load times and the payment process, so these became key areas of focus for the project. We recommended integrating Braintree Payments to allow for simple checkout and offer card and PayPal Express options.

For this project, key improvements were made to improve the site speed. We focused on the front-end layout and structure for the shop but also spent time optimising the back-end server setup.

These enhancements resulted in a 49% increase in average page load times and an 82% increase in server connection times.

As pages are now loading more quickly and users are enjoying a better experience, website pages are achieving better placement in search results. Google Search Console reported an average improvement of six places for relevant terms.

Product search is an integral part of shopping online. We increased the prominence of this function for mobile devices and used an improved auto-complete tool to display search results. This increased search volume by 65% and reduced the number of users exiting the site after a search by 71%. The number of unique searches jumped by 459%.