In this article, “Priyanka Jhamnani” shares a case study of a Switzerland-based online beauty retailer, about how they witnessed an increase in sales by 10% post migrating to Shopify. This wasn’t easy without our careful, unique and well-defined approach which helped them move to fresh new platform. Do contact us if you have any questions or need assistance around Shopify website development services.
Founded in 2011, Forester Beauty is the largest online retailer of hair, and beauty products in Zürich, Switzerland. They offer complete set of services for natural, mixed, and curly hairs.
Forester Beauty also has a nail-studio for manicure, & pedicure besides a cosmetic-studio for facials, waxing, and eyelash extensions. One can also book appointments online.
Challenges
They had mainly deployed open-source software for their website and other customer applications that required them to spend a major chunk of their everyday time managing them. Their team could hardly focus on other important functions including sales and marketing.
The company was struggling to find solution to the following problems –
- Their website needed update
- They were dependent on developers for day-to-day tasks
- They were struggling to keep maintenance costs under control
- Their website displayed ordinary performance
Finding/Analysis
Based on our discussion with their team and our analysis, we identified the following –
- Their website needed major overhaul. Not only did it need update, but the UI & UX needed a complete makeover including layout, cart, checkout page etc.
- Migration to a fresh new platform.
- It needed seamless migration of the platform without any business disruption, outage or downtime. It was important to retain their SEO score too.
Objective
We had the following objective in front of us.
- Seamless migration to Shopify
- Retention of site SEO and scores including backlinks, referring domains etc.
- Retention of traffic, and sales.
- Retention of high ranking keywords.
Solution in sight
Their website was on Magento 1.9, support for which had ended in June 2020.
With the release of the new version, they had 2 options to pick one from –
- Upgrade to Magento’s new version
- Migrate to a SAAS-based platform such as Shopify
Magento and Shopify are two of the most popular ecommerce platforms on the market today. They’re often pitted against each other though in reality, they are quite different.
Magento offers complete control over the code where as Shopify is fairly easy to maintain without the hassles of self-hosting. This is one of the prime reasons why Shopify is fast becoming the preferred choice of new ecommerce stores.
Since Shopify is self-hosted, one doesn’t have to worry about page speed, and loading time.
Execution
Magento to Shopify Migration Steps:
*Illustration for Open-source to Shopify
Technology aside, we made quite a few aesthetic alterations together with a bucket load of dynamic transitions and enhancements that further reduced the bounce rate.
End user features and functionalities were replicated for Shopify with the use of custom built and other third-party Shopify apps on Shopify app store.
In order to retain SEO while transitioning, we carried out activities in three phases (pre, during and post-upgrade).
Benchmarked the pre-launch SEO metric to ensure we don’t lose the track and maintain rankings, traffic, and authority throughout.
Results
Normally if the migration process is not done properly, a site may lose entire SEO juice and end up with a negligible presence in Google search results.
However, due to our unique and well-defined approach, we were able to migrate successfully without taking a hit.
The final results were beyond their expectation –
- Forester Beauty now had a state of the art online shop
- Their traffic and sales were retained
- In fact, the first month saw an increase in sales by 10%
- Significant improvement in UI & UX
- The site SEO and metrics remained unaffected