For the last 30 years, the Slovene footwear retailer and a well-known shoe brand MASS has been known for always putting its customers first. Operating more than 50 stores across Slovenia and Croatia, the company offers a vast collection of trending shoes for everyone’s taste and every opportunity. Aiming to also reach online buyers, MASS turned to us for help and at the beginning of this year, we started building a Magento 2-based online shop. We immediately set clear goals, agreed on the timeline and discussed the main UX points with the client’s marketing team. But even the best planning left us unprepared for the challenges of Covid-19, when all non-essential stores had to close their doors. In such circumstances, the client had a new objective: “We want an online store ASAP!”
Case study – how we built an ecommerce website for MASS in only 10 days
But how?
When the corona crisis began, we were just days shy of having our new design approved by the client while our developers were working on the implementation of PIM – a system meant to simplify the work of the client’s marketing team by integrating their ERP system with Magento ecommerce. We all have the same goal in mind, namely to finish the project by June. When the timeline changed, we therefore had to offer the customer a much quicker solution. Initially, we were thinking of basing the store on Shopify, Magento 1 or even WordPress, but all these options had their limitations. For this reason, we decided that it was best to simply speed up the design implementation and stick to Magento 2 while importing all the data manually.
Before / after
Before the renovation on the left / After the renovation on the right
A 10-day developer challenge
In just 10 days, the developer team on the project worked around the clock to build this ad-hoc web store. Their tasks included:
- Finalising the design implementation;
- Setting up the production environment;
- Importing data on more than 5000 products with size and colour variations;
- Importing product images;
- Manually setting up filters and categories;
- Importing 70 brands;
- Setting up the WSPay payment system;
- Optimising the website for mobile users;
- Redirecting the old links to new pages.
While this race against time was taking place, the other part of the developer team continued with the primary project, focussing on order automation and transferring the data from the customer’s ERP to PIM.
The MASS team was busy too, deciding on which products should go on sale, filling in forms with item names and preparing the copy for new landing pages.
The marketing team takes over
When the Magento developers finished their work, their colleagues from the marketing department were just getting started. A week before the site launch, we started with teaser campains, warming up potential buyers until the day when we could invite them to visit the store. To achieve our goals, a team of 6 digital marketing specialists prepared a detailed advertising strategy, which included flooding Facebook and Instagram with ads while also taking advantage of Google Search and the Google Display Network.
We prepared more than 30 creatives for the campaigns (banners, video, gif), including materials in Facebook, Instagram and Google dynamic formats. We also wrote more than 25 different ad copies and tailored those to different phases of the customer journey as well as the specific aims of the campaigns.
And what were our results?
Within hours of hitting the social media channels, the web store was visited by more than 2,000 customers while the following campaigns attracted an even bigger crowd. To track our progress, we created an interactive Google Data Studio report, allowing us to monitor the campaign results in real time.
New challenges ahead and future tasks
We’ve already installed Hotjar on the store to monitor the customer behaviour and improve the UX accordingly. We also aim to implement data transfer automation with the help of PIM, thus reducing the client’s workload and eliminating errors in importing images and product as well as sales info.
Dear Optiweb team!
Thank you for the countless hours you’ve spent battling by our side. I’ve already worked with numerous agencies and can confidently say that none comes close to yours. Thank you so much for providing answers to all our questions, your responsiveness and the willingness to implement every solution on the go. I simply cannot believe that we were able to build a fully functional ecommerce page in such a short time – for two markets!
This is a project that MASS had been putting off for 10 years, and by choosing you to help us tackle it, we made the best possible decision. :) I am so happy to be able to work with such nice people! Miha, you should really be grateful to have them on your team.
Let’s keep rolling. :)
Tjaša Tršar
Marketing
