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How did the project start?
Established in 1966, LD Mountain Centre was one of the UK’s first shops dedicated to the needs of the outdoor enthusiast. Now, with customers ranging from pioneers like Sir Chris Bonnington and Alan Hinkes OBE to school trippers, World Challenge and Duke of Edinburgh Award participants and those of us who just like to escape at the weekend or a few times a year, 2008 was the right time for us to finally venture into selling online. With increasing pressure from the high-street chains in our industry added to the regular requests we receive from our customers asking when we will open an online store, it made commercial sense to do so once we had decided on the most appropriate business model and found an expert partner we could trust.
We ultimately chose specialist ecommerce agency Wansford Digital, only a stone’s throw from our store in Newcastle, to build us a bespoke online store based on their Hyperia Commerce software.
What options did you consider?
We initially contacted Business Link to see if they could recommend a supplier we could work with to design our new online store and meet all our expectations. They provided us with a list of local suppliers who all had experience building ecommerce websites.
Having spoken to a handful of them we eventually decided to work with Wansford Digital, based in Newcastle’s Quayside, as we felt they had the best all-round experience and could guide us every step of the way, not just in designing the website but advising on everything from marketing to strategy to legal and banking implications.
As this was our first online store we would have to pull together all the product information for the thousands of products lines we stock and wanted to sell on the website, so it was crucial that the provider we chose could make this as quick and painless a process as possible. Wansford use their own in-house software, Hyperia Commerce, to power their online stores.
One of the key features of this software is its ability to import product information and photographs in bulk from Excel spreadsheets. This meant we could pull together and compose all the product content offline and add it to the website all in one go much more quickly than if each product had to be added one-by-one.
What help and expertise did you receive?
As previously stated we used an external supplier, Wansford Digital, for the actual design & build of the website and the on-going marketing thereafter as they had broad experience in ecommerce website design, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising campaigns, price comparison engines and affiliate marketing. We also used a part-time member of staff who is a professional photographer to take various shots of the interior and frontage of the store for use throughout the website.
Lastly we hired two new members of staff whose initial responsibility would be to pull together all the product content for our huge range of suppliers such as Berghaus, The North Face, Burton and Salomon, and long-term they were to become members of the main shop staff whilst also helping to fulfil orders from the website.
Once the website had been built, Wansford Digital provided on-site training to our staff covering the use of the website administration software as well as general-purpose search engine training so that any new content we add ourselves we can ensure it is well-written and will help boost our presence on the likes of Google.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
We had actually instigated this project a few years earlier with another supplier but it ultimately fell through for various reasons before it could even get started and so we learned from the mistakes we’d made previously before approaching another agency this time. Perhaps the biggest task was the rather mundane job of collating all the product information to go on the website.
Wansford Digital advised that if we really wanted to see success with the shop in a short timeframe we should try to write original content for as many of the products as possible rather than rely on the standard blurb that the manufacturers supply and probably two-thirds of the competitors in the industry use on their own websites.
So, listening to that advice and after receiving some search engine optimisation tips from Wansford we undertook this mammoth task and it required approximately 3 months to complete but has certainly been worth the investment in time.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
The launch of the LD Mountain Centre shop has been a massive success so far, exceeding all our initial expectations. We’ve received lots of positive feedback from both new and existing customers and as a result of the global nature of the store, compared to a physical shop in Newcastle city centre, we are picking up much more business outside of the North East region.
Commercially, the site has been very successful, hitting a six-figure turnover within the first 3 months since launch and have received 90,000 visitors since November 08. The proportion of sales we receive from Google Shopping is also much higher than we expected and is proving a very effective marketing vehicle.
What are your plans for the future?
As a result of the rapid success of the store we have accelerated our plans and intend to invest wisely in a further range of online marketing services with Wansford Digital. We’ve already began testing some electronic mailshots and this has proved fruitful but I main priority is to further improve our visibility on the search engines like Google by investing in search engine optimisation and running measured pay-per-click campaigns. We are considering looking at more niche marketing areas too such as the other price comparison sites like Kelkoo and channels like affiliate marketing.
We also intend to expand the range of products offered online now that we’ve proven the site works with the initial range we started out with. As the commercial success continues we’ll also need to streamline our fulfilment operation and we are already looking at integrating our website with our stock control system, Top-to-Toe, which Wansford will be able to handle as they’ve done this with many other systems such Sage, Microsoft and CyberTill.
