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How did the project start?
When the Menswear Site contacted Visualsoft there was an immediate air of excitement in the studio. Based in the South of England, the website represented the amalgamation of four distinct, individual stores; Mirage Menswear, Basement Menswear and Escape Menswear. Each highly individual store offers a wide selection of brands encompassing a range of today's popular fashion genres. The Menswear Site was largely developed by the company in house, with a team of web specialists growing the site successfully online for a number of years. When the site hit a ceiling of turnover, caused by a system simply unable to cope with further business growth, the option to utilise a third party eCommerce specialist became more appealing.
Having worked with over 30 fashion clients, Visualsoft was acutely aware of the Menswear Site and its prominance online. Being approached to supply technology and consultancy going forward; effectively making Visualsoft the online partner of the Menswear Site was a great acknowledgment of the years of research and development placed into specialising and excelling in eCommerce.
What options did you consider?
The Menswear Site were recommended to Visualsoft by Touchretail, who provided the EPOS solution for their stores and had previously worked closely with Visualsoft in developing successful solutions for clients including Shop Rugby and Unique Menswear in similar fields of retail. The Menswear Site eventually chose Visualsoft as their web partner based on a huge portfolio of clients offering glowing references. They also recognised Visualsoft's willing and proactivity in working to drive forward an online business long after a website has been delivered.
The only solution going forward was to retire the old website and build a new site based on the solid Visualsoft eCommerce platform. The site was built completely bespoke, however, where technologies had been developed previously, code was reused, keeping development costs low. This was especially important in the case of the Menswear Site, as the company required one of the most advanced website solutions Visualsoft had developed since the Charles Clinkard website.
Features of the new site included EBay Integration, which formed a huge marketing arm for the business and could be managed from the back end of the Menswear Site. A lot of attention was paid to design, creating a contemporary and striking style, whilst providing a perfect stage to show off products. Layout and navigation was largely based on years of research into user behavior and AB testing. This in principle could more than double sales on a site without ever introducing any more traffic, through doubling user conversions based on trust and confidence and making use of cross/ up sell features.
What help and expertise did you receive?
The Menswear Site project was built fully bespoke within the Visualsoft studio in Stockton. Visualsoft worked closely with the Menswear Site to understand their target market and learn in detail their web strategy to date. As the business was well established online, both parties felt it would be beneficial to also work closely with Touch Retail to link the website to the in house stock control system. This would allow stock levels on the web and in store to be updated instantly, maximising order fulfillment.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
One of the main challenges in working with the Menswear Site was in maintaining the levels of success the site had achieved for a number of brands and key search terms. When a brand does well online, often greater reserves of stock will be bought; if this demand drops through slumping SEO performance, it can be a costly exercise. To prevent this, Visualsoft investigated the performance of the current website through Google analytics and began structuring the site towards maintaining levels of presence in key areas as well as looking to build search engine performance widely across all products and brands.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
Key outcomes of redeveloping the Menswearsite.com have included:
Dramatically increased sales almost immediately after launch - approximately 700% growth.
Traffic has increased by approximately 300% with zero spend on marketing.
As stunning as these results have been, there have also been problems created through such huge online growth in such a short period of time. Stock issues occured, with a number of the stores which feed stock to the website with empty shelves. Due to these problems, the Menswear Site has never had the opportunity to run pay per click marketing alongside the website and is only just structuring a campaign with stock issues being resolved.
The site continues increase in popularity with Google with virtually all titles for the 2000+ items of stock listing as number one in Google. Further to this, many of the highly competitive brands in the Menswear Site are now listing on the front page of Google, generating a wealth of 'buying traffic.'
In examining why the Menswearsite has been successful, a number of conclusions can be drawn. The Visualsoft eCommerce platform is a highly flexible, proven foundation for online businesses to grow. In a marketplace where techincal excellence is paramount, the Menswear Site has all of the tools at their disposal to become one of the UKs most prolific fashion websites. Success has been achieved because of the Menswear Site taking on board consultancy in SEO and free marketing strategies from Visualsoft and putting them into practise with great intelligence and drive; thus making the most of the platform. A fairly clumsy analogy might be that of a leading race car driver utilising the best car and supported by the best techncial team.
What are your plans for the future?
Plans for the immediate future can now be put into action, as stock issues have now been addressed and new technologies have been put in place to assist dispatch. These have included integrating with the Royal Mail to the level of being able to print off labels for parcels through the backend of the website. The Menswear Site recently visited Visualsoft (for the first time) and alongside Visualsoft's Google Adwords qualified members of staff spent a day developing a pay per click strategy which will inevitably see further increased sales. Additional options over the coming year include integrating the stock on the Menswear Site with Amazon to again further significantly increase sales.
