The Hat Club were in trouble. With the imminent launch of their new brand, the eCommerce component of the project wasn’t making progress.
We were brought in as the clean up crew for a project that was failing. Time was running out.
After our initial appraisal, we have to give the client the bad news.
There was no saving the new website that was in the process of being built by another agency. We could exhaust a budget to get some fixes completed, however we believed the money would be better spent on the existing working site, than applying band aids over band aids on the ‘new site’.
Our recommendation was to dump the new website project, and focus the limited funds on a fixed set of specific improvements to the brand expression of the existing live site. We may also see a mild improvement to conversion by correcting a few bad usability practices.
We were able to successfully achieve the strict timelines set by the client. The Hat Club brand launched to internal and external praise.
We exceeded their expectation on what we were able to achieve given the circumstances.
As a result of our modifications, we were also able to improve the conversion rate on the website by 10%.
Initial investigation
The initial investigation focused on the good, and the bad and the ugly of the solution that had been developed.
This included how well the Shopify solution had been coded so far, in addition to eCommerce tactics to ensure conversion.
Unfortunately, the implementation was seen as extremely lacking, and was a step down from the ‘old’ website that was already live. Not only was the design terrible, but the technical code was a mess and not in line with current common practice.
The account required management across international time zones
The Hat Club is based in the United States, with key stakeholders in the UK. We managed the time difference by consolidating our communications in our project management software and time-shifting our meetings to time that fit within business hours for the US and UK.
More time was invested in account management to make communications slightly more explicit and detailed as the round trip for a clarification would cost the project a day. Key projects deliverables were also scheduled to coincide with opportunities to save a day. e.g Delivering on a friday, enabled The Hat Club to have the full friday for review ready for Lamb on Monday.
Biggest brand-bang for a fixed budget
With a limited budget, we needed to focus on the elements and page that would have the most impact. For most eCommerce websites these are the header, home and product page as well as some basic mobile usability problems.
Header, home and product page
The header is valuable as all pages are affected by it’s improvement.
The homepage defines the first impression of the business, so improving the quality of this page impacts on all new business.
The product page is where people decide to make the purchase. This is also the place where eCommerce conversion optimisation tactics are best applied.
Shopify Plus
The Hat Club is hosted on Shopify Plus.
This allowed us a number of key modifications to the checkout process to reinforce the brand messaging.