The Challenge & Solution
Stella Beauty needed a solid ecommerce website that would out perform their previous Wix website both in terms of design and functionality. They had grand ideas of being able to easily maintain their stock and their orders with their website being linked into their shipping and fulfillment system, as well as being able to simply and quickly apply discounts to individual products, categories or add Buy 1 Get 1 style promotions. Of course the website needed to look clean and modern, outdoing the competition, as well as being easy to use and provide their customers with a unique shopping experience and reward them for their loyalty.
To come up with the right solution for Stella Beauty required a lot of research before we could even go into the development stage. We needed to investigate the best platform and all the additional addons or custom development that would be required. Eventually, after Magento 2 was ruled out, we settled on WordPress and WooCommerce. From there we build stunning custom designed templates that they could use across various pages and for their products, imported all their products across from Wix and started building the advanced features that would help them stand out. Now the site stands proud, capable of almost anything they can think of!
Dynamic Pricing Rules
One of the biggest and most important features for Stella Beauty was the ability to create sales and promotions quickly and easily. This included being able to add discounts for different customers, blanket percentage discounts, free products when certain conditions are met (such as Buy One Get One) and the ability to award users fixed price discounts. All of these needed to be able to set at product, category and user level, with a few of them needing to apply at the cart when a variety of rules and conditions had been met. To solve this we research a variety of WooCommerce plugins and tested those which met our requirements. The testing phase is important so that we can make sure no conflict arise and the site doesn’t break.
Shipping & Loyalty Rewards
Another request was to create a system that would eliminate issues they were having with customers inputting their address details incorrectly. They also wanted a system that could reduce the time spent on fulfilling orders. Ultimately we decided with them that GoSweetSpot was the best bet, along with a plugin developed by a New Zealand company called AddressFinder. Integrating these two was a reasonable straight forward task but saves Stella Beauty a significant amount of time and money!
The task we had set out for us here was to recreate a user experience that would engage their customers and increase repeat purchases. One of the best ways of doing this for a consumer products website is by using a loyalty program. For Stella Beauty we found, installed and configured a plugin called SUMO Reward Points which allows use to manage how users earn points and then allow them to purchase products on the site with the points that they have earned.