We’ve Launched a New E-Commerce Store for Shonn Brothers…

We’re pleased to announce that following on from our SEO and PPC work completed over the past seven years, Shonn Brothers have commissioned us to design and build a new website as their business goes from strength to strength online. This was a complex build with layers of functionality and a task that our developers were keen to take on.

With Magento1 coming to the end of life, the website was lacking in terms of both functionality and design. As an international wholesale business they needed to migrate their website over to a secure and reliable platform that could withstand the high amount of orders received from their multitude of customers: WordPress was the perfect solution.

WordPress could provide the reliability required by the business, as well as ensure the site was current, modern and made the best use of current technologies. The move from Magento 1 to WordPress would also ensure that the website had a clear upgrade path for the future, with no end-of-life risk.

The Design

Instead of completely redesigning the website, a design ‘refresh’ was decided upon. This was a tactful decision as many of the business’s customers are repeat users and understood the website’s design and frontend functionality. Therefore, it was essential that the user experience (UX) on site was the same. The new website holds some of the traditional elements of the previous site, but with the added use of the latest technologies on offer to create new graphics and bring the site into 2020.

The Build

With over 15,000 products and 25,000 customers, all of whom had account information and order history to transfer over to the new site: the build of this website was to be one of our biggest web projects our team have faced. The new website also needed to be linked to an in-house stock system so third parties, like Manchester based company Evo-Soft of whom we worked with on the project, were able to complete integrations. 

With orders being made every few minutes, the current website had to remain live at all times, so it was essential that our team worked hard behind the scenes building the new version of the site. Careful preparation and planning was put into place to ensure new orders and customer account were seamlessly transferred over, an impressive achievement by our team.

The website regularly sees high levels of traffic at all points of the day, which is why we built the website on its own dedicated cloud server, with a stack specifically built to help manage the amount of users and orders.

“It’s been a pleasure working with the team at Shonn Brothers. The level of design and development involved within this project has allowed our team to really showcase what we can do with e-commerce and has stood us in good stead for future projects too. It’s great to work on these types of websites, that are completely business critical.”

Gary, Technical Director

The new website will also allow the wholesaler business to have greater exposure within Google, and our SEO and PPC team are already working hard to heighten this exposure with keyword rich descriptions, internal links and a bidding strategy to target users of the website who don’t place an order within 30 days.

We’re incredibly proud of our work on this new website and how well our team dealt with such a huge build. You can check out the impressive new site here.