Poingdestres were having issues with their Magento eCommerce site which were drastically reducing their sales. We worked quickly but effectively to conduct a full website audit in order to be able to fully resolve the issues. We also significantly improved the user experience.
Poingdestres had recently purchased a Magento eCommerce site, but within days of the site going live, they became concerned about the site’s performance and the fact that it was not being backed up. Over the next few weeks and months, Poingdestres noticed their sales drop dramatically - and the whole situation became increasingly stressful. Having lost confidence in their web company, Poingdestres came to us for advice after a positive referral from a business associate. We discussed their current situation and listened to their concerns and frustrations over falling sales despite the significant financial investment they made to their premium Magento solution.
A full website audit revealed the extent of the situation. There were major errors, such as W3C validation issues and lots of duplicated content - mostly down to bad coding convention. It also turned out that the admin account of Magento had been locked down, which was limiting Poingdestres ability to use their own site. Some of the other issues included content descriptions that ended mid-sentence, no meta tags, and pricing that was only visible when you clicked into a product.
Our initial priority was to set up a quality control process so all on-page content and the new meta tags could be thoroughly checked. Previously, when a product was no longer available, the site simply went to a 404 error page, to resolve this, we created a Magento plugin to redirect these pages to the product’s replacement. Poingdestres website had French and German shop fronts, but since Poingdestres wasn't selling to these countries (and never wanted to), we disabled them and redirected the now unused URLs. Their website, as is the case with many eCommerce platforms, had sort functions which allow users to filter products, but Google sees these pages as duplicate content, which negatively affects SEO. Our technical team did some work to make Google ignore these extra pages, reducing the number of duplicates from around 18,000 to less than 100.
Our next priority was improving the UX. To do this, we allowed customers to see an item’s price without clicking into it, and also added a single page checkout and an address finder, so users only need to enter a postcode. All of this was designed to reduce the number of steps required for a customer to complete a sale. We also added an abandoned cart email system, which automated the process of reclaiming any lost sales. Once our work was done, we provided training to the Poingdestres team so that they were confident enough to use more advanced functions of their site, rather than just updating content and adding new products.
Poingdestres' traffic has almost completely recovered, only slightly short of where it was before their migration to Magento - and online sales are extremely healthy.
We spoke with Stephen Poingdestres, the owner, to see how he thought our website upgrades and marketing work were performing. His reply was simply:
Stephen Poingdestres, Owner
"This is the first time that we have felt in control of our website."
