When a large part of your business is reliant upon a successful and easy to use website, the thought of making any significant changes, to an existing site, can bring about a feeling of fear. We’d had our WordPress site for about six years. It had generally served us well but it didn’t quite do all the things we wanted it to and we often had little niggles with it which gave me sleepless nights!
Having worked with Business Think on a previous SEO project, I asked for the existing site to be transferred to Shopify. This was a delicate process, which was expertly handled by Elliot. He worked hard to ensure our timeframe was met, whenever I asked questions he always came back promptly with an answer and, if necessary, was always there on the end of the phone if a more detailed discussion was required. Through Zoom workshops, he trained our team to use the new platform and he was always available for them to contact, should they have questions or queries. Preserving our existing SEO was key and he made sure that, when transferring from one platform to another, everything was preserved.
Elliot is a really good listener, he is an excellent communicator and works promptly to deadlines, answers emails quickly and is a lovely person to have on our team. I’m really glad that we found Elliot and chose him to build our Shopify website; having the new platform and his measured advice and experience on hand has certainly helped our online business to grow. We now have a website which is easy for us to edit, straightforward for our customers to use, is reliable, looks great and ranks better than it ever has before.
Helen at Helen Round
Our work with Helen Round
I first met Helen while delivering digital marketing support for a Government Funded scheme. The discussion focused on search engine optimisation and issues she was experiencing with her current WordPress website, which was built by another designer. SEO, speed and performance tests were completed, and actions recommended to address the issues. Sometime after this Helen made contact again and started asking questions about Shopify for e-commerce and whether the business would be better off on this platform, compared to WordPress. After explaining the advantages, the decision was taken to make the switch.
As with all migration projects, when building a new website, the risk to search engine ranking is always a factor and the data was carefully prepared and converted into the new technology. The main challenge was the previous WordPress website itself, which had been built by another designer using a visual editor. This bespoke coding meant the data could not be migrated in its current form. As a result, each product and blog post had to be adjusted to ensure the content worked as intended on the Shopify platform. Many hours were spent getting this right. With over one thousand individual pages on the Helen Round website, each one had to be manually checked before proceeding.
Another complicating factor was the need to provide both wholesale and retail functionality. As a result, different types of customer account were needed, variable pricing, rules on ordering quantities and geographic tax differences. This functionality is not standard with the core Shopify package and their own wholesale solution is priced $24,000 per annum in hosting alone, making it inaccessible to smaller businesses. Using a blend of add-ons and custom coding, the equivalent wholesale solution was delivered at a fraction of that cost.
I really enjoy working with Helen, who is constantly looking to learn and always positive. The first thing Helen did was sign up at Shopify tutorials and start researching what else the e-commerce platform can do. From time to time, an email will arrive from Helen explaining she’s heard a new Shopify announcement or discovered an app that can help her customers. I think that’s one of the major advantages of Shopify, everything is within your control. Plus, those issues with the old WordPress version vanished the day the new Shopify website launched.
It is clear that Helen and her team constantly strive to do the very best they can for their customers. That approach is irresistible and during the project they really made me feel a part of their team.
Thank you Helen for asking Business Think to work on this project.
Elliot Forte at Business Think
