SignatureThings.com is one of the biggest online stores that sell custom design brass hardware encompassing diverse ranges from rustic to traditional to ultra-modern designs. They needed a brand-new design that would reflect the brand’s vision and also would be mobile-first with the emphasis on UX. Speed and Payment Integration were vital as well. They needed a checkout process with as few clicks as possible and personalized parts of the website based on users’ preferences. SignatureThings.com had a nopCommerce e-store 3.80 and wanted to upgrade the same. The new version of the site should have become more user-friendly and attract more customers to increase the profits and expand sales.
Challenges
The decision was made to upgrade the company's website to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core. SignatureThings.com had the following requirements while building a new online store:
- Faster search system with suggestion and spell correction feature
- A feature allowing customers to evaluate other customer's reviews
- Quick and intelligent product search
- Simplify SEO optimization
- Quick loading times
- Customer retention
- Integration with Braintree payment gateway
- Automate some nopCommerce features
- Migrate nopCommerce 3.80 data to the latest stable version of nopCommerce in a completely re-designed architecture
Solution
Execula LLC developed and upgraded the website using nopCommerce 4.30. Also to meet the requirements, new plugins were developed that are compatible with the latest version.
- 1. Flexible Menu Plugin
Execula’s Flexible Menu plugin provides easy and effective navigation in the store. With this plugin, the store admin can manage the front end top menu in an easy way right from the administration panel. It also allows adding Custom menu Items.
- 2. ChatBot
Chatbots with advanced AI provides site visitors with a “self-service” option which allowed a two-person team to stay on top of support and sales. It resulted in quick customer interaction and returning consumers.
- 3. Sale - Special Timer Plugin
The plugin was developed using nopCommerce Tier prices. Special Price Products are shown on the home page under the "Sale" section with a special price along with a timer that is set for a particular period.
- 4. Solr Search Plugin
This plugin replaced the nopCommerce default search with Apache Solr Search. Search by using the Solr Search engine is very fast and has spell check and suggestions. It shows search results not just by searching through the product's name but also by the product's tag and a short description.
- 5. Customer Review
nopCommerce code was customized to allow the customers to evaluate other customers’ reviews. Also, users got the opportunity to upload an image of their installed product while submitting the product review. The photos and the text are shown on the "Customer Review" page. The functionality in the admin section was added to approve the customer's images that should be shown on the front end. All of this made the reviews section more lively and increased sales.
- 6. SEO Plugin
The SEO plugin provides a feature to add the content of your social media pages like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram on your site. It adds sitemap-mobile.xml, sitemap-image, and ror.xml to store that is used for search engine optimization, hence driving traffic to the store.
- 7. Lazy loading
For pages to load faster, lazy loading was added on home and category pages. Now first loads the page and then the image. Also, an image optimization tool was added to reduce the image size, help to load pages faster.
- 8. Brain Tree Payment Plugin
This plugin was developed as a nopCommerce payment method that allows a user to integrate Braintree payment gateway. That integrates vault and Authorize and Delayed Capture. Ease of multiple payment systems offered convenience to users.
Result
With the support of new plugins and nopCommerce 4.30 features, not only the UI of the store was improved, but it also provided with a high-quality personalized experience for the user. As a result, SignatureThings.com got a 40% increase in the number of customers in 2 months and a 150% growth of the average order value.
Below are some site benefits leads to more revenue & profit
- Happier Users due to the latest upgrades and a faster site
- Improved store response time utilizing ultra-fast Solr queries
- More Page Views, More Conversions
- Quick and easy payment gateway
- True full-text search that your customer will love
- Utilizes fewer resources per request. More room to grow
- Improved Google Ranking and accelerated SEO and site health rank
