WeddingFavours.ca
Miva Ecommerce Design

Web Development, Customization, Data Transfer, Matching Blog

Miva Ecommerce Design & Development

Business Overview

Weddingfavours.ca began in 2005 as a home based business and over time outgrew its small roots. 14 years later, the website has grown to include 50+ product lines and over 6,000 products. Offering brides one-on-one service and the ability to personalize and truly customize their items gave Weddingfavours.ca the competitive edge in the market.

“We had worked with Glendale Designs in the past and knew without a doubt we wanted to work with them again. When it comes to website design, consulting, and e-commerce best practices, we know they are the best! ” Christine Rozon

THE CHALLENGE

While the previous website design was clean-looking and easy to use, the back-end needed some updating to keep up with the highly competitive wedding market. The checkout process was a little buggy and often resulted in customer service inquiries or abandoned carts. Older 3rd-party modules needed to be removed to increase site speed and minimize potential future update issues. The site needed to be converted to full HTTPS from the standard HTTP to increase security and comply with the increasing safety requirements issued by Google.

Weddingfavours.ca realized 44% of their market was mobile driven, yet that traffic was not converting to sales. The mobile site was often forgotten which sometimes led to missing or inaccurate information. Search was tedious unless you knew exactly what to search for, leading to the best selling and featured products often being missed by shoppers. Overall, the mobile site was lacking the functionality and features of the desktop site.

Following in the footsteps of the main site, the Weddingfavours.ca blog was also in need of restructuring to ensure it would be easy and attractive for the customers to navigate, as well as the staff of Weddingfavours.ca to update.

THE SOLUTION

The first step in resolving the conversion rate of visitors to sales was to restructure the site into a responsive format. Not only would this help to cut down on future maintenance of the site and decrease aesthetic glitches, it would also be much more appealing to the sharply increasing number of customers visiting the site on mobile devices. The cleaner look of the responsive site on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets will lead to fewer frustrated customers abandoning their carts and shopping elsewhere. Furthermore, when a customer does have trouble on the site and reaches out to customer service for help, the staff will now confidently be able to direct the customer to a solution, sure that the mobile site is providing the same information and design as the desktop site.

THE PROCESS

In restructuring the bones of the site, the Glendale team was able to entirely remove outdated modules and replace them with Miva built-in features. This will ensure that as Miva continues with version updates, the Weddingfavours.ca site will receive the same support, reducing glitches and bugs, and lowering the amount of maintenance needed overall. This played a large role in the reorganization of the checkout process. Combining the new look, updated coding, and HTTPS security, the checkout is now a smooth and secure process, providing more peace of mind for the customers.

While Searchspring worked well for the desktop version, the same search capabilities were unavailable for mobile users, which led to confusion and difficulties for the customer. The updated responsive site allows Glendale to integrate Searchspring allowing for more comprehensive navigation and search as well as a sleeker look on both versions of the site.

Finally, with the fresh new look that was inevitably on its way for the site, the outdated style of the blog would also need a face-lift. The blog would need to be converted to a responsive format to ensure a stream-lined look that would be easy to navigate for the customers, as well as easy to maintain for the staff at Weddingfavours.ca

THE RESULTS

The results of the work performed by the Glendale team are a visible increase in conversion rates from mobile visitors to actual sales. The attractive and clean design provides an easy-to-use platform for all shoppers. With the images, layouts, search options, and checkout now consistent across both versions of the site, customers are more easily able to navigate themselves through their shopping without needing to contact customer service. If however, a customer does need help, the staff can easily guide them through to a quick solution knowing that information is consistent across all mobile and desktop platforms.

Combining increased visibility (thanks to complying to Google’s security requirements), ease of use, and the addition of Miva-provided features offering easy maintenance and updates, Weddingfavours.ca will reap the benefits of these changes for years.

As always, Glendale Designs was fantastic to deal with. We’ve used Glendale Design on multiple occasions for website changes and have used their services for two major website overhauls. If you need ANY web work done I highly recommend using Glendale Designs. They are always professional and willing to give you their honest opinion and recommendations. Work is done efficiently and timely. If there are any issues they are quick to respond and help. Great work! I look forward to using your services in the future.