“EZ Marketing always bring great ideas to the table in a refreshing way. They helped our business to go online in 2015 and supported all aspects of operations ever since from web design to customer care. Find a way to work with them. You’ll be glad you did.”
Edward Redmond, The Owner
Background
SouthEast Wetsuits branched out from our e-commerce efforts with Lawler’s of Morriscastle. As a holiday resort, it combines a lot of different businesses, a Surf Shop, a groceries shop, a Take Away and a Beach Club.
Lawler’s stocked a great value Osprey wetsuits, which is not a very well known brand on the Irish market, but its level entry prices make these wetsuits a great proposition for a beginner or a holiday maker, looking for a cheap but well-made wetsuit.
In 2015 we decided to expand some of the surf shop stock online and added an e-commerce section to an existing website. We ran a small Google Adwords campaign for the summer period, which did create some online sales, but also caused some confusion, as people who were looking to buy Osprey wetsuits were brought to a website that was showcasing their Take Away offerings.
In December 2015, we recommended separating the two businesses and designed and launched Lawlers Online Shop on lawlersonlineshop.ie domain. The website was fully optimised and all redirect from a previous domains were set up to retain and benefit from the existing rankings.
Challenge
At the time the product mix would include wetsuits, surf boards, beach essentials (clothing, footwear, windbreaks, kites, etc.) and even camping gear. While it was a decent website overall, EZ Marketing team felt that it is lacking identity, so before the summer season start we decided to completely re-brand this branch of the business and gave it a catchy and memorable new name – SouthEast Wetsuits.
After a brand re-adjustment and a smaller SEO redirect management campaign the website was relaunched at southeastwetsuits.ie and we pressed on promoting and advertising the business. The first month of sales exceeded all expectations and we had to re-stock our warehouse and we also started expanding the product mix into new brands.
An interesting observation that is only obvious to those who actually manage the sales. Most web designers and even digital marketing experts seem to never think about these things enough. We are no better- we didn’t really have a good understanding of running an online business until we started doing it first hand. When your online sales are down- first look into improving your website’s usability! Find where the customers get stuck, find how easy it is to check out, check all devices and go through the process as if you have never shopped online before. Ask someone who never shopped online before to give it a go as a test order. Talk to your customers. This is the only way to troubleshoot the issues.
Solution
In this particular case a web master and an operational manager “hats” we had to wear combined in a revelation! The theme we used to design the website in December was too heavy, slow loading, resulting in abandoned carts. What was more scary – it was not compatible with the major new June update of the Woocommerce- the very core of the website’s shopping engine. We felt the results immediately and our sales dropped dramatically in an instant! Getting through to the theme developers proved a challenge as it often happens in web development business. (No, most of the web designers do not code the whole thing from scratch, this is not the 90s!)
If we were not involved in this business so deeply, we would probably never have even blamed the theme for the drop in sales. Yet, we opted to change it altogether, to something that was cleaner, lighter, extremely easy to shop on, this immediately eliminated the issues with the whole checkout process and the new website was very fast to load and easy to navigate.
At the start we used Paypal Express as a payment method, however unlike what Paypal is trying to make vendor believe, it is not a hassle-free solution, with very expensive fees, awful customer service and (a cherry on top) we discovered that mobile Paypal Express checkout is missing a guest checkout option ( even though it was enabled in all our settings), forcing mobile shoppers to create a Paypal account – which in 60% cases resulted in dropped checkout and loss of a sale. Thanks, Paypal and see ya!
We are now using a direct credit card payment form directly on our checkout page, which has been secured with an SSL certificate to protect our customers’ sensitive data.
EZ Marketing is currently offering a complete operations management service – we manage the online shop, the stock, customer support by email and phone, the sales management and orders processing and dispatch. In addition we provide all digital marketing (SEO, Social Media marketing,) Graphic Design and PPC campaigns management. Our conversion rates for Google Adwords Management during May-September 2016 were pretty impressive at 6.5%, which is average for the top25% of all businesses (according to Wordstream research) and the cost per click was brought down to under 20c.
Results
The online sales on southeastwetsuits.ie (comparing to 2015 at lawlers.ie) have soared by a massive ten-fold. We have confidently expanded the product range into more expensive semi-professional sportswear brand Alder, and it has been a great success. Considering that we started our online sales season only at the end of April and all the issues we had up until the end of June in 2016 – the future season’s sales are looking bright.
