The Old Ecommerce Store
You probably don’t remember the Regina Pats previous Ecommerce store, unless you ordered something from it in years past. It was built in the 90s on the Magento platform. At the time it was cutting-edge technology. However, this was not a very user-friendly website, to both those purchasing from it and those administering it. We found working with Magento overall to be a nightmare and apparently so did a few other people ( Read this or this or this).
Additionally there were costs associated with upgrading versions of Magento and as a result these upgrades had not been made regularly by the Regina Pats and eventually in Late 2015 the Regina Pat’s store just quit working. As you can imagine, online sales are very important to an organization like the Regina Pats so they asked us for recommendations on a new solution.
We’ve done a number of projects now, partnering with ECWID (that stands for Ecommerce Widget) which is a third-party store, that integrates really nicely with WordPress, but is completely contained on ECWID servers. Thsi means that the client can easily manage their own account settings with ECWID, all the contents of their store, including images are stored on ECWID’s servers which makes for way faster load times and a much smoother, faster web experience for users that are not on the Ecommerce pages, as the site in general retains a smaller footprint and thus loads faster and in the end, gets a boost in SEO because of that ( when compared with other stores).
So we didn’t hesitate. We explained ECWID’s offerings to the Regina Pats and they were thrilled. Along with everything listed above, there were a number of other features that an ECWID store offered that they didn’t have or were unsatisfied with the old Magento platform. Features such as:
- Displaying Sale Prices
- Inventory levels on products
- Load Website Banners above the store ( to advertise specials and promotions)
- Easily change the order of Categories and Products within a Category
- Easily editable font options that were NOT in html)
- Product codes listed on invoices
So we made the switch. We worked closely with Karen Magnus over at the Regina Pats and she was great at supplying high quality photographs as well as content for the store. In fact in no time at all we had everything built and Karen trained so she could easily take over the store content entry. She found it an easy transition and in less than 2 weeks had her complete inventory entered, priced, categorized etc.
This project took place very quickly but is was not rushed! The Pats now have a beautiful, fully responsive and mobile-friendly ecommerce website that handles not only retail sales but Karen has also found a way to handle Season Ticket renewals on it as well – making that process smooth and simple for her valued season ticket holders!
We loved working with Karen and the Regina Pats! If you have a product that you would like to sell on the web and increase the size of your current market – than we can help. Give us a call at 306-586-6118!