In the early months of 2020 everyone could see that the global "channel shift" toward e-commerce would be much accelerated by lockdowns and pandemic restrictions. Business opportunities would arise ...  but HK-based health/wellness retailer IMI was far from ready for them, as we shall see. 

Discovery

After a thorough review of their online store we identified a series of critical problems. These findings would become our success metrics for the entire project:

Their domain ranked badly in Google. The site rendered incorrectly on mobile. Loading times were slow. Conversions were patchy. Customer retention was at an all-time low. Average order values were sluggish. Every month they were losing market share to competitors. 

Our Process

After interviewing key management and getting to know the brand we presented mood boards and design concepts. We had to capture the existing identity - trustworthy, professional, clinical - but bring it up-to-date with a more contemporary look and feel. 

These concepts we later fleshed out into mockups and page templates.

On-trend, minimal design. 

To fully meet the brief and solve the mobile screen issues of the legacy site, it was critical for us to follow a “mobile first” design practice, so we began with the ubiquitous “hamburger” menu. As screen widths increase, this fleshes out into a more-functional navigation system on tablets and smaller laptops, and then further on to a detailed “maxi-menu” on large screens, showing descriptive text, images and related articles within each category menu item’s dropdown panel. 

Up-to-date content management system 

We opted to use an open source platform for the site, Drupal 9 with its popular Commerce module. This gave us great flexibility during the build, and allowed us to approach complex business logic with custom modules developed specifically for IMI. 

CMS user “roles” were created for various user levels within the client team (and within our team) with granular permissioning: their blogging team can’t accidentally delete a product category, the warehouse can view open orders but not edit prices, and so on. 

SEO triumph

Fixing the slow loading time and the site’s mobile-responsiveness alone would have considerably boosted the site’s SEO rank, but we took it much, much further. 

Identifying a series of high-value, low-competition keywords, we created a content strategy for IMI’s in-house writers to pursue. This has enabled them to create articles which not only rank, and generate traffic, but also convert that traffic into sales. 

We identified the category and subcategory pages (e.g. “probiotics” or “fish oil”) as potential gateways to the site – pages designed to appear in search, pull people in, and encourage those people to explore the site and buy products. Adding descriptive text to these pages caused the search engines to index them and over a few weeks we were able to watch the climb through the rankings, in many cases to the top of Google’s results for the given term. 
Needless to say, all of this work boosted visits to the site considerably: traffic rose from \~100 day for the old site to well over 200 unique visits per day now. 

Multiple categories, multiple languages, multiple shipping and payment methods

With over 700 products split between 53 categories & subcategories, a Chinese language version, multiple contact forms, different shipping methods matching different (but overlapping) geographical regions, over 20 CMS users and a product grid with multiple filtering and sorting parameters, there was a lot to think about. 

The challenge was to reach the end of the process with a site which_looks_ simple and uncluttered (even though, under the hood, it is far from simple). 

Email marketing

IMI's website is tightly integrated with their email marketing platform. Not only can website visitors sign up to the newsletter, but also customers' records on the email platform are updated every time a user makes a purchase, so IMI can send targeted email campaigns to new registrants, or to long-term loyal customers, or to first time buyers. 

We can even trigger an email sequence when specific products are sold: to ask for feedback, share product-specific support and news, or run prize draw competitions. The possibilities are endless. 

This detail-focused communication has enabled IMI to increase their Repeat Customer Rate from 28% to 37%. 

Custom integrations

Certain IMI products require refrigerated transport - this affects which delivery services can carry orders containing those items. The choice of delivery service affects delivery times and charges, all of which needs to be displayed to the buyer in real time at checkout. You couldn't do that with Shopify! 

Culture of Ongoing Improvements 

Rather than just launching our websites and moving on, we strongly believe in creating a culture of ongoing improvement. To this end, we have been conducting an ongoing Conversion Rate Optimisation campaign to measure and optimise the performance of various website elements. The best part? It will never end!