Mixal Shop: From Brick to Click

Can a traditional family business become a leader in digital distribution of tools and professional equipment?

Project front image

Breaking the Ice - Making a Decision

Sometimes, the hardest decisions are those we do not appreciate enough. It’s not often that you hear a small traditional family business get the courage needed to sail into the digital world full of giant sharks.

The icebreaking decision occurred after more than 10 years of outstanding business management and successful retail sales of worlds famous industry brands like Bosch, Makita, Stihl, Villager and so on. For a family shop, this is truly amazing and inspirational, considering the momentum where Mixal was on its highest peak, and yet decided to shift the focus to online sales.

And that is exactly how we would like to start this story - by giving the credit to the Mixal, and all small and medium businesses who recognized the opportunity and successfully made the transition from traditional brick retailer to online shop, eCommerce.

CHALLENGE

Create a brand new, user friendly, eCommerce website that will open a new source of income, position the Mixal Shop as a worthy competitor in saturated market, and develop the strong relationship between Mixal and it’s customers.

OUTCOME

We created fully optimized and beautiful online shop that can compete with shops of some of the largest retailers in the industry. With page load time less than 2 seconds and Average customer time spent on website more than 2,5 minutes, it is a true conversion booster. Oh, and revenue increased, more than anyone could have anticipated, and the results were seen immediately after the release, exponentially increasing every month by staggering 135% - the same percentage we were increasing the campaign budgets, making the Mixal ultimately the best ROI eCommerce website we worked on so far.

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SCOPE OF PROJECT

Strategy Definition

Web Design and Development

Quality Assurance

Google Ads Strategy and Management

Keyword & Social Media Analysis

Website Performance Monitoring

SEE THE WEBSITE

Developing the Strategy

Meeting the requirements often leads to making compromises on the way. One may predict that building an eCommerce shop is straightforward one man job, and in some cases he may be right. However, building an eCommerce solution that may compete with already established online shops (and we are speaking about brands that may have several thousand views per day), takes some time, but most importantly requires very good off the radar strategy.

After analyzing the Market Conditions and Competitors, it has been concluded that building a shop would have to become a 3-Phase solution, with the accent on the 2nd phase.

  • First, we would create a simple one page website with only important information and strong Call to Action buttons. The goal was to optimize this website in order to increase the presence in search results and create a brand awareness.
  • After that, we dived deep into creating design tailored online shop, based on client requirements and data and knowledge we gathered from analyzing traffic of the one page website.
  • The third phase was devoted to mobile users and making the shop as much mobile friendly as possible, and increasing the marketing activities as well as concentrating on Organic traffic.
wcs team Developing the Strategy

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Once we had a solid strategy, we were able to jump to work and make it happen. We believe that thorough planning, that covers not just the most important aspects but all the corner cases, is a receipt for guaranteed success with no unpleasant surprises. The only thing that surprised us was that we achieved results way above our predictions and expectations.
01

One Page Website.

We knew from the beginning that one of the key challenges the new online shop would have, is a strong relevance to visitors and for Google search engine to recognize it and boost in Organic Search. It is impossible to compete with websites that have so many visits per day, at least impossible without strong backlinks and referrals. Also, we knew that if we built online shop and invested a lot of money in AdWords, we would be seen by big players, and they could easily outpay our ads, which would mean that we would lose the only traffic source we had.

Solution was to create a one page website, something that big brands would simply ignore, and slowly build relevance in Organic Search, after which we would use it as main referral to our Shop, making the shop invulnerable to Google Ads manipulations by big players.

The one page website also had some amazing results - close to 10.000 views per month, and generated reasonable amount of income for client, all of that below the radar of big brands.

project image Google Analytics - The Constant Rise of The Organic Search
02

Design Tailored Online Shop.

As the number of visitors and orders grew every month on the one page website, in the background we were rapidly designing the new eCommerce shop from scratch. By the time we were finished, we went through several production steps:

  • Branding and sketching a clean and modern design
  • Custom developing the website in WordPress
  • QA testing and making sure everything works flawlessly
  • Maintaining and extending the Google Ads Strategy
  • Optimizing the website and reducing the page load time below 5 seconds
  • Weekly monitoring and tracking in Google Analytics and other tools
After several weeks of agile software development, we launched the brand new eCommerce shop with couple of thousand items from biggest industry brands: Bosch, Makita, Stihl, Villager and so on. All the traffic from one page website was immediately redirected to new Mixal shop, which gained free traffic at the bare launch. That is something almost impossible to do, especially in already saturated market.
03

Mobile Friendly

During our standard weekly monitoring and trying to figure out a way of improving the conversions, we found that we have a lot of unused potential originated from Mobile users. In order to recoup, we planned for a few changes:

  • Creating a brand new navigation for Mobile users, while keeping the old one for Desktop visitors (which worked perfectly for them). A goal was to give the Mobile users easier navigation and getting them to the items they are interested in much faster. We managed to accomplish this in no time.
  • Getting rid of all unnecessary website sections that were of no value to mobile users. For this we had to use Heatmap Tracking to be sure which parts of the website users ignored and why.
  • Implementation of Call and Messenger buttons for easier communication with staff, and spreading the know how much faster.
  • Another thing we did, that had an impact on both Mobile and Desktop users, is a complete product page optimization, which resulted in products being the perfect SEO tool and Organic Traffic generator. It’s like a blog on steroids. This also resulted in reducing the page load time even more - to less than 2 seconds.
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Using the Power of Brands Mixal study

Concentrating on Brands

It’s no secret that brands can help you connect with your audience as if you were brand as well. To be fair, Mixal, as a retail shop, has had it’s loyal customer structure, but in the digital world, Mixal was just an orphan, a newborn online shop that nobody has heard off, and this was ok.

In order to increase the digital brand awareness we used brands like Bosch, Makita, Stihl, Villager and so on, the brands that customers are well familiar with, to make a connection with our visitors. We managed to accomplish this through funny, yet right on spot visuals as part of our Head section on Homepage - the so called season promo activities with beautiful discounts. People dig them out and behold, a connection was born. Now, it’s up to us to keep the wheel spinning by creating new and interesting visuals as part of the Marketing strategy.
Mical Cart Cart Page Design

Conclusion

The Mixal online Shop has made a successful transition from Brick retailer to eCommerce website, while keeping the retail shop - making it the perfect Brick & Click business.

In our Journey, we managed to help Mixal position themselves in the digital world as one of the key players in professional tools and equipment industry with awesome results:

Results

More Traffic

135000 page views every month and rising

Returning Visitors

26,2% of visitors who bought on Mixal shop return to buy again

Revenue Increased

135% increas in revenue on average every month

Load Time

Page load time under 2 seconds

Session Duration

Average session duration is 3 minutes

New Source of Income

Organic trafic is generating by 16% more income than Google Ad

Can a traditional family business become a leader in digital distribution of tools and professional equipment?

The answer is yes, most definitely yes. However, the Mixal online shop is not there yet, but it is on a good path of becoming one, and we will be there once they manage to do so.

Now you understand that by hiring us, you don’t just get our Development skills, or Design craft, neither our Marketing specialties, you get the combination of all three plus the knowledge and experience of getting to the top. It’s not just about the revenue, it is about the business built to last and overcome obstacles on it’s way. Think big, and think fast, as competition is growing rapidly in all areas and industries.

Did We Do a Good Job? They Say We Did

“A great team that is always there to act quickly and efficiently,
help and recommend a new technique to increase sales! Good job team, just keep going!” Dušan Miljanović, Founder of the Mixal Shop

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