Dan’s‌ ‌Fan‌ ‌City:‌ ‌making‌ ‌an‌ ‌online‌ ‌store‌ ‌a‌ ‌primary‌ ‌point-of-sale‌

America’s largest ceiling fan retailer was struggling to make its online store a primary point-of-sale. They needed a platform that supports content customization and personalization instead of their antiquated Drupal CMS.

Established in 1979, Dan’s Fan City is America’s largest independent ceiling fan retailer. They manufacture their own brand of ceiling fans under the Gulf Coast Fans and TroposAir brand. Fans are sold through their own 44 retail locations, select lighting showrooms and online through their website as well through Amazon and Home Depot. Their unique online fan builder allows users to design their own fan before purchase.

Challenge

Even though Dan’s Fan City had a website for several years, it lacked the eCommerce tracking and analytics needed to justify its role as primary point-of-sale for new and existing customers. Dan’s Fan City’s challenge was to of course increase their online sales, but to also establish measurement capabilities for a multi-channel digital marketing strategy. Most of their sales were done in the brick-and-mortar stores, but the online store sales were not keeping up. One major contributor to this inertia was that their previous CMS, Drupal was antiquated and did not support content customization and personalization. It was also missing other key features and, more importantly, a look and feel that would match the standards of today’s modern online shopping experience. Dan’s Fan City understood that, as purchasing trends shift increasingly to digital platforms, they needed to compete more aggressively in the online retail fan space.

Solution

After careful analysis of Dan’s Fan City’s needs and goals, Spinutech (formerly Bayshore Solutions) concluded that the nopCommerce platform was the right one for the new website because of Dan’s Fan City’s large product catalog and amount of customization that could be attributed to each product. The nopCommerce platform would allow Dan’s Fan City to edit content, pages, and product descriptions with little difficulty. The platform’s highly customizable features also allowed for the rebuild of Dan’s Fan City’s interactive fan builder. It offered a secure, user-friendly, and cost-effective solution.

Dan’s Fan City had a large number of SKUs to import so the Bayshore team chose to leverage nopCommerce’s product import process in Excel format. The client had in-house expertise for extracting the data from their old website and formatting it into the Excel format required. This included references to thousands of product images and product attributes. Bayshore extended the import functionality to include product specification data to support advanced search filtering. Product bundles were important to Dan’s Fan City, as they sell fan kits as well as individual fan components. The product import process handled linking associated products with product attributes saving potentially months of manual data entry.

Regarding the website, many custom elements and integrations were created including:

• A sleek and easy-to-use custom fan builder plugin that allows users to design their own custom fans for purchase
• Custom discount plugin
• Custom invoice templates
• Advanced eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics that allows the site administrators to understand where shoppers are in the buying process and how visitors are using the site. This data can be used to improve conversion rates
• Integrations with PayPal, First Data and their inventory/warehouse system
• A content delivery network (CDN) that ensures fast load times across the site whether a customer is browsing or completing a transaction

From a digital marketing perspective, Spinutech (formerly Bayshore Solutions) conducted an extensive SEO and metadata revamp to improve organic rankings on search engines. The site map was also updated so search engines could crawl the site more easily. Also, many third-party landing pages were now able to be created within the Dan’s Fan City domain with the same previous functionality.

Spinutech (formerly Bayshore Solutions) also configured three email marketing automations for abandoned cart emails, a welcome email for newsletter sign-ups and a purchase follow-up email with a review generation component. Using a nopCommerce MailChimp plugin, these email campaigns were configured to trigger using nopCommerce variables.

Results

The updated website now reflects a modern eCommerce store that encourages online sales. The nopCommerce platform gives Dan’s Fan City the ability to make changes to their extensive catalog with ease. The product offerings are now highly customizable and their full catalog can be accurately displayed to users. Also, the “Design Your Fan” fan builder plugin is one of the best in the ceiling fan industry and has helped drive Dan’s Fan City’s online sales goals.

With enhanced back-end SEO, the site is seeing better search engine rankings and an increase in organic visitors, including a 112% increase in organic clicks for non-branded terms, a 71% increase in organic clicks for branded terms, and a 26% decrease in organic bounce rate.

The addition of eCommerce analytics and tracking has led to the realization of a $4.31 ROAS within existing paid search campaigns, which has been further optimized reaching a ROAS as high as $7.23.

Spinutech (formerly Bayshore Solutions) is an experienced nopCommerce Gold partner. The company delivers custom eCommerce solutions across all industries. Its certified developers build secure, scalable, and supported solutions tailored to their clients’ unique business needs utilizing the power of nopCommerce.