Store update and custom plugins increased the orders by 50%

SignatureThings.com sells online custom design hardware pieces of brass on their furniture website that cover the complete range from rustic to traditional to ultra-modern designs. They already had a store built on nopCommerce 3.80 but wanted to increase the profits and expand sales. The new version of the site should have become more user-friendly and attract more customers.

Challenge

The decision was made to upgrade the company's website to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core. SignatureThings.com had the following requirements while building a new online store:

Allow a store owner to add new menu and submenu easily and change it whenever required.

• To show the product with special price along with the timer.
• Faster search system with suggestion and spell correction feature.
• A feature allowing customers to evaluate other customer's reviews.
• Simplify SEO optimization.
• Pages should load faster.
• Location Address Verification system.
• Integration with Braintree payment gateway.

Solution

Execula LLC developed the site using nopCommerce 4.10. Also to meet the requirements, new plugins were developed.

Flexible Menu Plugin

Execula’s Flexible Menu plugin provides easy and effective navigation in the store. With this plugin, the store admin can manage the front end top menu in an easy way right from the administration panel. It also allows adding Custom menu Items.

Sale - Special Timer Plugin

The plugin was developed using nopCommerce Tier prices. Special Price Products are shown on the home page under "Sale" section with special price along with a timer that is set for a particular period.

Solr Search Plugin

This plugin replaced the nopCommerce default search with Apache Solr search. Search by using Solr Search engine is very fast and has spell check and suggestions. It shows search results not just by searching through product's name but also by product's tag and short description.

Customer Review

nopCommerce code was customized to allow the customers to evaluate other customers’ reviews. Also, users got the opportunity to upload an image of their installed product while submitting the product review. The photos and the text are shown on the "Customer Review" page. The functionality in the admin section was added to approve the customer's images that should be shown on front end. All of this made the reviews section more lively and increased sales.

SEO Plugin

The SEO plugin provides a feature to add the content of your social media pages like Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram in your site. It adds sitemap-mobile.xml, sitemap-image, and ror.xml to store that is used for search engine optimization, hence driving traffic to the store.

Lazy loading

For pages to load faster, lazy loading was added on home and category pages. Now first loads the page and then the image. Also, image optimization tool was added to reduce the image size, help to load pages faster.

Address Verification System

Execula LLC customized nopCommerce code to check if the address entered by a user in front end or admin area is correct before saving it in the database. It also suggests the correct address matching. It uses tax cloud address verification API to verify the address.

Brain Tree Payment Plugin

This plugin was developed as a nopCommerce payment method that allows a user to integrate Braintree payment gateway. That integrates vault and Authorize and Delayed Capture.

Result

With the support of new plugins and nopCommerce 4.1 features, not only the UI of the store was improved, but it also provided with a high-quality personalized experience for the user. In result, SignatureThings.com got 20% increase in the number of customers in 2 months and 50% growth of the average order value.