150% increase in SEO metrics in a three months

Challenge

Classic requirements:

Newline Trophy sells custom manufactured awards of crystal, glass, acrylic as well as traditional trophies with multiple options. Traditional trophies are available in multiple sizes and comprised of sports figurines, column colours and trim options. Looking for a way to enhance the customer online experience, they required an online application to present clients a way to design virtual awards and trophies. In addition to client online preview, it was important to have thumbnail images and components tracked to the cart and editable prior to final conversion.

Development requirements:

• Automate some nopCommerce features that affect product pricing, SEO and shipping calculations
• Provide a feature, whereby admin could create product templates and use them later to create SEO rich virtual products with ease, publish and assign to appropriate sports-related categories
• Develop a custom product builder functionality enabling end user simple customization tools to design a product based on pre-selected and available components. To collect engraving or award text for custom products that are offered with personalization and support these functionalities, designing a better user experience with performance optimizations
• All features above developed using a nopCommerce plugin for future migration to newer nopCommerce versions

The total challenge for the project included the following tasks:

• Identify requirements and data migration steps from an existing code base which was not fully working and developed by another nopCommerce vendor
• Specify features and architecture solution based on requirement and existing data that resided in the old application
• UI / UX improvements in back-end for admin and in front-end for the end user
• Migrate nopCommerce 3.80 data to the latest stable version of nopCommerce in a completely re-designed architecture
• Everything was to be done using plugin architecture in the latest stable version of nopCommerce

Solution

The project started with listing out customer requirement in detail and comparing it to the database structure used by the old project and new UI requirements. Once it was done, a designing of architecture that could enhance performance without issues as per customer requirement was started. During this phase, the team also identified how to migrate old data efficiently per new and improved table(s) structure in the database.

nopAdvance did everything using a single plugin. Here is how it looks in the admin menu:

After completing some base features, nopAdvance moved to the product template feature. Using a product template, the Newline team is able to create N number of products based on template configurations. Product creation from template looks like below image:

There are many other modules which channelize the whole platform per Newline Trophy requirements but the custom product configurator for end customers was important to plan and develop in order to streamline the online order process and collect vital component information for the production of custom trophies.

Here is how it looks like in front-end:

The next critical module was to create a plugin for collecting customized engraving from an add/edit button in the cart. Since most of the products produced by Newline incorporate custom engraving, so this feature was important to both end user for ease of use and Newline staff to ensure the information is collected accurately.

See below image:

After development and testing, the team was surprised with an issue which was not apparent during initial evaluation and scope. All images including thumbnails created with plugin developed by another developer were no longer of use and needed to be reconfigured using the new plugin categories and component products. Writing a custom script, team was able to generate new product images and thumbnails using the new plugin features which eliminated the need for the customer to manually configure over 2000+ images. This saved the customer 100’s of hours additional work and speed up the ability to launch on schedule.

All data from the existing production site was then migrated to the most recent version of nopCommerce from 3.8 including categories, products, customers, orders, discounts, blogs, etc.

Website performance was important with over 200 categories and 1000’s of complex products. By taking advantage of pre-developed plugins, choosing proper hosting and caching server, Newline Trophy is one of the leading online retailers in their industry with significant improvement to conversion and online visibility.

Results

• Successful data migration without any loss
• Faster and much-improved website
• Increased orders and customer engagement
• Improved and accelerated SEO and site health rank
• Single optimized plugin with multiple modules

Statistics (Based on the last 3 months after launch compared to the previous 3 months before launch):

• SEO, site ranking and visits increased. Google search console, Google page speed index and other SEO / ranking tools show an increase of average 150%
• 50% growth in terms of orders and revenue within 3 months
• Guest and registered customers increasing rapidly with almost 50-70% every month

Feedback

“After working with an American developer on our most recent 3.8 launch, we had several bugs and issues with custom plugins developed. As I was getting scraps of their time because they had moved on to new projects, I was in a position of having a production site that was for lack of a better term “broken”!

Though hesitant to work with a foreign developer I decided to give nopAdvance an opportunity to earn my business and was pleasantly surprised. We chose to migrate to the latest stable version of nopCommerce and re-develop all of the custom plugins.

The thing that I appreciate most is the willingness of nopAdvance to make suggestions throughout the process making the backend processes flawless and the user experience better. They saw things that I didn’t and were open to the suggestions without hesitation”.

-- Michael Whalen (Founder, CEO of NewLine Trophy)

About NopAdvance:

NopAdvance is an established company being authorized nopCommerce solution partner with an excellent track record for the best customer satisfaction. With the above 5 years of experience in NopCommerce industry, we have immense knowledge in NopCommerce architecture. We believe in keeping the customers happy by giving them exceptional services at a very competent price.