BH1 Promotions
Seamless migration from Magento to WooCommerce multi-site network.
Project Overview
BH1 Promotions is an award-winning supplier of promotional merchandise for businesses owners and brand managers in the UK.
We were first approached by BH1 Promotions in 2017, to design and develop a new website that would act as an online catalogue for their database of 3,500 promotional products. They required a filter to help users find relevant products, and a quotation system to take orders without the requirement for immediate payment.
They already had a storefront running Magento 1 that presented significant challenges. The CMS was overly complicated and difficult to update. The new site brief had many customisations, and replicating these in a Magento install would have been much more challenging compared to WooCommerce. Premium WordPress plugins such as YITH Get Quote and Gravity Forms provided out the box support, as these features would be expensive to replicate in Magento.
As the existing BH1 site had no complex ERP integrations and had a fair amount of content that needed updating (including a separate WordPress blog), we were able to safely migrate to WooCommerce, and it was far less expensive, with fewer recurring costs as well.
Project Details
- Custom child theme
- Magento/woocommerce migration
- YITH get quote plugin integration
- Megamenu & product filter
- Multi-site network
96%
Lighthouse accessibility score
97%
Lighthouse SEO score (TBC)
5/5
Customer feedback rating
Interactive workshop
The first task with this project was to identify the target audience.
The majority of users would be other businesses owners browsing merchandise to promote their company or brand. Therefore, with over 3,500 variable products it was essential that customers could locate the best products for their business, or industry as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The biggest challenge of this project was the migration of products from Magento to Woocommerce, ensuring all data, images and attributes were migrated correctly, while also ensuring any structural changes to the URL's were planned for with appropriate redirects to maintain SEO authority.
WooCommerce Customisation
In preparation for the product migration, we created a child theme for WooCommerce Storefront that would include bespoke customisations for additional e-commerce features and pricing functionality.
We developed custom templates for the home page, category listings, products details, FAQ resources and blog.
As this was a B2B business there were minimum order requirements, so there needed to be restrictions in place to prevent single orders with less than 100 items. Orders made on promotional products also needed to be available in increments of 250, 500, 1000 and 2,500 to qualify for trade discounts.
Importing product data
BH1 Promotions already had this product data available in Magento, so we were able to export to CSV and import into WooCommerce. We then developed a function within the child theme that hooks into WooCommerce tabs and outputs this data into a responsive table on the product details template.
Mega menu for products
Due to the number of product categories and depth of sub-categories, it was important visitors to the website could locate categories quickly, with minimal effort.
We developed a desktop mega menu that offers improved usability advantages such as seeing all categories visible on the screen at the same time, which would not be possible using traditional drop-down menus. Other benefits of utilising a mega menu on desktop devices include friendly and visual groupings of categories and support for images and icons that a visitor can quickly correspond to:
Product filter and search
With over 3,500 variable products producing over 150,000 variations of different product sizes and colours, there needed to be a solution to filter categories by these product attributes, and a search feature to locate products directly without having to browse through all the categories sub-pages.
We integrated an AJAX product filter and search feature using shortcodes into the custom templates created using page builder:
WordPress multisite network
A standard feature included in Magento is the ability to create different storefronts, which BH1 Promotions still wanted to utilise in order to offer custom storefronts to their established clients. This means the team can use the CMS to launch new shops on subdomains and manage completely separate products, image media and pricing.
To achieve this in WordPress we activated and installed WP Multisite that allows BH1 Promotions to manage a network of websites from a single WordPress dashboard.
The multisite network shares the same custom child theme and plugins as the parent site, allowing staff to populate new storefronts on the sub-domain network with branded products tailored to the clients business.
Let's Talk
Whether you need to increase website traffic, sell more products, or reach international customers, we can help. Give our marketing experts a call on 01202 901 607 so we can chat about how we can help your business.