Our customer, Spectrum Boutique, is a famous online store for adults.
Founded by Zoë Ligon, a well-recognized sex educator and journalist, the company has become one of the major industry
players in the US promoting open and sensible sex education through toys, personal care products, and curated content.
From early 2015, the company had been running a WooCommerce-based store, continuously refining the installation to
provide the best possible experience to their clientele.
Regardless of its decent ecommerce capabilities, the platform had been still putting quite a range of constraints
on business, forcing top management to consider a pivotal shift to a more flexible and powerful solution —
Magento 2.
Impressed by our portfolio of Magento projects, the customer decided to entrust Staylime with the migration from WooCommerce to Magento 2 and further customization of their next-gen ecommerce solution.
The reinvented Spectrum Boutique was to help the company expand their influence and uncover exciting business
opportunities never seen before.
Challenges
Initially the customer approached us with a set of ready-made design mockups.
Our task was to implement a custom Magento
theme leveraging the existing design.
Professionally-built in terms of aesthetics and identity, the layout inherited the best from the legacy version
of the
store, yet still fell short of adhering to the layout and limitations of the Magento Blank Theme.
Design specifications and a proper UI kit were not in place, making the existing mockups difficult
for the frontend developer to use.
Thus, prior to actual development, our designers had to upgrade the assets and create a UI kit and convert the
mockups from InVision to Figma.
Operating in a distributed multi-team environment, we did our best to keep our development processes in-sync with
three other parties and Spectrum Boutique’s in-house team.
As the project advanced, the customer gradually increased the scope of our activities and eventually delegated the
majority of works including custom Magento
development to our team thanks to their prior dedication and in-depth technical knowledge.
However, tight deadlines put extra pressure on Staylime with new functionality requirements and ideas coming from
the customer: the very last touch-ups were introduced just hours before the official release.
By mobilizing our technology and project management expertise, we coped with all the showstoppers along the way, having evolved into a long-term full-cycle Magento development partner to Spectrum Boutique.
Frontend development
The Spectrum Boutique store was designed with a particular focus on usability and visual appeal.
Looking to make the user experience smooth, seamless and truly memorable, we embarked on the most creative yet
proven frontend trends: eye-catching clickable icons, scroll-linked animations, intuitive and fast navigation.
Aimed at perfection, Staylime significantly refined the UI provided by the client.
Given the unique functionality requirements some of the storefront features were additionally developed either from
scratch or based on available extensions.
As a result, the website obtained the following custom-built elements:
Multi-parameter category sorting allowing to arrange the products in ascending and descending orders based on
their width and girth in addition to the conventional price/name sorting.
Interactive site menu, including pop-ups, mini-cart, quick checkout and registration pages.
Easy site-wide search enabled by Elasticsearch. When searching, the engine also returns the number of products
that match the search query.
Related serviceNeed to develop a Magento theme too?
We render the full spectrum of services related to Magento theme development, including the development of a unique theme from scratch, conversion of existing design into a theme, or theme customization.
Migration from WooCommerce to Magento had become a non-trivial task for our team to fulfill. Over the years in business, Spectrum
Boutique had accumulated a multitude of critical data that had to be carefully moved to a completely new ecommerce
platform.
Taking into account the specifics of the WooCommerce catalog, we developed a custom migration tool on top of the
commercial off-the-shelf script by Firebear Studio to ensure fault-free migration to Magento 2.
Some of the most challenging aspects of migrating from WooCommerce to Magento included the following:
It turned out that Magento product reviews do not fully align with those of WooCommerce, lacking such
functionality as star ratings. To accurately move the reviews to Magento, we had to carry out additional
development.
We implemented the ‘Usually Bought with’ section on the product page and migrated corresponding historical data
from WooCommerce to Magento to help Spectrum Boutique take full advantage of cross-selling.
Assigning products to categories was the hardest for two main reasons. First, as per customer’s requirements, the
catalog structure was to be changed. Second, technology-wise Magento product catalog was quite different
from the
WooCommerce one.
To tackle the issue, we compiled a set of categorizing rules into a sheet together with the product owner and then
assigned all available products to categories manually. However, due to a slip-up on the customer team’s side, the
product catalog was unexpectedly disrupted, so we had to recover the database from the backup and assist the
customer in re-assigning product categories afresh.
Our engineers also migrated the store to a different server, having opted for Nexcess as a suitable and reliable
provider.
In sum, it took us two weeks to successfully complete the data migration: all the customer and product data was transferred with no loss or damage to our customer’s huge delight.
Custom functionality highlights
Driven by Magento 2.3.4, the solution boasts a whole range of custom features implemented to address
the specifics of Spectrum Boutique’s business.
Working in close collaboration with the customer, Staylime thoroughly elaborated the newcoming
requirements and developed the following functionality on top of the platform:
Product catalog and menu
The unconventional layout of the product catalog comprises a sophisticated three-level menu. Instead of
displaying all products assigned to a category, the first-level page outlines the best selling products from all
categories united into corresponding groups. This way customers can view the entire selection and click to open
the category they are particularly interested in on a separate page.
Product reviews
The review section is available on both the homepage and product cards, so that potential customers could
instantly access the authentic reviews generated by previous buyers. Given the sensitive nature of this business,
we made it possible to leave anonymous reviews.
Product tags
The bespoke Product Tags extension allows filtering and searching for items by specific tags. Compatible with
Magento Layered Navigation and developed with SEO considerations in mind, the solution assigns a unique URL and
link to each tag on a product page.
Gift cards and coupons
Leveraging the Gift Card extension by Amasty, we enabled the ability to purchase personalized digital gift cards
at the store.
To further support Spectrum Boutique’s loyalty program, our team implemented a coupon generation feature. The
solution allows sending unique discount codes to customers via email to incentive them to finalize the checkout or
reward them for particular actions, such as signing up to a newsletter.
Pre-live SEO
The customer worked with a European SEO vendor and we conducted a pre-live Magento SEO check in collaboration with
their team to ensure the new website was visible in SERP to retain all the traffic upon the release.
As part of the project we also carried out the following activities:
Filled in the Tier 1-3 pages with the metadata from the spreadsheet provided by the vendor.
Enabled metadata templates as per vendor’s requirements.
Implemented the schema markup in the Mageworx SEO Suite Ultimate extension for all available sections of the website.
Created 301 redirects for the URLs that were changed during the migration.
Compiled a list of orphaned pages and handed it over to the vendor for further works.
Related serviceNeed SEO services?
From SEO basic setup all the way up to a comprehensive audit and SEO strategy implementation, Staylime embraces the entire scope of SEO services to bring your ecommerce site to the very top of search engine rankings.
Though the scope was significantly extended over the course of the project, Staylime managed to figure out the most
optimal and cost-effective solutions to meet customer’s requirements and expectations best and successfully migrate the customer’s store from WooCommerce to Magento.
The newly-built
website has allured a massive audience and a 20% sales growth within the first month after the release. Completely satisfied with the results, Spectrum Boutique has become our long-term client — as their end-to-end technology partner, we continue to work on further enhancement and optimization of the website to help the company grow and succeed.
The outstanding service that the newly-built store provides along with the unique customer engagement features it has allowed Spectrum Boutique to
be awarded with the Online Retailer Of The Year — Pleasure Products at XBIZ Awards 2021.
We could not be more excited about receiving this distinct honor! None of this would have been possible without our customers or my team of educators, designers, writers, and others who make up our dynamic team.
