Background
A passionate hobby suddenly turned into a successful venture for watch enthusiast Jon Quinn. After initial success on eBay selling DTC, 2010 saw the establishment of WatchGecko.
WatchGecko is now one of the leading sellers of watch straps, watches and accessories worldwide. To maintain this, they have invested heavily in their own manufacturing and content creation.
Brief
WatchGecko made the decision to shift to Shopify Plus from Magento, in order to match their growth ambitions. The site needed to be clean and easy to navigate with a strong focus on content. Content that empathised with the needs and wants of well-educated customers.
Services
-
User research
- Design system / UI & UX
- Development
- Rapid prototyping
- Content population
- Magento migration
Integrations
- Boost Commerce
- Rebuy
- Reviews.io
- Linnworks
- Klayvio
Initiation
We like to get to grips with the brand, business and client, beforehand. We carry out a series of workshops, both creative and digital, to gain a better insight. For example, we spoke to WatchGecko customer services to develop an understanding of the types of questions and issues they face offline, so we could identify areas for improvement on the site.
Migration
Onstate successfully migrated WatchGecko from Magento 2 to Shopify Plus whilst retaining strong organic rankings and handling large amounts of data. Hundreds of thousands of customer and order records were migrated and the product data was restructured to boost SEO.
A complex WordPress-to-Shopify blog migration was also achieved by utilising Shopify’s native blogging engine and custom shortcodes.
Product Priority
We wanted to pedestal the product. By stripping back the design details, the product became the hero through the use of high quality imagery and USPs in a dynamic content block, allowing for product admiration and ease of adding to bag.
Content & Conversions
With content playing such a pivotal role in WatchGecko’s rise to the top, we had to make sure it was woven through the fabric of the site. Blogs, imagery and videos had all been invested in heavily and the design needed to reflect this.
To aid with conversion rate optimisation, we made further UX and UI improvements.
One of which was the site navigation. With such a vast range of products, we redesigned it so customers had a swift way of finding their desired products and checking out.
As an online only business, our website is an essential asset, however the design of our Magento site had been largely unchanged since it was launched in 2014. We knew that an update was overdue and we spent several weeks working through a shortlist of potential partners when we took the decision to move over to Shopify. We met with Chris and his team several times during the selection process and they quickly became our favoured option, so we spoke to several of their previous clients who gave us honest feedback about the process that they had been through. The redesign started towards the end of 2021, which meant we only had around six months to complete the migration before the existing site came to the end of its life. The move was more involved than we had anticipated, but Onstate was a pleasure to deal with from start to finish. They did not take any short cuts and we now have a fantastic new website of which we are all very proud. I would not hesitate to recommend Onstate to any similar business – and have in fact already done so.
Intelligent Integrations
Onstate introduced a range of integrations based on retention and improvements: Boost Commerce was utilised for improved search and filtering, Rebuy for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and product recommendations, and Reviews.io for social proofing and Linnworks from an ERP perspective. Additionally, we moved from Mailchimp to Klaviyo, to unlock the power of CRM and email marketing even further.
