Tech Stack
Service Provided
We were in dire need of an upgrade as our outdated platform was negatively affecting user experience, and thus causing great loss of revenue. We were blown away by the flawless framework and design implemented by Auxesis, who basically redesigned our entire setup for the better!
Mike S.
Product Owner
About The Client
The client is America's largest Independent Ceiling Fan Retailer, since 1979. They manufacture their own brand of ceiling fans and these are sold through their 30-corporately owned retail locations, 10-independently owned & operated dealer locations, select lighting showrooms and online through their corporate website, which we were contracted to rebuild, redesign and improve.
Background
When the client initially reached out to us, the client’s portal had a vast array of fans and fan accessories, but the portal was poorly designed with a primitive and slow fan builder wizard. This resulted in a high bounce rate and low customer engagement, resulting in steep revenue loss. Moreover, they were running a web store based on Drupal 6 + Ubercart, which was already an old technology and a nightmare in terms of management and backend operations. During the discovery workshops conducted by us, we evaluated and identified all the bottlenecks successfully, and proposed necessary solution to the client. We were entrusted with the project, and our team successfully transformed the portal into a modern online fan store - fast and easy to navigate, with a state of the art fan builder that was extremely easy to use. Once main development was completed, we were given charge of maintaining the portal and ongoing feature improvements.
Why & how we were chosen?
The client initially started looking for a development team to help them fix some backend issues that their marketing team had raised. They spoke to multiple vendors and did extensive calls with them to understand the company background and technical capabilities. During once such call with our team, they brought up a few fundamental issues like UI/UX improvement and fan builder layout, and we suggested them some strategies for improvement that we already researched out during our review of the portal. This impressed them, and as the discussion progressed, it became evident that the present set up was not optimal and needed to be replaced in favour of a better system. Our team was chosen because we were able to identify these issues first hand, and instead if just focussing on the requirement that they gave us, were able to bring something more to the table that had the potential to create a deep business impact.
Challenges
Based on the outcome of the discovery workshop, the major challenges that were identified were the following:
- Drupal 6 was old and already end-of-life, and hence needed to be migrated to Drupal 7.
- The ecommerce store needed to be ported from Ubercart (with about 30,000 fans and fan accessories) to Drupal Commerce with enhanced features.
- Create a much improved version of their fan builder feature which allows visitors to compile various parts of the fan (like motor, blades, light kits, downrods) through an interactive graphical interface.
- Overall UI/UX Redesign of the entire portal to make it more user friendly and interactive.
Solution Design
To begin with, it seemed the main issue was the lack of a coherent and effective UI/UX. The UX was old and not appealing to retain customers, leading to an extremely high bounce rate. But a deeper review also made it clear that the backend architecture was old, and was not capable of handling the growing data for new models and accessories. So an backend upgradation to Drupal 7 + Drupal commerce (from Drupal 6 + Ubercart) was agreed upon.
Their present website consisted of about 30,000 products including fan bundles, fans and accessories like light kits, downrods etc. We too up the daunting task of migrating these from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce. While migrating was taking place, the client's marketing team also wanted to incorporate a better product bundle mechanism, with features like option for admin to mark if a product can be individually bought or only available as a part of the bundle, product single price as well as bundle price, product bundle discounts as per bundle configuration.
Also, the general site migration needed to be done from Drupal 6 - 7 with all contents (about 10,000 nodes and blog articles).
However, as mentioned earlier one of the most important feature that now needed to be re-designed and re-developed was the fan builder mechanism. In their present site, they had a very basic version of the fan builder, but they wanted some serious revamp of the functionality to make it more appealing and more GUI based.
And our team was up for the challenge. We delivered a state of the art, fast and intuitive fan builder to them. Each of the steps was divided into layers and options in each layer were derived out of the choices the user made in the previous steps. Also, at the end of all the steps, the user was able to download a compiled fan image to be able to have a final look to and share it with their friends and family. Admin had full control and be able to choose which products appeared in each step and how it would vary and interact based on different user choices. Also, in the initial step, users could optionally upload an image of their own room, to see how the fan would look in their own room environment.
The transformation delivered by the Auxesis team proved greatly favorable as it considerably improved the conversion rate while reducing the bounce rate. They also helped us thoroughly and easily manage our virtual marketplace and every product going into the builder.
Mike S.
Product Owner
Future Plan
Once the main development was done, we had already forged a solid relationship with the client's team. They continued to make additional development changes, and finally after several phases of development, the project entered into maintenance. We continue to maintain the portal to this day, and continue to fulfil additional feature requests that they come up with from time to time.
Outcome
Needless to say, the overall UI/UX improvement we did to the portal led to an increase in conversion rate and reduced the bounce rate drastically. But we believe we created an even bigger impact through the fan builder implementation. When building a site using a framework like drupal, it’s more than just a content management system and it should be more of an advanced configuration system as well. With this new system, the client was amazed how easily they could manage not only the webstore, but the products that go into the fan builder. They could literally manage each and every aspect of the layer attributes, position of a layer over its predecessors and the discount pricing for accessories going into the fan builder. Also, the client was impressed with not only the quality of work but also the communication and improvement suggestions our team brought to the table.
40% increase in conversion rate
With all the backend and frontend changes, the overall performance of the portal increased, leading to an improved conversion rate.
bounce rate reduction to 30%
With the UI/UX improvement that we did, the bounce rate reduced considerably, thus ensuring more traffic retention and increased ROI
An improved fan builder mechanism
The fan builder was transformed completely from a old legacy system to an improved, easy to use mechanism that was loved by the customers.
Let's Build Your Next Digital Product?
Our emphasis is on modernizing, innovating, interacting with customers and speeding up the process of bringing products to the market to help businesses get an edge over their rivals. We collaborate with customers worldwide to create Software applications that eliminate their old and intricate problems. A committed, knowledgeable and accomplished team of highly-trained professionals will help you with your product development from start to finish.
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Innovation & Creativity
Our immensely talented technical team consistently thinks out of the box, producing truly innovative solutions leading to outstanding end results.
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Maintaining and improving client satisfaction is our top priority, and we achieve this through prompt customer support, be it during the project or after the completion.
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Our Clients
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Clutch & GoodFirms Reviews
Our success is demonstrated by having the most reviews compared to competitors.
Auxesis Infotech provides web development support on our Drupal platform. They are always flexible enough to help us achieve our goals. Very pleased with Auxesis competance, flexibility, communications and execution.
5
Richard Halderthy
Director Brand & Communications, Saint Gobain Ltd
30 Reviews
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I'm impressed by their communication and speed of action. Ever since we launched the redevelopment, there’ve been many compliments on the improved look, functionality, and ease of navigation.
5
Ryan Titley
Director of Projects, ERRIN
30 Reviews
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