It all started with Peter Millar, a multichannel retailer, dealing in various types of clothing, accessories and sportswear. As consumers increasingly became aware of and began to express interest in their versatile fashion collections, Peter Millar felt the need for an ecommerce platform that would explicitly reflect their brand image and accelerate the business growth process. The company focused on three key parameters:
- Betterment of website design for enhancing the user-experience in order to reflect their brand identity as a luxury retailer more precisely.
- Implementation of an efficient solution that would help the company effectively reach out to its target audience browsing websites through desktops, laptops, Smartphones, tablets and various other devices.
- Extension of the Magento functionality to enhance site performance and cater to channel partners in a more efficient manner, by more gracefully presenting all the product catalogues.
To address each of these requirements, Peter Millar chose to utilize the Magento platform’s flexibility within a responsive design framework to fulfill the business needs through customization of front-end as well as back-end elements. Before detailing on how fashion retailer Peter Millar drove multichannel growth through application of Magento and responsive design, let us explore the positive impacts of these two elements on ecommerce business.
Magento Application development: The key advantages
Magento offers an open-source freely downloadable CMS platform for website developers. The striking feature is that Magento’s shopping cart can be utilized at no additional cost. This CMS is a boon for ecommerce businesses because of the following reasons:
- Customized Business Solutions: Magento comes in four versions, namely, Magento Community, Magento Enterprise, Magento Enterprise Premium and Magento Go. Each version is designed based on specific business requirements. Moreover, modules, extensions widget, themes and add-ons can be easily customized. Magento also has a mobile friendly version.
- Short Market Time: For any business looking for a platform that can be made available to the market within a short period of time, Magento, with its free design templates, is the ideal choice.
- Search Engine friendly: Magento has inherent SEO features which permit the modification and optimization of web page elements like Meta tags and page titles to ensure better ranking in search engine result pages.
- Currency Updates: Magento’s updated currency format is a boon for international sellers. The straightaway link to WebService X allows this platform to modify item prices according to exchange rate fluctuation.
- Community Shopping: This CMS offers a brilliant platform for indirect marketing by inviting customers to read and write reviews of services and products, save items through the ‘Wishlist’ functionality and promote community shopping through ‘Send a Friend’ option.
- Rich Features: Several product options (bundled, group, configurable, etc) embedded within this CMS platform allows businesses to efficiently organize their stock.
- Responsive Design: Benefits for Ecommerce Businesses
- Usability: This is a very important factor so far as Ecommerce websites are concerned. Responsive design allows users to browse your site from desktops laptops or mobiles without downloading specific apps. Moreover, responsive design ensures quick access and high quality full website experience for customers even on mobile devices thus enhancing conversion rates.
- Time and Cost Effectiveness: Since a single website adjusts according to the size of the devices, companies need not spend time or money building and maintaining multiple websites.
How leveraging Magento and Responsive Design helped Peter Millar
The responsive framework enabled Peter Millar to provide world-class user experience across a range of devices. With an upgraded look and feel of the website, the multichannel retailer was able to rope in the company spirit within the site. Extra effect was added through application of color swatching in the pages containing product details, so that manifold apparel options can be gracefully represented. The implementation of an interactive store locator ensured the flow of visitors to local retail outlets. The page loading speed was also accelerated through Magento’s hosting configuration and caching functionality.
The responsive framework coupled with an effective CMS like Magento, enabled Peter Millar to enhance its site visits, including visits through mobile devices. There was also a rise in organic conversion rate and order value across desktops and mobiles. This is a significant indication for fashion retailers, intending to drive multichannel growth, to switch to Magento within a responsive framework.
We provide magento development services. Discuss with our expert magento development India team at Mindfire about your project. We will be glad to assist.
