HIE Direct – Case Study

HIE Direct is one of the country’s largest stockists of bathroom and plumbing products.

HIE were a Sellerdeck user who wanted a website that showcased their products in a way that wasn’t possible with Sellerdeck out of the box.

HIE Direct are the experts when it comes to bathrooms, kitchens and general plumbing supplies. With over 20,000 product lines Sellerdeck would not have been our original thought when developing an eCommerce store, instead we would have opted for the more robust Magento eCommerce platform. However, as an existing Sellerdeck user HIE approached us to rebuild their existing site with no budget for a full transition to a more advanced platform. We redesigned the company’s main retail website and introduced functionality that doesn’t exist within the Sellerdeck framework but which is available on more expensive platforms.

Objective

Thorough analysis of HIE’s web analytics and an audit of the old site was done to determine how people were using the site, where people were dropping off and where the biggest potential for improvement was. With such a large site and so many products the objective was clear, focus on the user journey, simplify the navigation and make it easier for customers to locate, review and purchase products.

Solution

The site was redeveloped on the Sellerdeck eCommerce platform with additional bold-ons being added to create a more intelligent website that assists users in their purchasing of products.

Results

The site launched in January 2012 with instant improvements in conversion rate. Further analysis of the website analytics showed that bounce-rate had dropped, time on site was lengthened, average number of pages viewed per visit increased and most importantly revenue jumped. Over the next few months the site also started to climb in the search rankings thanks to the improvements to the site’s coding and more logical and SEO friendly structure.