Space 48 and Cox & Cox Win Best Magento Upgrade Award

There was plenty to celebrate for Space 48 at the recent Magento Imagine conference, as we picked up the Best Magento Upgrade award for our replatforming project with Cox & Cox. Our Magento specialists successfully upgraded the brand’s ecommerce website from Magento 1 to Magento 2 and transformed their website performance! 

In this blog, our Senior Project Manager, Jake Smith, discusses the challenge presented to us by UK homeware business Cox & Cox, the key objectives, why Magento 2 was the right solution for their business and the award-winning results. Take a look!

The project’s challenge and objectives

We’re always proud to receive recognition for the ecommerce development and strategy work we do with our awesome clients, and the award for Best Magento Update at Magento’s showpiece event in Vegas was a real honour. It was great to share the stage with Cox & Cox, at Imagine 2018, to talk about the replatforming experience from both the developer’s and merchant’s perspective.

Cox & Cox’s Ecommerce Manager, Aynsley Peet, led the talk at Imagine, explaining the challenges his business had and what their objectives and requirements were for their website upgrade.

As a pure-play ecommerce homeware company, turning over £14 million per year and growing 20% year-on-year, Cox & Cox found they’d outgrown Magento 1.

Here are some of the key objectives Cox & Cox had for the replatforming project:

• Add mobile-first responsive website design
• Future-proof the website for business change
• Sustain 20% YOY revenue growth
• Reduce the number of extensions required
• Improved checkout experience
• Achieve parity and exceed performance vs. competitors

This slide from Cox & Cox’s presentation demonstrates the strategic business drivers that led them to consider upgrading their website with an ecommerce platform move:

It was not just strategic reasons that led to the decision to replatform, there were key technical issues that also prompted the need to upgrade, which are shown in the slide below:

The solution: Magento Commerce 2

Cox & Cox explored other ecommerce platforms, such as Hybris and Demandware (Sales Commerce Cloud), but the cost and replatforming implementation timescales were an issue, and Magento 2 soon emerged as the best option for the brand’s needs.

So, why Magento Commerce 2? Here are some of the key benefits of the platform that helped Cox & Cox decide that it was the right solution for their business: 

• Magento Shipping enabling more complex shipping requirements 
• Integrated SLI for search, which now powers 35% of the revenue
• Pre-sell functionality to take orders for items which need to be manufactured
• Operational efficiencies from features such as visual merchandising and easier content management

The reasons for choosing Magento Commerce over the Community Edition are outlined below, including Varnish caching out-of-the-box and faster order processing:

Tips for undertaking a replatforming project

Cox & Cox chose to work with us on this Magento 2 migration project, as it’s important for merchants to work with an experienced agency, whose developers have the required expertise in their chosen ecommerce platform.

We’ve helped a number of brands migrate to Magento 2, whilst we have also taken on several Magento 2 rescue projects from retailers who’ve come a cropper after replatforming to the platform – often due to inexperienced developers and technical support.

This is something that we spoke about at Imagine; the importance of working with an agency you trust! Here are some of the other tips we outlined about undertaking a large-scale project, like migrating to Magento 2:

• Get key integrations done early
• Do regular internal releases to staging – test throughout the process, not just the end!
• Plan everything well in advance and don’t underestimate the complexity involved
• Focus on close collaboration and empowering the merchant – this is their baby after all!

The timeline below demonstrates how the project evolved:

The award-winning results 

It’s one thing delivering a smooth website migration to a powerful new ecommerce platform, it’s a whole other challenge to ensure it produces the desired results, in terms of performance, stability and, ultimately, revenue. 

Well, the results of the Magento upgrade project speak for themselves. Aynsley reported that Cox & Cox saw the following results in Q4 last year:

• 28.8% increase in revenue, rising to 45% on mobile
• 6.7% increase in conversion rate, rising to 20% on mobile
• 26% increase in average order value
  

These are impressive numbers, but that only tells half the story. The following two slides show the key challenges and their resolutions, plus the performance results against the project objectives:

As we mentioned, mobile responsive website design was a key priority in the upgrade project. Take a look at some before and after screenshots of the Cox & Cox mobile homepage and product pages:

Finally, we thought it would be rude not to include a picture of the awards! Here is our MD Jon Woodall and Aynsley clutching their Best Magento Upgrade awards at Magento Imagine!

If you want to get the full story of the award-winning Magento Commerce 2 replatforming project, you can download all the slides from our Magento Imagine talk here. Or, head over to our Cox & Cox case study page and look explore the great results we helped them achieve.

Space 48 is a leading UK ecommerce consultancy and Magento website development agency, based in Manchester. If you’re a Magento user considering an upgrade or you’d like to know more about the suitability and benefits of the Magento 2 platform, why not get in touch and talk to a Magento specialist.