Case Study
Meridian SP Shop
The Project
Meridian Speciality Packaging decided towards an online store – Meridian SP Shop – to optimize their selling process and also in order to facilitate the purchase of their products on the customers end.
As e-commerce platform they opted for BigCommerce and choose to buy the ELLA – premium responsive BigCommerce template based on Stencil theme-engine.
Challenges
Even if the purchased theme was a premium one with a certain amount of easy to edit options for a regular shop admin, Meridian company needed such customizations which involved heavy development work, through theme coding language adjustments, complemented with custom scripts to match the store selling method and to enhance the overall user experience.
As Meridian business extended to the French and German market also beside the UK based one, we had to implement Transifex translation with specific request related to SEO in the selected languages in addition to the local translations.
Solutions
Working on third-party themes is generally quite complex, so we thoroughly studied the documentation to first understand the methods used and the connection between the elements in order to prevent breaking the core functionality whilst working with handlebars strings in the theme customization process. This is how the ELLA theme looks by default. Our team managed to fulfill the required layout and template changes as per project specifications.
Beside other tasks we also handled Stripe integration as the payment processor for the online store.
After Transifex implementation and translations we ‘ve added the language selector to the header and allowed multiple currency conversions besides the ones already activated making sure of correct formatting.
In addition custom scripts were used in order to improve the basic functionalities.
- On product listings and views visitors can see prices including and excluding VAT throughout the website. Header section search suggestions show the prices also following this approach. This helps customers plan their budget accordingly.
- Since Meridian SP is a wholesale company their items are sold usually in packs therefore we altered the quantity selector. This makes possible for the buyer to increase or decrease the value based on the maximum number of items in a certain pack (Pack Quantity). E.g. Chocolate Gift Box and Ballotin. Obviously meanwhile executing functionality changes we also had to furthermore extend the script so that in the shopping basket prices/quantities to be calculated correspondingly and correctly.
- We created a specified search query string with the idea to showcase all products under SHOP ALL category, hence customers can easily access the variety of items available. Faceted search was likewise optimized.
All things considered we contributed successfully to Meridian Speciality Packaging business.
