Anything Left-Handed case study: The benefits to online business of a flexible boxed ecommerce software package over handing control to a third-party developer - migrating from a bespoke developer to Actinic Developer.
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Anything Left-Handed’s latest online incarnation perfectly illustrates the fact that for forward-thinking online businesses, ecommerce is far more than just selling stock. To build a loyal customer base and gain repeat orders in an ever-crowded marketplace, you need a store that offers visitors more. For a high street book shop this might mean a few sofas and a cappuccino machine. For the directors of Anything Left-Handed this meant an active membership club, pages tailored for children, a database of famous lefties, personal left-handedness tests, quizzes, jokes, FAQs and a vault of information on all things left-handed so comprehensive many of the pages warrant top search engine rankings independent of the core business. The site now stocks over 250 product lines, receives around 1500 unique visitors per day, and gains around 50 orders per day with an average value of £28.
The new site is already taking almost twice the level of orders of the failed bespoke development and they have only just started to unleash their marketing plans. The web sales forecast of £220,000 for 2004 is only 10% on the previous year, reflecting the very poor performance from the bespoke site. With full functionality plus marketing and development potential returning, online sales are predicted to get back on the previous growth pattern, increasing 80% year-on-year for both 2005 and 2006, with Keith’s more conservative forecast for the third-year expected to see a 60% growth in 2007 yielding Web revenues of £1.1m. Overheads are expected to stay fairly fixed, and of course that means that as turnover increases, profits are expected to rise rapidly over time.
One particularly helpful and unforeseen aspect to redeveloping the site ‘out-of-the-box’ was discovering how open and flexible the software really was. Keith explains: “I have recently integrated an in-site search engine (Search Engine Studio), affiliate program and outgoing links directory using different low-cost, third-party software. With the bespoke site, this would have taken months and cost many thousands, if we could have done it at all! We have a long list of improvements we might choose to deploy in the future, which we now know we can do inexpensively when I have a little spare time. It’s satisfying, creative work and means the design and development process is completely integrated with our creative and marketing plans.”
Keith, Lauren and the rest of the team at Anything Left-Handed experienced enormous frustration by following a website development path that took control of the business out of their capable hands, but now it’s a very different story, and the whole company is extremely proud of the latest results: “The successful store you see today didn’t come about as a result of paying for somebody else’s expertise, but from our own vision, hard work and determination, using some pretty clever software on the way.” explains Keith.
Thousands of visitors buying products at the company’s shop over the last 36 years have had their lives made easier, safer and more enjoyable, but perhaps it’s only since the launch of their latest online store that the proud owners themselves have finally achieved the goal they aim to reach for their customers, to create “a haven in an otherwise back-to-front world.”
* Anything Left-Handed claims the most accurate studies conducted are among children who have yet to feel obligated into fitting into a right-handed world, and these studies produce figures of 12-15% left-handedness. The most recent research conducted by Prof. Chris McManus into genitive causes roughly concur, with a figure of 13%