Case Study - Anything Left Handed

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

 

First established in 1968, Anything Left-Handed, is a family business offering products, services and advice that make life easier, safer and more enjoyable for left-handed people living in a right-handed world. Directors Keith Milsom and his wife Lauren are ‘very left handed’, as is their son. And so, amazingly, is every member of their growing team based in London and Surrey. In fact, being part of the 13%* of our population that is left-handed is a pre-requisite of working at the most successful and dynamic venture of its type in the world. They’ll sell you anything from a boomerang to a bass guitar as long as it’s left-handed, but only if they’ve tried it first and think it’s any good. It wasn’t until a recent overhaul of their ecommerce website, however, that they discovered just how vital this personal insight and involvement really was to this unique business.

The company was originally run out of a shop in Soho by a right-handed hobbyist spurred by the inconveniences of left-handed friends. Keith and his father took over 20 years ago and retain a real-world shop in London. In a reversal of traditional roles though, this real-world shop serves as a showcase window to support the core business now conducted online at www.anythingLeft-Handed.co.uk: “Our shop turns over around £100k per annum, but more importantly it adds ‘bricks and mortar’ credibility to our online business.” says Keith. “We’ve cut back on less profitable wholesale and mail-order business as a direct result of the strength of our website. For 2004 the website has been responsible for 60% of total business turnover, next year we forecast web sales accounting for 70% of all sales, and by 2007 that figure should reach 86%. While all other business is predicted to stay constant, internet business will grow.”

No surprise then that the quality, stability and security of Anything Left-Handed’s website is of paramount concern, and anything jeopardising its success causes Keith more than a few sleepless nights. Imagine then his despair over the last year when an apparently sound decision to outsource website development backfired. Keith lost all control of the company’s key marketing channel before fighting back with a superb relaunch site built in-house with the latest version of ecommerce package Actinic Developer. Business is now growing again, but other ecommerce businesses facing a similar crossroads could learn valuable lessons from the experiences of Anything Left-Handed.

Keith explains how he came to make the decisions he did over the past year: “The site we had developed as a marketing test from 2000 onwards worked okay, but demands on my time for marketing and managing the business made it difficult for me to add all the functionality I really wanted. So we made the strategic decision to outsource site development to a third-party which would create a bespoke online store and information site for us. As it turned out, this change in direction was disastrous, setting us back a year in business development and leaving us horrified at the results.”

After lengthy delays, the developer did produce a site, but not one that worked anywhere close to the standards Keith had expected, and crucially also failed to alleviate time-consuming technical overheads. Fortunately Anything Left-Handed was far from inexperienced online and could see obvious technical flaws, including access to the site, incomplete navigation, slow load speeds, difficult site maintenance processes, very poor activity reporting and more. “We couldn’t afford to wait and see if things got better,” says Keith. “That site should have been operating at higher levels than the old homespun site, but we could see our sales going through the floor.”

Internet turnover had doubled each year to reach £200k in 2003 until the setback caused by the bespoke development. The disparity between the cost of outsourcing and the price of in-house site development with boxed software rang alarm bells: “We’d planned a site operating as you see it now, only with less functionality, and had budgeted around £30,000 to get those results,” says Keith. He now owns the site he envisioned and what’s more he created it himself tailoring it to his precise requirements and marketing plans, and all for around £4,000 including software and consultancy outlay.

“By early July, we had had enough. I gave myself a week’s preparation, made sure we had access to as much of the site content we had prepared as possible, then put our own original site back up as an interim measure, dealt with the fallout with the developer and set about developing the site you see today using Actinic’s software,” Keith explains. “I redeveloped the whole site myself in just two months, using some of the design work we had paid for, but restructuring the whole thing around the boxed software. On 13 September 2004 we were back up and running with a fully-functioning site, and saw an immediate increase in site visitors, page views and orders.”

Understandably Keith now believes the benefits of a flexible boxed ecommerce package over bespoke third-party developers are incalculable. “I just felt my business was completely out of my control,” he admits. “The service we received was poor, and there was little I could do about it. A third-party had our whole site sitting on its own servers, with us entirely at its mercy. If that company went bust one night, then we would have been left with no web site and no way of recreating it. I could have woken up one day with no online presence at all, faced with starting again from scratch with months of hard work on my hands and virtually no business in the meantime. I simply couldn’t sleep at night with that risk.”

 

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