Shiels Magento2 Website
The Background
Founded in 1945, Shiels is an innovative Australian jeweller with retail outlets in SA, Qld, NSW and WA, and a thriving online store offering their amazing range of products.
From one original retail outlet in Adelaide, Shiels has expanded into all the major shopping centres in metropolitan Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane, as well as recent entries into Sydney, and has become a leading online jewellery retailer in Australia and beyond.
James Anthony Consulting (JAC) was approached by Shiels to design and implement upgrades to their online store.
The Challenge
Shiels had been struggling to migrate their existing eCommerce website to the Magento2 platform. Problems with budget management, missed deadlines, and lack of communication with an incumbent eCommerce services provider translated into lost growth opportunities in the digital space for the brand.
JAC was engaged to remediate the failing project by leading the incumbent provider to deliver the eCommerce site. JAC took a “mend it, don’t end it” approach, providing unbiased advice alongside stalwart and driven leadership, and converted a challenging situation into a successful outcome.
JAC ensured the project was delivered under a controlled operational framework delivering high-quality outcomes and smoothed out interactions between all stakeholders, leading the project to a successful result. This garnered Shiels’ trust in JAC and led to JAC becoming Shiels' preferred eCommerce services provider, delivering reliability, flexibility, capacity and skills to keep up to their business needs.
Our Role
During this project, JAC redesigned, built, tested and released the newly adapted Shiels online store. JAC continues to provide ongoing maintenance and support for the eCommerce asset.
Our Approach
JAC deployed a Scrum methodology to transition to the Magento 2 platform, achieved by performing a series of development sprints, each delivering a piece of the overall product. Each sprint began by deciding on delivery priorities for the next two weeks (placed on a Kanban board). This was followed by a period of requirements clarification, and developer estimation of priorities. These in turn were followed by construction and testing.
While this was ongoing, JAC’s Project Manager worked with Shiels’ Product Owner to refine and review priorities, always paying close attention to project budget/time resources. New features were implemented and enhanced to satisfy business requirements. After launching the new website, JAC identified maintenance and support activities needed, ensuring Shiels is always open for business online.
The project was divided into four major segments, each with a set of milestone activities:
1. Implement custom pages
Cloned existing staging site for JAC demo hosting.
Layout adjustment of homepage including corrected links, custom trending section, and favourite “popup” feature.
Implementation of all new website pages.
Performed rounds of appearance tweaking, to meet key stakeholders’ expectations.
2. Fit Magento Website to business processes
Review the website process-fit between Shiels Inventory, Logistics & Accounting processes, by discussing website operation with key stakeholders. Rapid interviews were conducted.
Improve the process fit by implementing features such as: AusPost label template printing, payment gateway setup, formatting reports to match accounting system import format, and packing-slip printing.
3. Prepare site for launch
Performed rounds of cross browser testing, to ensure the attractive website displayed on popular mobile, tablet and desktop browsers.
Performed Google PageSpeed Insights testing, to ensure optimal display speed.
Installed all corresponding plugins, Google Analytics, and submitted Sitemap to Google Search Console.
4. Launch website
Prepare the go-live checklist, coordinate the go-live actions between Shiels and JAC.
Generate sitemap.xml for submission to Google.
Test all the website functionality on Staging host.
Migrate website from Staging to Live.
Verification testing of the website.
Cross-check to ensure that all applicable go-live actions have been performed.
The Outcome
JAC was able to fully satisfy Shiels requirements, delivering an upgraded and functional online asset on time/on budget. During and since the project, we have:
Successfully transitioned Shiels to the new eCommerce platform Magento2.
Successfully managed the client’s website assets day-to-day technical operations, responding to critical issues as and when they arise and successfully maintaining an up-time of 99.9%.
Maintained website functionality under scale, working flawlessly with 300K+ visits per month.
Improved the Shiels’ online sales outcomes, achieving major year-on-year sales growth.
Continue to provide ongoing support and maintenance activities that respond to Shiels’ dynamic industry:
Reactive site repair.
Remote site uptime monitoring.
Responding to queries and requests from client staff, performing continual improvements.
Regular content management system security patching.
Pro-active cross-browser testing, to ensure the site continues to function correctly on all popular mobile and desktop browsers.
The very positive outcomes of this project underpin the excellent working relationship that JAC has established with Shiels. Together, we have expanded Shiels marketplace to eBay, Catch and Amazon, and have subsequently embarked on new projects that have delivered increased online sales growth.
