Who?

UKAD is a software development company with over 15 years of experience, with much of that time spent working with Umbraco. As such, we're a Registered Umbraco Partner and use Umbraco as our go-to CMS of choice for many client sites, including eCommerce projects.

Our client, Westbay, is a Swedish manufacturer of trailers and they are the authorised dealer of Dodge RAM and Fiat Professional. They asked us to complete the development of their online store to sell products, as well as spare parts and commercial vehicles, with the potential to post promotional articles as part of their marketing process.

What?

Before contacting us, Westbay were already operating with a website, but it was outdated and required some significant changes. So they asked us to develop a modern, stylish and easy to use eCommerce platform that provides a convenient online shopping experience, displaying existing products in the best possible way, going from product to payment within several clicks.

The next requirement was to have a simple content management process, to allow the customer service team to easily operate both the product pages and the blog articles. The last requirement was to ensure we created a sophisticated mobile layout because, according to the customer's data, over half of traffic to the website came from mobile devices.

Why?

We wanted to have a nice and convenient webshop for Westbay customers where it's easy to find the accessories in various product categories, to create an order and pay for it in just a few simple steps. As we use Umbraco to build our websites, our team required an eCommerce plugin to meet the customers requirements. At the start we used Merchello, but it has several limitations. First of all it's not suitable for the latest Umbraco version and it also lacks some necessary features, so we decided to go with Ucommerce, which does have a lot of functionality out-of-the-box. However, we soon found that Ucommerce has a not-so-smooth integration with Umbraco. So, when Vendr emerged in our vision, we decided to give it a try and we found it was the most suitable solution for our project.

How?

Vendr truly is awesome! We utilised Vendr's free add-on package, Vendr Checkout, to help us create a seamless checkout flow, with minimal clicks as the client had requested. This, teamed with the already available payment provider, DIBS, meant we had covered all the requirements we had for this project. We are even looking at implementing an additional payment option - pay-by-link.

Results.

Our team utilised a combination of Umbraco and Vendr to create a truly brilliant eCommerce website. Such a combination provided the client with simple content management, just as requested; several clicks are enough to perform almost every action, even to create a new page with a custom layout. The new website and eCommerce solution has had a positive impact on the client's business. Right after launch the website saw a significant increase in sales. We cannot share the exact numbers since they are confidential, but both the client's and our metrics recorded that tendency. And it keeps growing!

Final Thoughts.

As the project ended, we clearly understood why Vendr has become one of the most popular eCommerce plugins for Umbraco. It's flexible and powerful, with perfect tailoring of the payment solutions for any specific business. Basically, it is suited well for the client challenges we had at UKAD. We ensured that it would fit technically, which it did and we applied it to the client's (and our developer's) satisfaction. We did get in touch with support via the contact form, who replied and resolved our query with speed. And, as mentioned, we have some brave plans to work with Vendr in the future, including the plan to create a pay-by-link solution so that store owners could create a kind of virtual order and pay by a similar link for it, as well as use it for other projects in the future.

Vendr is a great tool for every Umbraco developer. It allows the creation of really powerful eCommerce stuff that perfectly meets Umbraco's approach to content management. The UKAD team appreciates Vendr so much that it will be used in the next eCommerce project we launch.

UKAD.