Project Examples

Over the past 30 years I’ve worked with hunderds of different clients on hundreds of projects. Here are a couple of examples of the types of projects I’ve worked on. My work has primarily been with eCommerce, manufacturing and professional services businesses.

Retail eCommerce Client Profile:

This client sells a consummable (food) product via their website and in stores. The product is available in numerous flavors and they have several seasonal varities that are promoted at different points throughout the year.

Objectives at Project Start:

Improve eCommerce website front-end and back-end user experience and increase online sales.

The client had significant issues with site downtime due to malware problems, UX issues triggering client complaints, situations where the site would disconnect from third party tools used for analytics and order processing and an offline situation where retail stores had been reducing their self space making it more important for them to fix these issues so they could sell more product through their own website.

Process:

I did a full initial analysis of the site identifying numerous technical issues and UX problems.

The site was built on WooCommerce/WordPress with a cPanel (shared) hosting setup with numerous plugins installed, many of which were outdated and a couple that were no longer supported by their developers.
Overall site performance was pretty bad with PageSpeed Insights scores in the 20s on mobile and 30s on desktop.
Some objects were off-screen on mobile making some of the site features unusuable to customers on phones.
PHP version running on the site was several versions old but a few of the necessary plugins were incompatible with newer versions thus why it was left as is
Adding product was difficult due to some customizations that had been made. I was able to make some adjustments to the custom code to immediately fix this problem (Good functional code but bad UX design/CSS).
Google Analytics not properly installed so no data was being collected yet the script was attempting to load with errors contributing to overall site performance issues.
No use of a tag manager (Google Tag Manager or other)
Google Merchant Center continuously disconnects from site and product changes are not reflected on Merchant Center after they are made on the website creating customer confusion.

Based on the analysis findings and several meetings with the client, I recommended switching to BigCommerce or Shopify to take some of the resposibility for back-end maintenance off their plate. The client did not need a fully custom site and with the WooCommerce setup they had they were completely responsible for back-end maintenance but without the staffing or budget necessary to handle it.

The client decided to go with BigCommerce, so I migraged all of their products and site data from WooCommerce to BigCommerce over a weekend with less than 2 hours of downtime, connected all third party tools used for analytics and order fulfillment, and trained their team on how to use the platform to add product, fuflill orders and add inofrmation to the site.

The Results:

The changes implemented resulted in a significant improvemennt across all metrics including higher revenues and higher profits.

Engagement rate increased from 28% to 63%
PageSpeed Insights scores increased to above 90 on both desktop and mobile
The site passed core metrics on desktop and mobile for the first time
Total sales increased by more than $50K in less than a year
Website downtime when from around 11% to 0%
Customer complaints went from a few each week to just a couple over the course of a year
Time spent managing product on the back-end decreased significantly
Fixed issue with Google Ads resulting in collecting high-quality data for decision making
Helped client implement Targeted Google Ads strategy that brought in six figure revenues off less than a $24K spend over 12 months.
Trained client on data analysis and created several custom reports in Google Aanalytics so they could quickly find KPI data

Retail Apparel Sales eCommerce Client Profile:

This client sells apparel through multiple custom-branded eCommerce sites.

Objectives at Project Start:

Simplify the management of mulitple eCommerce sites, improve data quality, improve connections with third-party tools, improve workflows on the back-end and improve the overall user experience on each website. The clients main concern was that none of the sites had an engagement rate over 20%.

Process:

I did a full initial analysis of the site setup and back end workflows documenting any issues. This client had several eCommerce sites for different brands running on WordPress sites. The product was actually managed on a third party fulfillment service platform with embedded store pages from that application on the client’s websites. All of the purchase transaction and fufillment ocurred through the third party platform but it looked like it was happening through each site.

Back-end workflows were almost entirely manual, very little automation and what was automated wasn’t efficient
All of the sites failed core metrics and scored sub 40 on desktop and mobile devices
The shopping experience on each site was generic and awkward (felt very sketchy) – The client had a designer copy embed code from the fulfillment service and paste it into HTML fields on each site without any customization.
Order notifications (Oder verification, status updates, etc.) were all branded with the fulfillment services branding, not the website.
Customer email addresses were being captured within the fufillment service platform but were not being imported into any system controlled by the client or used for any marketing activities
Learned through the process of working with this client that they had very little technical expertise had been piecing things together with no long-term planning.

Based on the analysis findings, I created a detailed plan for addressing all of the issues above starting with fixing the branding issues, making UX and workflow improvements, connecting all of the websites with a centralized data management application with custom dashboard showing metrics associated with client KPIs, worked with client to clarify KPIs, implmented an email management/marketing plan and connected fulfillment platform with client’s MailChimp account and started an on-going training and support program for the client and their staff helping them “learn as they do” with me over the course of a couple of years.

The Results:

The changes implemented resulted in a significant improvemennt in client technical knowledge, customer engagement, user experience, sales and profit margins.

Sales increased by more than $100,000 over a six month period
Profit margin jumped from 19% to 33% thanks to reducing manual processes, automation and improving the client’s technical capabilities
Engagement rate for each of their eCommerce sites increased to over 60% within six months
The technical capabilities of the client’s staff improved significantly as a result of the training and support program resulting in less frustration managing the sites and the ablity to focus on more important metrics.

Those are just a couple of examples of past projects. If you’d like to learn more, contact me HERE or you can learn more about my professional background on my LinkedIn profile:

Thomas M. Broadwater – LinkedIn (opens in new tab/window)