Specialists in a niche market
Christine and Linda Naysmith moved The Stick & Cane Shop over to Oxatis in April 2013 to test out the platform before transferring their main website Brolliesgalore. The Stick & Cane Shop sells a great variety of walking sticks, and they pride themselves on providing their customers with great value for money and fast dispatch. In this niche market, their philosophy of great customer service combined with good quality products has been a recipe for success.
Key to success:
Christine and Linda outline the main points of their success:
“A key element that allowed us to obtain the level of visibility and success we enjoy today is the search engine optimisation we’ve been able to achieve with the help of the Oxatis team. As we migrated our site to Oxatis, we were worried about losing the search engine status we’d already achieved. We worked closely with the experts at Oxatis to carefully select the keywords we wanted to optimise, and followed their advice on the optimisation of our site including rewriting URLs, optimising product descriptions, headings, cross-selling etc. Thanks to these efforts combined with some paid advertising, we were able to improve our status to second place in Google for a highly competitive keyword. This helps draw customers to our website – we have between 7,500 and 10,000 visits a month, and 36% of these visitors come from Google. As 65% of our turnover comes directly from our site, this traffic is essential for our sales.
We also enlisted Oxatis' experts to help with the design of our website to make it attractive and professional. With Oxatis we have all of the features we need to reassure customers and lead them to the checkout. Features like zoomable images and detailed product pages help convince first-time customers as to the quality of our products. Providing information on dimensions, measuring, returns and delivery on the product page also helps remove any doubt from visitors’ minds and leads them to confirm their purchases.
Oxatis makes integrating several shipping options (including international and next-day service) simple, and our customers can not only choose when they want their items delivered, but with which service: Interlink Express, Yodel, Royal Mail, DPD or FedEx International.
We use three payment methods from among the many possibilities Oxatis offers, and they were easy to set up. This allows our customers to use the payment platform they’re most comfortable with, and this helps our conversion rate: 3.5% which is 2.33% higher than that of the average e-Commerce site.
Oxatis stresses the importance not only of gaining customers, but of building relationships with them and creating loyalty for your brand. We use the blog feature regularly as it allows us to stay in touch with our customers and keep them up to date with all of our products and events. Comments and blog posts help add a personal, human touch to our communication with our customers. Similarly, we post openly on our Facebook page and Twitter account, and these post feeds can also be seen on and linked to our homepage.
The important features for us, in choosing Oxatis, were the Marketplace Managers for Amazon and eBay, and the SmartFeeds for Google shopping and other comparison sites. Along with these, Oxatis also provides a mobile optimised site and Facebook Social Store, which means we sell our products across a wide range of platforms, keeping us current with modern shopping trends.
When we first moved our site to Oxatis we wanted to test out the platform, and we haven’t looked back. Today we have two successful e-Commerce sites with Oxatis, and we have everything we need in terms of SEO, design, features and support. Oxatis' technical support team is there for us at any time when we need a hand setting up a feature or option, which is a real bonus as it allows us to keep our site up to date with the latest innovation.”
Oxatis Advantages
…that helped us succeed:
- Our website is in the top Google results for important keywords thanks to the optimisation work of Oxatis SEO experts. This helps attract visitors to our site and has a direct impact on our sales.
- Oxatis' design experts helped us create a site that is attractive and user-friendly. Key features such as quality images and detailed product descriptions help reassure our customers. Customisable shipping and payment methods allow us to provide our customers with options and cater to their specific needs, which helps with our conversion rate!
- Oxatis' platform is set up to help you build customer loyalty. We manage our blog right from our back office, and it allows us to stay in touch with our customers and build relationships with them.
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