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Mobility Pitstop Case Study

When Mobility Pitstop and Harmony first discussed the project, the company had no identity or name, and today, the site has over 2,000 visitors a month, maintaining a repeat client base as well as drawing in over 70% new visitors each month, with a low bounce rate.

• Mobility Pit Stop is a complete commerce solution from customer search to delivery at their door for mobility products. Mobility identified the key aspects of the business to be their technical knowledge, availability of components, reliability and speed of delivery, which Harmony would reflect with the website, and support with its functionality.

  "The design of the front end of the site had to accommodate for a spectrum of disabilities and impairments."

  Name and Branding

  Without a name, Harmony put forward several combinations of design and name at early stages of the relationship. It was important that the name did not confuse visitors and search engines with the suppliers of general mobility products, and yet very memorable. Several designs and names were put forwards and discussed, from just logos to basic header designs. After much discussion it was decided that the name would be Mobility Pit Stop, with the strapline of "The part you need, when you need it!"

  

  Shop Front End

  The design of the front end of the site had to accommodate for a spectrum of disabilities and impairments when using the site. Therefore, care was taken from the very start to ensure the site met the W3C and Bobbie recommendations for standards and accessibility. The interface was designed to meet the government regulations and standards for usability for businesses, ensuring Mobility Pit Stop was compliant.

  Product Management

  Products on the site can be sorted into categories, and product relations – for example tyres for the product the visitor is viewing – can be set up. Basic product details include a name, description, cost and photographs, which are managed through a back end system for staff of Mobility Pit Stop. The system allows them to edit details, and upload photographs – allowing the images to be cropped to show detail of a product.

• Customer Ordering

  Mobility Pit Stop does not require you to register before you can enter the payment process. Instead, customers can shop as they wish and the details entered for the purchase (such as name, address) are put forward to create an account for them without repetition of information, or interruption to the ordering flow.

  Registered customers have the added advantage of being able to see their order history by logging in at any point after. 23% of checkout drop-off on average happens because sites insist on registration before purchasing*.

  At present the site uses Google Checkout, which gives the added benefit of recognition in Google searches. This payment system could equally be swapped out for another, such as Paypal or Sage Pay (Protx), which Harmony have proven experience with.

  "23% of checkout drop-off on average happens because sites insist on registration before purchasing."

  Discount Schemes

  At present the site allows for staff to apply a discount rating for a group of products, or allow items to be added individually to a discount to allow for quantity based discounts, such as "10% off orders of 4 or more tyres."

  Shop Management

  Staff at Mobility Pit Stop are able to manage the products, customers and orders all from one place online. Staff can be allocated their own individual logins and permissions. Once logged in, staff can manage orders, change statuses of transactions and locate customer details with ease. Appropriate information can then be exported to Sage in csv format.

  "Building accessibly does go a certain way to providing the foundations for good search engine indexing."

  Marketing, Additional Content

  From the initial design and throughout the build, Mobility Pit Stop was designed and developed to ensure it would receive maximum coverage on Google organically. Building accessibly does go a certain way to providing the foundations for good search engine indexing, but the additional content helps, giving the search engines more to index and crawl. Mobility Pit Stop added sections such as “ask an expert” and other articles to help this, and have plans to enrich the site content in this way in phase two.

Looking Ahead

Mobility Pit Stop are keen to enhance and improve their online presence and service to customers in a number of ways:

• Building on the existing product listing, additional attributes such as composition or weight are to be added, to bridge the gap between the physical product and an online shopping experience.
• Expansion of discount system to allow for a specific value discount to be added, and visible on the product’s page – for example £5 off.
• Content management system to allow modification of advice and ask the expert pages through the management system.
• Extension of ordering system to allow pick list and dispatch notes to be printed directly from the manager.
• Image tagging to allow more descriptive and deeper search ability for products.
• Increase intelligence of product relationships – “customers who bought x, also bought y”.
• Add ability for recursive shopping for products that customers regularly reorder without them having to search for them.
• Regular newsletter facility to keep in touch with customers, with subscription integrated directly into the orders and settings for customers to manage their communication preferences.
• Basic stock control, allowing staff to enter stock levels and the system to decrement according to orders. Products to show out of stock automatically, allowing customers to view but not order, and at other times indicate stock levels to customers to allow them to make informed decisions at the selection stage.

* Source: Forrester Research US; Required Registration Lowers Online Conversion Rates, April 2008 (via Google’s “Make your website work”).