Upgrading an e-commerce website for the UK’s most established supplier of welding services and equipment.
Role: Designer at Nzime
Website: www.fosterindustrial.co.uk
Overview
After working with Foster Industrial over 8 years, they were looking to upgrade their website. This included a full migration from Magento over to Shopify, with integration with Craft as the main CMS.
I worked on elevating the design, and identifying opportunities for optimising the new website from a business, user and discoverability point of view.
E-Commerce Web Design
Opportunity for uplift
With a migration to Shopify, there was an opportunity to elevate the design which had been largely untouched for five years.
I looked at ensuring the Foster Industrial brand was more strongly represented through a mix of video and image based content – highlighting their person service.
A careful balance on the homepage needed to be struck – visual links to top level categories to serve the e-commerce user, trade services for a B2B audience highlighted with icon based USPs and calls to action for further information.
Considering both B2B and B2C audiences
Foster Industrial serve both a direct customer base through their e-commerce website, as well as providing additional services to the trade – such as servicing, stock management and efficiency surveys.
The website has to work for both audience types, so adopts a segmented menu system to keep the e-commerce function and trade services separated.
Product Categories and Pages
Category and product listing pages had more opportunity for cleaner and more optimised design – I created product card components that had flexibility for low ticket items up to the higher prices welding machines.
Opportunities to bring products forward in the journey was also considered, with category pages utilising a ‘featured product’ section.
Product pages are now more optimised for user needs.
- Galleries now feature both image and video content.
- Highlighted product features includes key pull outs with imagery
- Real-time delivery expectations and stock levels
- Shipping & returns information on page
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Cross-sell and Upsell opportunities
A more recent consideration on the Foster Industrial website was how to increase their average order value – design currently in build.
I designed a product comparison table that can appear on selected product pages, highlighting benefits in comparison to other similar products – this pulls product information directly from Shopify, so pricing and product information remains dynamic, mitigating risk. It also mirrors functionality used within a page builder block in Craft, keeping consistency across the site.
Products being added to basket now triggers a dialogue confirming the action, and also presenting the user additional products that compliment what is in their basket. I suggested a rule set for each product category, to minimise the manual process of adding ‘related products’ to every product on the site – for example, if a user added a MIG welder to their basket, the suggestions would show MIG welding accessories under a pricing threshold.
This is also reflected in the basket, where cross-sell product suggestions also appear.
Email marketing
Shopify offers a more integrated automated email system that provides several opportunities throughout the user journey to increase brand awareness and improve conversion rate.
I created a user-flow diagram to highlight to the Foster Industrial team where there were potential opportunities to embrace.
In line with the cross sell improvements made, I suggested emails that were triggered after an order is placed, that recommends additional products based on content of the previous order .
I also suggested three levels of ‘abandoned’ browsing (from product category through to checkout) – this was aimed to increase conversion.
Lastly, reinstating an email newsletter signup, with a series of welcome emails including discount codes triggered by a certain amount of time passing without order.
These emails should see an increase in the average order value once implemented.
SEO & Discoverability
After discussions around increasing SEO value, especially optimising for AI search platforms, I presented Foster Industrial with a series of opportunities.
I first created a content review document that looked at common entry points into the website that could be improved upon. Using GA4, I highlighted the guides and case studies areas as areas of the website that could be built upon to increase valuable traffic to the website.
I also looked at content structures that would work well across different content types such as
- Buying Guides for products – such as reviews of popular welding products, and comparison guides with links through to the e-commerce areas.
- Educational Guides – helpful articles, with different welding techniques, answering commonly asked questions.
- B2B – Case Studies: utilising longer length write-ups for case studies with a common structure that highlighted the problem, solution and results
Case studies attract a much lower percentage of users to the website, but their potential for high-value conversion is massive. While product and educational guides result in a lower average order value, but at increased volume.
I used competitor analysis to help inform some recommended common structures for guides, this also resulted in new page builder block design to give Foster Industrial the right content blocks to fulfill these.
New blocks included
- Product comparison view – a dynamic product comparison table that pulls from Shopify product data
- Simple table – a table structure for flexible data types
- Video blocks – including portrait or landscape video asset upload, utilising some of their social media style content that internal teams were producing alongside guides.
- FAQs – leaning into AI question and answer style to encourage Foster Industrial content to appear in chat based searches.
Note: Foster Industrial is still undergoing development, so several areas are not on the live website from this case study.
More Projects
BridgeCast
A bespoke video subscription platform for the world’s top rated bridge player and teacher – Andrew Robson.
