Dataman

As Shopify is a Software as a Service platform (SaaS), this meant that maintenance, site infrastructure upgrades and security fixes are undertaken by the platform itself and the client wouldn’t be responsible. Shopify also have a 99.9% uptime so the store owner could take comfort that there would be minimal disruption to customers. There are two sites under the Dataman umbrella; an eCommerce site for customers to purchase products with geoIP functionality so the user is directed to the correct store depending on their location, the other site covering content and device support for the programming products offered.

To ensure Shopify was a viable platform for Dataman and met their requirements, Absolute undertook an audit of their Magento site to get a clear understanding of the current setup and what would be required for a smooth transition to Shopify.

Dataman also wished to undertake a design exercise to improve on their current site layout and make more use of modern practices, such as full width pages, larger images and a simplified menu navigation.

This meant key selling messages could be altered to better suit that market, pricing can be more easily managed and even localisation down to the level of the unit of weight used just helped each team more efficiently run the store day to day.

Between Absolute and Dataman it was decided to have a separate store which would cover customers in separate markets all while using the same domain, GeoIP would be put into place which would automatically direct the customer to the appropriate site depending on their location when accessing the site domain.

There were smaller compatibility issues too which required a solution, for example the ability for business customers to enter their courier account details depending on the chosen shipping method.

Furthermore, Shopify facilitated the option to change the client’s current payment provider to Shopify Payments, providing reduced fees and simplified checkout process for the customer.

Following the discovery phase, we worked with Dataman to find solutions on the potential issues we identified and provided guidance on alternative options and/or Shopify apps to keep the disruption to workflow changes and the day-to-day running of the business to a minimum.

We collaboratively worked with Dataman on the design phase, initially by providing a few select themes which our team thought would work well for the existing business and would allow room for expansion as the business continues to grow. The phase included several iterations to the design and the development of key bespoke pages that enhanced the standard Shopify templates. We adjusted the layout on both the homepage and PDP (product page) to better suit the content and provide a design that was more aligned with the clients brand identity.

Once the bespoke designs were signed off, the project quickly progressed to development, where our in-house devs built the site to specification - ensuring the site went through a few stages of review by the design team to verify the build met the agreed design specification.

With Dataman being in business for over 30 years and having operated on the Magento platform for several years, their customer, order and product data was extensive and a critical part of the project data migration planning was extensive to ensure we didn’t lose any important data. The migration scope also included specific rules, such as only importing customers who ordered products and disregarding accounts which didn’t have an order history.

A top priority was the new ‘Resource Centre’ contained within the site, which allowed Dataman to provide constant support for its wide product range . The resources include software to accompany the programming devices and device manuals in PDF format, the files can be quite large and because Shopify doesn’t support large file types above a certain size “out of the box”, Absolute were tasked to find a solution for customers to be able to download a resource, while keeping the functionality clean and not disrupt the user experience with too many steps. Working with Dataman it was decided to use Google Drive and for Absolute to create bespoke middleware so a user can download a file with one-click without needing to leave the Dataman website and accessing Google Drive directly.

Finally, although preserving search engine rankings (SEO) was straightforward as majority of the product and page redirects were put in place during the site data migration from Magento to Shopify, we undertook a review to ensure all was correctly mapped before completing the project and preparing for the go live.