Skirtings R Us - Mageworx Magento Case Studies

Website:

skirtingsrus.co.uk

Industry:

Home building

Home renovation

Year founded:

2012

“The APO module provided the heart of our product catalog, and gave us complete and granular control over our product options. It also has benefited the company by reducing workloads associated with managing the website.”

Will Baker

Founder of Skirtings R Us

About the company

Skirtings R Us was founded in 2012 as an online retailer of moulded MDF products.

The company’s initial goal was to offer customers in the UK a bespoke solution that could be specified to suit the customers' needs, rather than customers being forced to buy the standard ‘one size fits all’ products found at DIY outlets.

Since then their operations have only increased with a full team of office, production, and delivery staff.

They increased manufacturing premises, and significant investment in automation.

The challenge

Skirtings R Us products have a lot to specify ― design, length, thickness, height, finish.

With all product options considered, their catalog consists of 10,000+ products which, ordinarily, would each need their own page and all of which would have been similar in content. This was quite an overwhelming thought of having to manage and would have been UX and SEO suicide.

They knew that the clearest way of presenting these product options was in a drop-down menu format.

However, the next problem was that a normal Magento 2 product option solution would force Skirtings R Us to show every possible combination, but it was not physically possible for them to produce every combination that would be showing on the site.

They needed some options to be restricted or not to appear in combination with other options.

Mageworx’s Advanced Product Options was recommended by several Magento web developers as the best solution for the company’s scenario due to the increased flexibility, and the scope of functions it provided, and the robustness of the code that it uses, which given that this was going to be central to the sites functionality, would provide stability to the website on going.

The solution

Advanced Product Options allowed Skirtings R Us to have one product for each of their designs and implement a sophisticated option menu structure on each, rather than having a page for each possible combination.

This reduced the company’s catalog from 10,000+ products to 207 ‘customisable’ products.

In tackling the restricted options problem, APO (using dependencies) allowed Skirtings R Us to restrict options from appearing in menus if the option is not available in combination with something a user has already selected.

In addition to this it also provided menu formatting and options to make menus mandatory or visible amongst other things that helped provide a clearly structured path for users.

“Reducing our catalog had the knock-on effect of reducing the workload associated with maintaining that number of our products. And in terms of UX we now regularly receive feedback from customers expressing how easy it is to select what they require.”

Will Baker

Founder of Skirtings R Us

Summing up

Extensions’ complexity

The module is providing a complex function, it follows that the solution has a degree of complexity and that can take some time to get correct. For us this was the dependency structuring, however it is logically put together, and once you understand the process you are away.

Customer care

We had several interactions with the Mageworx team throughout our website's development, in which staff were helpful and able to rectify or modify the module to address issues or behaviors in the module that didn’t reflect how we needed it to work.

Usefulness

Obviously, the massive reduction in pages is a major win. But equally important the module menu structure allows our website to exist in a user-friendly state that would not have been possible before.

We would particularly recommend this module to businesses that have complex product options due to the increased flexibility, and the scope of other functions it provides.

Will Baker

Founder of Skirtings R Us

Customer success stories

How Skirtings R Us advanced their Magento 2 product options with the Mageworx solution

About the company

The challenge

The solution

Summing up