More than a year ago, one of our long-time clients came to us with concerns over their Yahoo! Store. Blair Candy Company, located in Altoona, PA, was experiencing its normal year-over-year growth plus a rapid increase fueled by the COVID-19 crisis.
With more online orders coming into their warehouse than ever before, they needed to make sure their eCommerce store and backend operations were able to keep up with the demand. After evaluating their Yahoo! Store and determining whether or not a platform migration was necessary, it was decided that moving to a new eCommerce platform was necessary.
Knowing that moving to a new platform is no easy endeavor, Blair Candy co-owner Pam Macharola, placed her trust in the team here at Your Store Wizards to make the process as simple and painless as possible.
There were a few goals going into the project. On the front-end Pam wanted her store to retain the look and feel of her Yahoo! Store as much as possible. On the back-end, it was a priority to make order processing, customer login and order history, and management of wholesale accounts easy.
Based on the client’s needs, BigCommerce turned out to be the platform of choice to take Blair Candy into its next growth phase. BigCommerce’s easy-to-use interface, robust features to manage items, orders, customers, and price lists, as well as a streamlined checkout process made the platform a perfect fit.
As a BigCommerce Enterprise customer, Blair Candy was given a dedicated project manager who worked closely with Your Store Wizards from contract signing to launch day. Weekly status meetings were held with BigCommerce, Blair Candy, and Your Store Wizards to discuss the project, check on progress, and provide support where needed.
Blair Candy was on the Yahoo! Store platform for more than two decades and moving an older site with voluminous amounts of data would be intimidating to many, but Your Store Wizards was up to the challenge.
When developing our Platform Transfer Service, we created a unique, proprietary process to extract data out of the Yahoo! Store system, analyze it, clean it up via a unique three-step system, and load it into the new platform.
Once data was analyzed and brought into BigCommerce, our team went to work!
Here is just some of the work the Your Store Wizards team did for this project:
- Custom programmed the store to maintain the look and feel of the old Yahoo! Store as much as possible.
- Implemented Your Store Wizards advanced search application, Search Magic, which was also used on the client’s Yahoo! Store.
- Optimized item page design to increase conversions.
- Reduced or eliminated the need for 3rd party applications, saving the client monthly service fees.
- Built a custom application to easily update different levels of wholesale pricing.
- Built a custom application to allow customers to sign up for a new wholesale account with an approval/disapproval process and email autoresponders.
- Made the checkout process quick and easy by enabling BigCommerce’s one-page checkout.
- Assisted with setup of back-end settings such as payment processing, sales tax, system-generated email messages, and more.
- Integrated Ship Station to streamline the shipping process for Blair Candy’s warehouse staff.
Blair Candy’s new BigCommerce store went live earlier this month, and since then we have been optimizing various aspects of the customer experience based on feedback from shoppers, Google Analytics, our own analysis tools, and more.
While learning a new platform isn’t easy, Pam and her staff have embraced the platform and are already looking forward to additional ways to streamline operations and improve efficiency on the back-end.
“The new platform definitely has a learning curve, and my head is spinning, but I know that I have a team at BigCommerce and Your Store Wizards who are available 24/7 to help when we need it,” according to Pam. “I was very nervous going into this, but we didn’t experience any hiccups and we’re now actually getting more online orders on a daily basis than we ever had before, so it was definitely the right decision for us.”
For more information on how Your Store Wizards can help you move from Yahoo! Store to BigCommerce, check out our Platform Transfer Service as well as the services we offer for BigCommerce merchants.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.