Optics Trade is an established online store in the sport optics as well as hunting and shooting equipment industry. They have been on the market and our client since 2011, when we developed their first Magento 1 online store.
Since then they have been exponentially growing every year and currently have more than 5 million in online revenue.
When Magento 1 was approaching end of life, we started to develop their new Magento 2 online store. This project was quite a challenge because of many custom-made functionalities and plugins that have accumulated over the years in their original Magento 1 store.
The project had three main goals:
- Migrate all aspects and functionalities from the old Magento 1 store
- Make the new online store even better and more user friendly than the old one
- Page speed was our main focus
Optics Trade online store consists of several websites such as Optics Trade, Hunting Trade, Reloading Trade, B2B, and so on. They have a multi website online store.
Until now we have migrated two online stores – Reloading Trade and B2B – to the new Magento 2 platform.
LINK of the project: www.reloading-trade.eu
How have we improved Magento 2 speed?
At the start of the migration, Magento 2 was not known as a fast platform. Especially not the frontend with the Knockout JavaScript framework.
What did we do?
- We got rid of the Knockout framework. We have replaced Knockout with a much faster Alpine JS framework.
- We have rewritten all JavaScript components to use Alpine JS.
- We have removed the biggest 3rd party JavaScript libraries such as jQuery. We are developing all Vanilla JavaScript components.
- Magento 2 code optimization with profiling tools.
- Fast server hosting on a powerful cluster.
Beside focusing on great user experience and speed optimization, our development team had a significant challenge to implement many advanced custom-made functionalities. The project had a long task list with many specific and tailor-made functionalities, but let’s expose some of the most challenging ones.
Questions & Answers and the Community Upload section
Every product page has a dedicated section for the questions and answers from the community and also a section where users can upload images or videos for that specific product.
This Q&A section allows users to share their experience with the product or just to ask specific questions regarding the product. Both the community and clients themselves then have the opportunity to answer those questions and create an open discussion about the product.
This is beneficial in two ways: it helps other visitors to better understand the product and it is very useful for content generation for Search Engine Optimization as well.
What is more, visitors have an option to like and share the most relevant and useful answers which allows them to rank the most helpful questions or answers higher.
Auto cross-sell and up-sell product relations
One of the advantages of the Optics Trade online store is a wide selection of products. In some cases, however, this can be a big editorial challenge, especially when linking products together so you can offer relevant similar and complementary products to customers.
Having such a big catalog, it is almost impossible to have a manual selection of up-sell and cross-sell products. For this reason, in collaboration with the client we have developed a functionality which allows the creation of specific up-sell and cross-sell rules automatically linking products together.
Rules can be set up very accurately using a variety of conditions, which allows to automatically generate relevant cross-sell and up-sell products with high level of conversion.
