Makro reaps benefits from transactional website powered by Maginus
Makro, the leading cash and carry wholesaler in the UK with stores at 30 locations nationwide, has added a transactional website to its sales channels in order to increase sales and develop its multi-channel offering. The decision was made in order to improve the service to existing customers and to open up the Makro brand to an even larger business audience.
Following a detailed selection process, Makro selected Maginus to design, build and host the new eCommerce site. Maginus was chosen as the management team at Makro felt they had a wealth of experience in developing successful B2B web sites and could advise them on the development of best practice in this new venture. It was also important to Makro that the Maginus eCommerce solution had a well-defined roadmap, to ensure that new functionality would be regularly available to help them to continue to improve the service and capabilities they could offer to their customers. The site went live in November 2010 and is integrated into Makro’s Oracle back office system.
The agency team within Maginus designed the new site within strict Makro group guidelines whilst ensuring simple navigation, great usability and a smooth customer journey. In addition, Maginus hosts the website, and thus was able to offer a ‘one-stop shop’.
Makro had very tight deadlines for the project and the new site went live just three months after the initial kick-off meeting.
Improved sales just some of the benefits of the new site
With its first ever transactional website up-and-running, Makro’s overall sales have increased by 177% since the site launched. Orders have increased by 134%, conversion rates by 52% and visits by 55%. These are excellent results for a new website, but an increase in sales and conversion are just some of the benefits that Makro has observed.
Makro now benefits from the scalability and flexibility of the new site. Initially Makro had 1,500 professional catering products on the site, but this rapidly increased to 5,000, and ultimately Makro plans to have 20,000 products available on the site, from across the entire product range.
Another great feature of the eCommerce solution is a ‘Cart Abandonment’ report, which enables the retailer to follow-up with customers that have left Makro’s website without purchasing the items in their basket. It also identifies potential issues in the system which may have led to the baskets being abandoned and helps to resolve these issues.
The site is designed and developed to be SEO friendly as proven by the increase of 40% in visitors from Organic search.
Andrew Finney, Project Manager of Makro Information Management, comments “We’re extremely pleased with the results of the site, which is still relatively new. In just over a year it’s amazing how far we have moved on, in terms of the number of products that we can sell online, the increase in sales and the improvements in the results from SEO.
It was important for us that we could handle the on-going management of the site ourselves. The CMS system allows us to easily make changes to the site to maximise the results, the site is fully SEO enabled which has allowed us to improve the stats in that area too.”
An improved design and future prospects
The site was recently redesigned by Maginus to get the best out of the content and further drive sales with a more compelling and user-friendly website and this was delivered in September 2011.
Speaking on the entire project, Andrew Finney, Project Manager of Makro Information Management, comments: “Maginus has provided exactly what we needed, and was also able to meet our challenging timescales whilst providing good support all the way through. Going forward we plan to continue to develop our online and multi-channel offering, which will allow us to further improve the service we offer our existing customers but to continue to add to our customer base. Maginus has been instrumental in helping us to develop the new online channel”.
Mark Thornton, eCommerce Director at Maginus comments “Makro is a great brand to be involved with. Their online channel is still relatively new, but it has already grown significantly and it has been designed to deliver the flexibility required to handle the company’s plans for expansion. I’m sure we can help Makro continue to grow the channel in the future.”