5D Spectrum Drives Up Sales for Pinewood Pro
We are always looking for fun ways to make shopping more engaging to help increase the bottom line. Our Marketing and Development teams work together to come up with ideas to do just that. Custom development is right up our alley – pushing the platforms we develop to the limits to produce outstanding results.
The Project
Pinewood Pro approached 5D Spectrum for help with a major upgrade. Their site had been built on a legacy version of MIVA, and was a hybrid with hundreds of html product landing pages. The good news was that the existing copy had already been SEO optimized. However, we would have to be careful in order to keep the rank intact.
Another part of the project was to evaluate how customers interacted with the site and to develop a more user friendly system to order the cars.
With a MIVA partnership since 1999, and decades of business and marketing experience, 5D Spectrum was perfect for the job.
“As a parent of a former cub scout, I understood the pains of purchasing this type of product. I had never built a pinewood derby car myself, and when I went to buy the parts for my son, I ended up going back three times because I didn’t know everything I needed to build a fast pinewood derby car.”
~ De Ivett, 5D Spectrum CEO
The Challenge
5D needed to build a whole new interface design, as well as merge the external html and php pages into MIVA so it could all be managed under one platform. The challenge was that all previous SEO had to be preserved, and the homepage had to load in under three seconds in order to maintain rank.
Additionally, we were tasked to find a creative solution to the somewhat confusing shopping system. Customers would forget certain car parts and end up having to make several separate purchases to complete their cars.
The Solution
The Miva software platform is optimized for performance and wide open for custom development. Focused on maintaining the SEO rank, we did some fine-tuning on the source code and assets that were being loaded, and it was ready to go. We were then able to create the shopping solution integrated right into the website. Miva makes it easy to add selected products right into the customer’s cart.
5D had the opportunity to create a novel shopping experience that walked parents through the process of purchasing everything necessary for a fast Pinewood Pro derby car. This included the car parts, tools, and a guide purchasable through a virtual car designer and speed simulator aimed at making a fun user experience.
The Impact
As a result of creating the car designer and speed simulator we were able to see an increase in the average order value over the first few months of the new site going live.
Over the next year, Pinewood Pro saw a positive trajectory across several metrics, including AOV and revenue.
