Background
Urban Road, a leading online retailer of premium wall art, wallpaper, and homewares from well-known local and international artists, needed a reliable eCommerce solution to support their ambitious global expansion plans. Urban Road, known for its affiliations with popular TV shows and strong social media presence, had built a loyal customer base but faced limitations with their existing website platform.
To address these issues and achieve scalability, Perceptiv Digital created a specialised Shopify Plus eCommerce site. The project included a seamless platform migration as well as a comprehensive SEO migration to maintain and improve search visibility.
Despite complex site requirements such as a platform switch and a domain name change, the migration was completed successfully. Urban Road now has a powerful, scalable online platform, allowing them to expand their reach beyond Australia and sell their stunning artwork to customers all over the world.
Urban Road’s Goals
- Creating a smooth transition between platforms for the business.
- Work with a technical partner who understands their business but is also very well versed with Neto and Shopify Plus, so that a successful migration can take place
- Maintaining their current data architecture.
- End up with a paradigm in which the internal team can build pages using pre-designed sections, resulting in faster speed to launch and hence, sales.
- Maintain a fast website with a high conversion rate and low bounce rate.
- Increase AOV.
How We Did It
- Urban Road made the move to an ERP and new platform at the same time. Ensuring all stakeholders across multiple companies were aligned was critical and achieved via a regular cadence of meetings.
- The product data exceeded Shopify’s variant limitation of 3; therefore, we put in place custom data architecture to allow any number of options and up to 250 variants per product. Making the move to Shopify Plus a possibility.
- The frontend build was complex, including sections on the homepage such as the Shop The Look section and the main banner, which has many features built into it allowing for easy internal control/updates of those elements by the Urban Road team.
- We worked closely with the design team to ensure CRO best practices were maintained.
Challenges
- Multiple requirements for this website exceeded Shopify’s existing capabilities and required custom solutions. This included the use of a double URL hierarchy for subcollections whilst having unique content attached to them as well as the need to have more than 3 variant options for a product.
- Urban Road has 3 different product page designs as well as differing collection page designs—adding to the complexity of this build.
SEO Migration
For Urban Road’s website migration, we optimized the product category structure, implemented a clever redirect package to handle the domain change without redirect chains, and set up GA4 tracking with thorough testing. Pre-migration benchmarking and an SEO audit ensured readiness. Post-migration, we conducted a comprehensive SEO audit, resolved any issues, and monitored site and page performance to maintain visibility and growth.