Case Study: How Swanky Helped French Fashion Brand Horizons Lointains Switch From WooCommerce to Shopify

Brand overview

Horizons Lointains is an established ladies’ fashion brand, based in Cap Ferret, in the South of France. The brand aims to reflect the beauty of its surroundings with a chic, laid-back vibe to its clothing range.

In addition to its three physical stores in the region, Horizons Lointains sells its products across France and internationally via its online store and marketplaces. Over the years, the brand has enjoyed an increasing volume of traffic to its store, however, with more visitors came a series of challenges.

This case study will explore how Swanky helped Horizons Lointains overcome these hurdles and take on peak season with a more reliable ecommerce site.

Migration from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus

The brand’s website had been hosted on WooCommerce for a number of years, but the team were experiencing considerable problems with bugs and site downtime. In particular, the website was struggling to support large spikes in traffic, resulting in a considerable loss of revenue during peak trading times.

Having seen other brands replatform successfully onto Shopify, Horizons Lointains recognised the platform would be a good fit for its new ecommerce store. As a fully hosted platform, Shopify is a great solution for brands with peak sales and high volumes of site traffic. The platform boasts a 99.9% uptime across its stores, whilst the closed-source code approach means that Shopify merchants have considerably less bugs to resolve.

The brand’s in-house team called on Swanky’s experience in migrating numerous brands from WooCommerce to Shopify, to check that desired functionality could be achieved on Shopify, and to ensure that the migration went smoothly.

Custom development

To smooth the transition to the new website for its customers, Horizons Lointains wanted to keep the appearance of its Shopify store as close to the original store as possible. At the same time, they planned to use the replatforming to Shopify Plus as an opportunity to improve some key elements of user experience.

Leveraging our experience in custom development, Swanky’s developers built the additional functionality that Horizons Lointains wanted on its new Shopify Plus store, aimed at improving navigation and boosting conversion.

Easy navigation

To facilitate improved navigation around the site for mobile users, we created a permanent footer menu with clean, simple icons, visible only on mobile. The footer allows users to navigate between category pages, wishlist, basket and user account, without the need to access the burger menu. This helps users switch seamlessly between different parts of their account, even on a small screen, and return to their basket when they’re ready to purchase. They are also reminded of how many items they have in their wishlist, thanks to a small, notification-style badge indicating the current number.

In addition to the footer, we added breadcrumbs to collection pages to allow users to easily retrace their steps whilst shopping. Each breadcrumb has a clickable link, so the user can return to broader collections after they finish viewing each individual product.

Improved conversion

In order to encourage users to scroll through more products, especially on mobile, we increased the number of images visible on the collection pages from 1.5 to 2.5, allowing users to see two whole images as well as a portion of the next. A small arrow button over this half-revealed image makes it clear to the user that they can scroll to view more.

By making it easier for users to discover new products, you heighten the chance of the user finding the product they want, or adding additional items to their cart. In turn, this can have a positive impact on key commercial metrics like conversion rate, average order value and revenue.

Furthermore, Swanky’s developers created a sticky checkout button to appear above the fold, streamlining the journey to the checkout. This button hovers over the page, and reminds the user of the subtotal of their basket at any given time.

In addition, we added a “Quick Add” button to the collection pages, making it quicker and easier for customers to add products to their cart, without the need to view the full product page.

Results

Horizons Lointains started to see positive results as soon as its new Shopify Plus website went live. The store was launched two weeks before Black Friday weekend, to be ready for the peak traffic during this period, and the Horizons Lointains team were delighted with the results.

“We have never regretted our decision to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify.

“Over Black Friday weekend 2023, thanks to our marketing strategy and the right platform, we generated twice as much revenue as the previous year. Our website held up brilliantly, maintaining fast site speed despite the increase in traffic compared to usual.

“Swanky’s quick and efficient support enabled us to launch in time for Black Friday. This was especially important to us, since we had missed the summer 2023 sales periods due to issues with our WooCommerce site. We were absolutely counting on the last event of the year to end the year on a high note. And we succeeded!

“With Swanky we know we’re in good hands. Their team is talented and responsive.”

– Remi Guillot, Head of Technology, Horizons Lointains

Looking to switch from WooCommerce to Shopify?

Is your current WooCommerce site struggling to cope with high volumes of traffic? Is site downtime having a negative impact on your sales revenue?

If you are considering a switch from WooCommerce to Shopify, Swanky’s migration experts can help guide you through the process. We’ve migrated numerous brands from WooCommerce to Shopify, including international personal grooming retailer Wilkinson Sword and global brand group One Retail Group.

Get in touch with our team today to find out more about migrating to Shopify Plus.