Rave Digital

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a managing director for an eCommerce company

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

We hired Rave Digital to upgrade our Magento 2 version to the newest version and also maintain our platform.

What were your goals for this project?

Upgrade the platform, fix any issues that arise and maintain the platform to a good standard.

SOLUTION

How did you select Rave Digital?

Through Aheadworks website. We use several of their extensions for our platform.

Describe the project in detail.

Upgrade Magento 2.1.7 to 2.3.5. Magento 2.3 upgrade is a Major version upgrade as compare to 2.1.x and it couldn't be made directly on the PRODUCTION server. they needed to perform the Magento upgrade over development environment first.

Magento 2.3.x version require PHP v7.2. they had to review the existing server configuration and needed to configure server as per Magento v2.3 requirements. Due to the major version upgrade, they also needed to cross check the compatibility of configured Theme and Third-Party/Custom extensions. Use additional maintenance time to fix SEO issues and other back-end issues.

What was the team composition?

There was a business admin, a project manager and a developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The team managed to successfully upgrade the Magento 2 platform to the newer 2.3.5 version. Although it took longer than expected, it was not completely their fault, we had to wait for another vendor to update one of their third party extension.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow for the main task of upgrading the website was great.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team was punctual and approachable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

They need to be more proactive. We had 110 maintenance hours remaining at the end of the contract. We would have hoped that the team would come up with a strategy to use up these hours towards fixing the back-end issues and SEO.

However, only when we decided to cancel the contract, they approached us regarding the remaining hours and that we should use them up. Unfortunately, we didn't want to extend the contract for another 3 months to use up these hours.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I coordinate development tasks with our dev team as well as write copy, social posts, and email marketing for the site.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital, and what were your goals?

We hired Rave to fix our website after a previous developer did a poor job building it out. Rave immediately found issues within the core code that needed to be corrected and addressed those. They also have taken on a number of front end fixes to improve our UX and have implemented extensions to improve the overall usability of our site.

SOLUTION

How did you select Rave Digital and what were the deciding factors?

We found Rave through a thorough search of Magento based web developers and they had reasonable pricing with good reviews and feedback.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Rave oversees all of our website development work from server side setup to back end configuration and theming, to the front end results our customers see.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Our teams have always had at least two developers in constant contact, sometimes 3 or 4, depending on the scope of work required. There is always one direct point of contact that heads the team and a second contact in case they need to be reached also.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The work is completed in a timely fashion and with good results. Occasionally, there are ongoing issues that need to be addressed more than once. We did see immediate gains in traffic, transactions, and revenue after switching to Rave. They clearly know what they're doing.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Rave uses teamwork to set out tasks, assign them to the necessary team member/s, and set out time frames for completion within a 2 week sprint and/or within an estimated number of man hours needed to complete each task. Their timesheets outline who spent how much time on each task within each month. The point of contact is always readily available by email or phone.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They are quick to respond during emergencies. If the site goes down, they are on top of it within a matter of minutes. They are willing to explain the pros and cons for every decision you make regarding customizations, changes, and new extensions you want to implement.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There does seem to be tasks that need to be fixed multiple times. We have a lot of customizations on our site and many of these were built out by a different development team, so it's hard to say how much of the blame should be assigned to each side.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the project manager for our IT group.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital, and what were your goals?

We changed our consumer business ecommerce platform from CDS to Magento, but did not have internal Magento experience. Rave was hired to be the Systems Integrator on this project.

SOLUTION

How did you select Rave Digital and what were the deciding factors?

There was an RFP process, of which I was not involved.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Build and implement the Magento 2.x platform for our consumer business ecommerce site. Project steps included everything from project definition, design, data mapping, and cutover, as well as integration with our fulfillment center and external widgets (payment widget).

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked directly with 2 people, and were aware of 2 additional resources doing work in the background.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

I don't have these metrics.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

They used Teamwork as their PM tool, which I really liked. We had routine status meetings - ranging from higher-level project status meetings on a monthly basis, to daily stand-ups during the development and launch cycles.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They are very responsive and had to handle several inputs from our company. (with the various functional areas and stakeholders involved), and CDS who was the former platform provider and continued on as the fulfillment center. They were very knowledgeable, as well (which is why they were hired, but that doesn't always prove to be the case).

Are there any areas for improvement?

As we moved into the second phase of the project, which is to convert the shopping pages (phase 1 was updating the cart only), and needed our development team to get learned up on the new platform, Rave seemed more comfortable wanting to do the work rather than train others to do the work.

In fairness, our dev team was very passive and seemed to be waiting for instruction, rather than diving in and asking for direction; but I think it was a miss on both sides to develop as a team with the objective of using Rave's expertise to help build but also teach. I think we have now addressed this and it is going well, we just lost time while both sides of the team were waiting for the other side to lean in.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Reliva, a leading CBD retail brand in the U.S. We sell premium health and wellness products. I am working as the VP of E-commerce and Marketing in the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

We were looking to change the look and feel of our existing website and implement new Digital Marketing strategies

What were your goals for this project?

The goal is to have a well-maintained eCommerce store with modern UI/UX and increased traffic through different eCommerce Digital Marketing strategies.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We researched multiple eCommerce development and Digital Marketing Agencies. After exploring several options we felt confident Rave Digital was the best-suited option having expertise in both eCommerce Development as well as Digital Marketing.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

"The main focus of the project was to advance the existing eCommerce website, as well as develop Digital Marketing strategies to drive more traffic, further engage customers and increase sales.

The Rave team updated and modernized the UI/UX, as well as developed on-site functionalities, including; Product Subscriptions, Tiered-discounts, performance & speed optimizations. The Digital Marketing portion of the project was focused on funnel optimization, specifically focused on defining, development and execution of automation and drip campaigns throughout the buyer journey, including; cart abandonment, browse abandonment, A-B subscriptions, welcome series, Win-back, Loyalty tiers, and SMS order confirmation.

What was the team composition?

Their team consisted of of 4 people; developer, designer, project manager, and Digital Marketing Strategist.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

After 2 months of service Organic revenue increased by 19%, email revenue increased by 39.6%, and eCommerce Conversion Rate increased 46%. Additionally, realized a 57% growth rate for our email database via integrated PopUp signup form.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Their Project Management was excellent; communication and response times for requests was extremely quick. The team was always prepared for meetings, consistently updating us on Sprint progress in-between meetings too.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are true subject matter experts in their field. Very proactive and responsive. Easy to work with and the team collaboration to achieve our goals in the shortest amount of time was appreciated and admirable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing comes to mind. Great experience from beginning to end. I highly recommend Rave Digital.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a B2B manufacturing company that specializes in industrial masking solutions and automotive rubber/plastic molded solutions. Our offerings range from e-commerce masking products (such as tapes, caps, and plugs) to custom-engineered parts used in the most well known automotive vehicles in the world. I am the Digital Marketing Specialist.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

We hired them to help convert our website over to Magento's e-commerce/CMS platform.

What were your goals for this project?

To fix a ton of our existing issues by moving away from all of the custom applications we were using, and to help do a light redesign of our frontend.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I found them via Google search. We spoke to them and a few other companies and felt they really knew the aspects much better than the other options

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They converted our website over to Magento's e-commerce/CMS platform and redesigned our website. They helped with everything ranging from our marketing automation implementation, with Pardot, to assisting our IT team with the integration into SAGE, to training us on how to use the new CMS. They also do 40 hours of service for us per month by assisting with any issues we find and handling all updates and maintenance.

What was the team composition?

We mainly worked with Vimal. I know their team had several others that worked on the website as well, but I'm not sure who all was involved or how many there were.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

This new website has given us so many new opportunities we never had before. We're working towards the best user experience we can possibly offer our customers, I'm able to developed landing pages and blog posts without any delay (which is actually a massive deal when you compare it to what I dealt with on our old website), our website is now reliable, and our internal employees are way less stressed because of it.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Vimal basically managed everything for us. Rave's project management skills were awesome. From setting up meetings, scheduling follow-ups, ensuring tasks were completed on time, fantastic documentation, and responding in a timely manner. Vimal was a fantastic person to be paired with for this project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their technical knowledge, project management, and speed to implementation. Everyone we spoke to was very organized and knew what they were doing.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not really. Our system at Echo was very custom and hard to work with, so if we ran into any issues, I think it may have been on our end a lot of times

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a well-known brand providing a wide range of high-quality electronics components like connectors, switches, electronic modules, fiber optics, etc. I am working as a project manager for this project.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

We were looking to improve our eCommerce store and add various features. After talking with a few companies, we decided to work with Rave.

What were your goals for this project?

The goals is to come up with a more robust and functional website.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They had a strong portfolio in the same vertical, so it was easier for them to understand and implement our vision.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We want to enhance the eCommerce website with robust functionalities and easy navigation. We want it to be integrated with different external systems to make it accessible and scalable. The website should compare the products in terms of features and cost. The inventory management and customer management module are the key function for our enhanced site.

What was the team composition?

A team of 7 people is working on this project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The most pleasant thing is to see the traffic and the revenue graph up. There is a significant improvement in response time and speed. They are making the website SEO friendly, and we have started ranking among our top competitors that too soon.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They used Teamwork as their project management system. You can always check what task is going on, assign the priority, the time logged, etc. It gives us a very crystal view of the progress of the project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The deliverables within budget and on time impress us the most. Their bi-weekly meetings with quick updates are also worth mentioning.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There are always areas of improvement for everyone, but in our case, we are still finding the one for them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a niche community user chat/dating app on iOS/Android.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

iOS/Android React Native App Development

What were your goals for this project?

We hired Rave Digital to do a code audit on an existing live React Native platform and not only fix bugs, but also continue more iOS/Android development for the app.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Rave Digital had a great open mindset with working on our nice community app. They also showed EXCELLENT communication skills and time-management via phone calls, emails, texts, you name it. Their review from the code audit helped us to make best-case decisions, which were very helpful.

Describe the project in detail.

Perform a code audit of the live mobile app. Analyze bugs from Firebase user chat feature and fix. Analyze bugs from PRO app subscription version features and implement fixes. Publish new app version updates to iOS/Android stores.

What was the team composition?

We worked with the CEO, a development team lead (who specializes in iOS development), and a team member who specialized in Android development.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Rave Digital was able to quickly identify bugs in the coding and come up with solution fixes. These fixes were also accepted on first tries to Apple/Google stores.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The communication was consistent and effective all a wound.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I found their communication skills and response times to be impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement?

At this moment, we are really happy with the onboarding process and the continued work we have hired Rave Digital for!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a lead senior staff member overseeing multiple items that would fall under the heading of Operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Rave Digital?

Mobile App Development

What were your goals for this project?

Creation of mobile app in order to provide digital on boarding of clients as well as providing clients with access to maintenance forms and account data.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We talked with several providers in our area and based on initial conversations, selected Rave as the provider we were most comfortable with.

Describe the project in detail.

Initial on boarding of clients involving questionnaires which clients answer and the data is populated on PDF forms for them to sign. Providing access to their account balance and reports which required integration with a third party vendor.

What was the team composition?

We were assigned a project manager at Rave who was our go to in all things. We were aware that there were other staff who handled the heavy lifting regarding the development tasks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We used to handle the on boarding of our clients manually, requiring a significant effort to get the proper documents to clients to sign. Now, nearly 100% of our clients are accomplishing this task digitally through our mobile app. A huge success for us!

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We've worked multiple version updates for our mobile app and over time established what we believe is the best work flow in communicating necessary details to Rave. Rave has been very conscientious and alert to our needs and have gone above and beyond when we may not have been as clear or concise as they needed.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Rave's expertise and timeliness have been of the highest order. We've never posed a question to them that they could not answer. They've always found a way to accomplish what we needed.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We manufacture handcrafted shoes at a workshop in Oregon and sell them directly from our Magento e-commerce website. I oversee online marketing and project management for website development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Aheadworks?

We already use a HelpDesk extension that was developed by Aheadworks, but we wanted to add more functionality. We needed a sophisticated tool that could help our customer service team handle tickets sent by customers.

What were your goals for this project?

We brought on Aheadworks to enable HTML formatting for our customer tickets so that we could respond to customer emails with embedded hyperlinks and rich text formatting. We also asked to add a tab in Magento's customer profile pages that would show us every HelpDesk ticket that’s been sent to and from each customer.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Our website designers recommended Aheadworks when we built our first Magento 1 site several years ago. We’ve used many of their extensions since that time and continue to use their products for our new Magento 2 site.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Aheadworks evaluated our requests and sent an estimate with a statement of work for approval. Once it was approved, we granted their developers access to our site, and they deployed the requested changes. They implemented each task on a development site for testing, and then published the updates to our live site.

What was the team composition?

Since our project was fairly simple, we dealt directly with one developer from Aheadworks. I am unaware of the team composition on their end.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Aheadworks' extension customizations have helped our customer service team provide better, more direct responses to customer email inquiries. We've been able to reduce the time we spend searching for a customer's ticket history because now we have direct links on our customer profile pages.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Our communication with Aheadworks was simple and direct. All communication happened over email, and we were able to give feedback and see results in a timely manner.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I love Aheadworks' willingness to provide customizations to their existing extensions to meet our unique needs. They were fast to respond to us and provided frequent progress updates. From what I can tell, they always pay attention to their customers' requests.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We were very happy with our working relationship with Aheadworks. The only area I could think to improve would be more specificity about the ETA for the project completion, but this is a very minor concern.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the owner of Credex Alarm Systems. We offer alarm equipment and services to the private and commercial industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Aheadworks?

We engaged Aheadworks to create more functionality on our website. 

What were your goals for this project?

We especially wanted to enhance our SEO, marketing, user experience, and reporting.

SOLUTION

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Aheadworks creates Magento 2 extensions and customizations for our website. The extensions work smoothly with our existing Magento 2 theme. If they cannot create a tool, they recommend one that works as well.

What was the team composition?

We work with the owner and several developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Our website visits have increased worldwide. We also see more sales thanks to the Magento website’s smooth and efficient running.  With Aheadworks’ ongoing updates of the extensions, we’ve exceeded initial functionality requirements.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Aheadworks provides a high level of customer service. We have good and quick communication via the team’s support desk, and their technicians and developers demonstrate skill in their work. We contact them mainly via the online support desk and incidentally by phone.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their excellent level of service and quality of communication stand out most. We also appreciate Aheadworks’ excellent pricing.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, not that I can think of. Aheadworks has exceeded my expectations.