4mation Technologies

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Marketing Executive for Steel Builders. Steel Builders is New South Wales' largest supplier of steel to the domestic housing market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire 4mation Technologies, and what were your goals?

The original Steel Builders website was launched back in 2015/6 on Magento and whilst it was fit for purpose back then, the company has evolved and grown to be NSW's largest supplier of steel and building products and we wanted our website to reflect that.

We do not have any in-house developers and a marketing team of 1-person (that's me!) and so we wanted to move to a platform which was easy to use and manage across all internal teams. Where we found that Magento was clunky and costly to add plug-ins, we found Shopify was much more user-friendly. We also wanted to refresh the look and feel of the website and improve monthly revenue and conversion rates.

SOLUTION

How did you select 4mation Technologies and what were the deciding factors?

We were provided a choice of 3 developers by our digital agency, all of whom they had worked with before. We went through a process of chatting with all developers around what our needs were and what we hoped to achieve at the end of the migration. All 3 developers came back with proposals however 4Mations proposal was the closest to what we were looking for in terms of service level and outcomes.

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

We started off the project with a list of our non-negotiable improvements as well as a few "nice to have's". We laid these all out in order of priority and I worked with the team at 4Mation to work through each one. We worked together to build the Shopify website, both from scratch (design & templates) and to migrate all products across from Magento.

We have a lot of complicated products (such as custom sturctural steel items) that require the use of third party apps to calculate the price, depending on the weight, length and finish of the steel which 4Mation migrated across for us and liaised with the 3rd part app developers to make sure were running correctly. 4Mation also built a new quote request form for us, based on our digital agencies design and implemented this on to the new site.

Pre and post launch, our digital agency ran through some fixes to the site after an audit and both myself and the 4Mation team ran through these issues to resolve.

How many people from the 4mation Technologies team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with 3 people from 4Mation. They were the Head of Strategy, Developer and Senior Business Development Manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have only been launched for 1 month but have already seen our conversion rate grow significantly (almost 30% compared to the previous period). We have also received lots of positive feedback about the ease of use of the new website and site speed from both internal staff and customers.

We are also finding that we are getting less calls with questions about the website as well as more people finding products easily.

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

The communication I had with the 4Mation team was great! If I had a question, they always answered promptly, and if they didn't know the answer to a question, they would investigate this for us. They were also efficient with time and managed to finish their part of the project with a few days to spare.

The post-migration support has been great too, with ad-hoc support being provided as needed.

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

The team was great to work with and always friendly and supportive of our goals. The entire team, from sales, to development were supportive of our needs and didn't try and do their own thing which I found a few other companies were wanting to do.

They let us have as much control over the project as we needed, but at the same time we trusted them with our business.

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

I know they offered this before we signed on but it would have been great to set up an instant messaging channel on slack to get quick answers to some basic questions. Even though we didn't get round to setting this up, the email support was great!