Clear Horizon Digital

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm an executive at JBS, an international automotive parts supplier. We specialise in VAG tuning parts, but we also provide a range of services from custom ECU tuning to day-to-day maintenance.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our website was built around 12 years ago. It used to bring in a lot of online sales but had been left to stagnate over the last couple of years. Clear Horizon Digital migrated us from our old PHP site to a custom NextJS/NodeJS eCommerce platform powered by BigCommerce. Since being deployed we're getting a lot more traffic and we've seen a huge increase in online revenue.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found Clear Horizon Digital through word of mouth. We had a lot of quotes from other companies before this but we didn't feel that anyone else could build us what we wanted. They gave us a lot of their time to understand our business requirements and propose a solution that would fit within our budget.

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

The majority of the project was fully remote, but CHD did also come into our offices for some meetings that were easier to facilitate in person. They started with a series of discovery sessions to understand what we were trying to accomplish, then built out a series of wireframes & interactive designs using Figma. Once we signed off designs they built out the application. The site was built using NextJS & NodeJS and hosted on AWS.

They provided us with access to a BigCommerce portal where the managed eCommerce backend was hosted. We were able to test the site as it was developed using live previews & CHD were always looking for feedback. The site was deployed shortly before Christmas. The site is being continually monitored and we have a support contract in place for ongoing maintenance / incident resolution.

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

We had one main point of contact but there was two developers & a designer working on the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We saw an 80% increase in monthly online revenue, 34% increase in average user engagement time and a 28% increase in online customer retention. Just as importantly we're also seeing the site's average Google ranking increase on an almost weekly basis. We've had a lot of great feedback about the site and our customers are obviously happy with the change.

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

We primarily used Google meets & email to communicate, project roadmaps and scrum boards were made available to us over JIRA & Confluence. CHD normally use Slack but we requested to use WhatsApp instead as it was more convenient for our stakeholders. We caught up daily on WhatsApp and CHD regularly prompted us for feedback.

CHD were focussed on making sure we always had access to a live preview of current iteration of work being done via either Figma or their code previews in Storybook & Staging website. We were able to sign off in small increments without creating blockers on larger pieces of work.

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

They were able to really understand our business requirements and build a platform that can scale with us as we grow.

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

Nothing comes to mind, we were really happy with the work they did.