GoMage

Please describe your company and your position there.

Business Geeks, Inc, is a technology consulting company specializing in Magento development and AWS infrastructure management. I am a Magento Certified Solution Architect and Consultant at Business Geeks, Inc.

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

GoMage was hired to help maintain and build new functionality for a client that manages more than 2000 Magento stores on its hosting platform. The goals were based on small maintenance needs, with the additional ability to utilize GoMage knowledge to enhance the base Magento sites with new features over time.

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

GoMage came to the table with a package that was perfect for what we needed. They had a project management layer that we needed in a partner. Most development companies will require hard minimums, but GoMage was able to build a flexible package for us — one that allowed us to submit tickets, and we could be flexible on timing, and they could resource with some flexibility.

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

We decided on a couple key features that the team would work on. We got integrated with their ticketing system, had a few knowledge share meetings with their technical team. The feature development was completed as planned, and additional tickets and work were defined. One of the more recent project tasks that was completed was a distributed data import system, where data could be imported to each of the 2000 stores automatically from one centralized data repository. Giving the merchandizers to provide files that can be picked up by each store.

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

There is a project manager, a technical lead, and 2 Magento developers. They have done really well at keeping coverage during holidays and vacations for their team. e.g. There are actually 2 project managers that I have worked with, because they tag team for each other.

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

The flexible nature of the collaboration has been great for these types of projects where I don't need dedicated resources. This is been the most valuable part for us and the client.

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

We have had good success with their ticketing system, Slack for conversations and updates, and video calls when necessary. The response time for any questions has never been a problem. They have generally responded either that day, or early the next.

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

The project structure is well done. The fact that I can get a slice of a project manager, a slice of the technical lead, and the hours I need of the developer, has been a deal maker.

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

No, I think based on the agreements they have been true to their side, and I try to be true to mine.

Introduce your business and what you do there? 

I’m the director of e-commerce for Evolutions Brands. We’re a midsize company with over 100 employees, and we manufacture footwear and accessories.

What challenge were you trying to address with GoMage?

We needed help migrating our platform to Magento.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They suggested an action plan to help improve our online presence. They then migrated the platform to Magento. They also brought in third-party modules and extensions to improve our platform’s UX and functionality. They now provide ongoing maintenance and support.

What is the team composition?

We interact with roughly 10 people, including project managers, developers, and QA testers.

How did you come to work with GoMage?

I heard of them through connections in the industry and reached out to them on LinkedIn.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership began in October 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They worked quickly, migrating us to Magento within a month. With their work, our platform has improved functionality. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve also seen a tremendous uplift of our conversion rate and revenue jumped 50% in two of our main brands.

How did GoMage perform from a project management perspective?

The project started off a bit sluggish, but has drastically improved and is now going quite well. They’re extremely responsive, regardless of time or day. On top of that, their team is knowledgeable and communicates well with us, creating a synergetic partnership. We use YouTrack for project management, and we communicate via Google Meet, Slack, and WhatsApp. We also have emergency contacts that we can use if necessary.

What did you find most impressive about them? 

They assign seasoned developers to our project. As a result, tasks are completed quickly, usually within a few days, which is far better than I’ve experienced with other vendors.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’ve improved in areas we brought to their attention, and they proactively look for ways to continue improvement.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be specific about what you want to achieve, and set goals from the start. I strongly recommend that your point person someone with experience in technical things.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the Direct to Consumer Website (DTC) Manager at Bradshaw International. We are proud to be the number one brand in kitchen and gadgets, cookware, metal bakeware in food channels in the US market. Our company has over 30 years of history and owns a number of brands such as GoodCook.

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

Our cooperation with GoMage started in June 2021. Before we hired the company, we’d been looking for someone to turn our website built on Wordpress into an eCommerce website. At the time, our website was just a recipe blog.

People moving online pushed us in the direction of turning it into an eCommerce store, where people would be able to not only find recipes but also purchase our products. That was our main task at the time. Since our company had a number of websites built on Magento, we decided to move on with a familiar platform to us. But we wanted to build a PWA, since it offered a lot more opportunities than a traditional website. It’s light, efficient and provides advanced user experience. That’s how we found out about GoMage.

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

GoMage were the only one with experience with PWA and they also were the most affordable.

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

We hired GoMage to turn our Wordpress recipe website into an eCommerce store. That was our primary goal. We needed to ensure a smooth transition from being a blog website into being an eCommerce website. Being able to integrate our recipes with products in a way that is not pushing users away.

We didn’t want to lose our audience. We also needed to integrate our progressive web application with our existing CRM and order management system, as well as integrate the Cybersource payment system. One of the main tasks was to make our PWA ADA compliant. We needed to make sure that we started on the right foot with our PWA from the very beginning.

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

We had 1 backend developer, one frontend developer, one QA engineer and one project manager on our project.

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

We have successfully turned our website into an eCommerce store. Taking a look at analytics, we see that a month since PWA launch, the analytics is picking up in terms of web traffic. And we’re already selling products even though we haven’t done any marketing yet. This indicates that the website is performing well and the integration of products with recipes worked.

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

Our Project Manager Yuriy Protsiuk is our main contact within the company. The communication runs smoothly despite time differences between our countries. The team uses YouTrack to track all tasks, progress and details.

We also have access to a Slack channel where we can communicate with the team directly. When it comes to timelines, GoMage always provides the most accurate estimate so we always know how much time every task will take.

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

GoMage’s expertise on PWA is outstanding. When we had an issue and didn't know what to do, the team jumped in and got the results needed. For example, when we needed to integrate our PWA with other solutions, the support teams of those solutions weren't familiar with the PWA technology, so the GoMage team jumped right in to find the solution.

They deliver results pretty fast when something needs to be changed or fixed, within a day or two, depending on the task. Working with GoMage, we can clearly see that they care about clients.

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

There was never any frustrations during our project. The team handled everything to deliver the best results. If there was an issue, it was always resolvable. They take a proactive approach and always help us choose the best course of action, saving our time and budget.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Smartblinds is an e-commerce webshop focusing on selling smart home window coverings. Providing the market with rollerblinds, duo rollerblinds, venetian blinds and honeycomb blinds that are compatible with the best known smart home platforms. I was the Product Owner of this newly set up magento webshop and was responsible all the communications with GoMage.

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

At the beginning of this year, we made the plans to start an e-commerce webshop for selling smart home window coverings. Through a collaboration with a big technology company, our engineers developed motors that are completely compatible with the most common smart home platforms.

To start selling our products online, we needed to find the right e-commerce platform with a professional party of web developers to create the best webshop that would fullfill our needs. As a dutch company, we eventually found GoMage, an international company that already had experience is setting up similar webshops. After some good conversations, we decided to pick GoMage as our partner and started building our webshop from scratch.

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

When we searched for webdevelopers, we were looking for professional webdevelopers that already had experience with similar webshops. GoMage previous work looked great and we were enhousiastic about chosing them as our partner. Furthermore, considering pricing, GoMage provides great work for a good price. Therefore, we are very satisfied by chosing GoMage as our partner.

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

During our collaboration, we had a standardized way of working. On trello, we would make cards with all the different components that needed to be delivered (homepage, product category page, product detaill page, etc.). The project manager of GoMage would review this card and transfer them to YouTrack. In Youtrack, we and GoMage could see all the different components that needed to be delivered for the webshop. When a new track was added, the developers would deliver us a detailed estimation for the component. We would accept these estimations and the developers would start developing it on the test environment.

On a weekly call with the project manager, we would discuss all the questions we had and tried to clarify the important functionalities of certain objects. On a daily basis, we would communicate with the team through slack to give feedback and keep eachother updated. GoMage always responded quick and had multiple developers were availabe for our developments.

After 4 months, the webshop had been set live and overall we were very satisfied. In the future, we will continue working with GoMage to setup new components for the webshop and optimize our webshop in the best way possible.

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

The project manager at GoMage was the main spokesperson during our projects. He/She will communicated with us on a daily basis and tried to translate all the requirements to their team of developers. During our project, especially during the last months, a large team of 4/5 developers (FE & BE) were available for Smartblinds and would deliver quality developments relatively fast.

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

Because our webshop only has been live for a week, we don't have any significant measurable outcomes. Considering general feedback, we are really satisfied with the developments that are achieved. Most of the components are working great and were delivered fast. However, becasue we are only live for a week, we need to test everything before concluding that the shop is built perfectly. However, as general feedback on the delivered components, we are really happy with the quality of work.

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

Overall, we were really satisfied with the communication from GoMage. They were structured, gave realistic estimations and were always ready to respond to our questions. Through Trello, Youtrack and Slack, we would communicate with eachothers on a daily basis and be updated about progress that has been made. Only after a couple of months, there was a switch of project managers at GoMage. Therefore, some knowledge needed to be transferred and some questions were asked twice.

However, after a few weeks, the new project manager was fully adapted and we are now satisfied with the current way of working. Moreover, for a partner that is geographically quite far from the Netherlands, the communication generally always has been good.

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

GoMage has been quick to adapt to circumstances. In the last weeks before the go-live, a lot of components still needed to be finished. Therefore, they quickly responded by making more developers available for our team. In this way, they could deliver multiple components quickly and simultaneously.

Besides that, like already mentioned, the communication was overall very good. For a dutch company that is working online with a developing partner abroad, communication is really important to keep both parties satisfied. From our side, we were really happy with their ways of working and communicating.

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

During the switch between project managers, some knowledge transfers could have been done better. However, in these times of working (corona era), we don't always now the circumstances in which the switch was made. Furthermore, we don't have significiant improvements for GoMage. As long as they keep up the good work, we will be satisfied!

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m an eCommerce Manager at Restaurant Supply, one of the biggest companies in the USA selling commercial kitchen equipment and foodservice supplies. We offer products for the HORECA industry from the main brands of restaurant equipment and provide customers with a great shopping experience.

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

Our cooperation with GoMage started over 8 years ago. At the time, we had a poorly developed website for our other project – IceMachinesPlus.

The GoMage team made a great job rewriting our Magento 1 website and then later migrating it to Magento 2. The company is still providing support for this website. So, they are providing ongoing development and support services for IceMachinesPlus for more than 8 years already. We were so impressed with the results delivered by GoMage and Magento capabilities that we decided to continue our cooperation with GoMage.

We made the decision to migrate our 2nd website that was based on the NetSuite Commerce platform to Magento 2. The work on Restaurant Supply started more than 4 years ago. Even though Magento 2 was still in beta version at the time, we started the development right away. Magento 2 gave us access to more functionality and unlimited customization opportunities.

The main goal at the beginning was to migrate our NetSuite Commerce website to Magento 2. After GoMage successfully delivered the results, we continued our cooperation to implement even more customizations and features.

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

We chose GoMage for Restaurant Supply development because we had a great previous experience with this company. At the time, many vendors still developed websites on M1 only, and GoMage was already developing on Magento 2. After successful migration, we continued our cooperation as the company delivered all the results on time and migrated our store in record time, all the while working on the other of our projects.

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

lacked the level of customization capabilities that we needed. GoMage offered a high level of expertise, and the result of migration was tremendous – 2X increase in sales and 3X increase in website performance. After migration, we moved to other tasks and improvements. GoMage successfully developed a flexible price-output system for customers and suppliers, as we work with a number of suppliers with their own pricing policies.

GoMage also created functionality that allowed for the automatic creation of category pages. As a result, we saved thousands of dollars on front-end developers’ salaries. We also integrated our website with the NetSuite ERP system for stock management. GoMage has made a great job which allowed us to increase our sales. The improvements implemented last year allowed us to increase sales by around 20 percent.

The development team also created a custom solution for integration with the feed of Google Shopping. This solution helped us to bring our website to top positions in Google search results. They used the base code of that solution to later build their flagship module - GoMage Feed Pro, which we are using now. A year ago, we made the decision to fully rewrite our website to get rid of the tech debt and improve performance.

GoMage helped us to create a new price-output system, replaced the Celebros search with Klevu, developed a new module for NetSuite integration, transferred front-end to the new website and improved it, migrated all our custom modules, rewrote some key features, optimized the back-end and done other enhancement.

New site is now released and performs adequately. GoMage did a great job optimizing our store and the new website version is much faster than the previous one. GoMage also provides us with 24/7 Magento support and helps keep our server infrastructure up to our business needs. The work on the Restaurant Supply website is still ongoing. We are now pursuing the latest innovative technology on the market – Magento PWA.

GoMage offered us to add PWA functionality to our website and we are thrilled with the idea and the results it can bring. GoMage has been working on their GoMage PWA Storefront for a while now, and they use it for our project. The development has already started and we are looking forward to having our own Magento PWA.

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

Over the years of our cooperation with GoMage, the team has seen substantial growth, from just one developer to a full department of developers working on different stores and integration bridges. GoMage has really strong Magento developers of senior level. Aside from a high level of expertise, they are always a pleasure to work with.

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

The GoMage team brings real value to our business. Their competence and high knowledge of Magento allows them to build websites with high performance. Migration to Magento 2 increased our sales by 50%. Changes made over the last year alone increased sales by ~20%. Our new website with improved performance metrics is expected to bring even better results. The move to Magento PWA will bring even greater results.

During our cooperation with GoMage, the company helped us resolve a lot of business problems, enhanced our website and helped to increase revenue. The team delivers real results and goes out and beyond to provide us with innovative solutions.

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

Working with GoMage has never been a problem. We communicate mainly with Andrey, our Project Manager. All the tasks are tracked with YouTrack and we always know how much time they are going to spend on each of them. They always deliver results on time, even if we need to implement some features in record time. There have been many occasions when they finished the work even faster than initially estimated.

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

With GoMage, we know that everything is possible. They always manage to surprise us even with better results than we initially anticipated. There is no one on the market that knows more about Magento website optimization. They deliver results with lightning speed and always offer the best solutions. They have strong Magento developers and we see it in the results they deliver. There is nothing they could not do, even when we challenge them with very difficult tasks

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

There is nothing I would’ve improved. Since the beginning of our cooperation, they have tuned the processes inside their company to perfection, which now runs like a well-oiled machine.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a co-owner of a company specialized in weekly bouquets delivery.

After our customers subscribe to our services, they get bouquets delivered to their homes and offices every week.

Every bouquet is designed by experienced florists who know how to choose and combine the right flowers, shapes, and colours.

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

We’d found out about GoMage three years before our corporation started thanks to their GoMage LightCheckout Module. We’d been using the module for three years and wanted to change its functionality to meet our business goals better.

We got in touch with GoMage and asked to help us implement the postponement feature when a user subscribes to our weekly flower delivery. After the successful development of an additional module, we decided to move to other tasks.

Great experience with Gomage LightCheckout and high professionalism of the team were two of the main reasons why we decided to continue our cooperation with GoMage.

At the beginning of our cooperation, the main goal was to customize the GoMage LightCheckout extensions and add the postponement feature needed for our business.

After that, we moved on to other tasks, mostly related to complex customizations dedicated to taxes.

How did you select GoMage and what were the deciding factors?

We first found out about GoMage when we were looking for a one-step checkout module. We came across GoMage LightCheckout and decided to go with it because of a comparatively low price, good reviews, and provided functionality.

A few years later, we decided to improve our website and add a postponement feature for our customers. Naturally, we decided to entrust GoMage with module customization since they’d developed it and knew it like no other company.

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

Our work with GoMage started with the GoMage LightCheckout module customization. Initially, it didn’t have the needed functionality. We got in touch with GoMage and their team customized the extension for our customers to specify the start of subscription and the day of the first flower delivery.

After the work was successfully delivered, we moved on to other tasks. Overall, GoMage performed a lot of customizations related to the tax system for our website to work within Swedish legislation.

Our website consists of two stores: for private customers and for business clients. In Sweden, product prices are displayed identically for individuals and legal entities.

However, the price for legal entities does not include 25% VAT. For individuals, the price includes the tax. As a part of these extensive customizations, GoMage helped us to change the payment system to Stripe.

Since Stripe doesn't support the postponement feature, we needed to customize its module so that it would allow us to have the needed functionality. GoMage performed this customization and moved to other tasks that relate to tax management.

Also, GoMage helped us to redesign our website so that now it provides a smooth user experience and looks great.

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

Over the time of our cooperation, there have been a few changes to the team. The core team never changed. All of GoMage’s developers we’ve worked with have strong knowledge of Magento and can boast a senior level of knowledge.

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

We are fully satisfied with the service that GoMage provides. Over the course of our cooperation, our sales grew by 45%.

Our website always runs at the highest performance. What is more important, our website fully conforms to Swedish legislation, which is very important for us as a company serving both private customers and businesses.

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

GoMage has years of experience and we can see it clearly in how they organize all the processes inside our project. We mostly cooperate with Andrey, our Project Manager, who oversees all the tasks.

Our team users YouTrack for task management. The team always provides every task estimation, so we know how much time they spend on development. They often surprise us by delivering results before deadlines.

If we have some urgent tasks, they always manage to deliver them even on a tight schedule.

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

GoMage breezes through any challenging tasks and always delivers the best results. The team we are working with consists of highly professional Magento developers who easily develop functionality up to our business needs.

GoMage is a team of great professionals who know how to solve any problem and deliver high quality of work

Are there any areas for improvement?

Right now, I don’t see any areas of improvement. They have been improving the processes inside their company and our project.

Today, all processes run like a well-oiled machine. They also have a high level of English, and we have no problems communicating with the team.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m CEO & Co-Founder of a worldwide platform for self-designed and customized clothes and accessories. We provide a range of services such as print-on-demand products with the ability to add custom designs or use the ones sold by designers. Designers get a commission every product sold with their design.

For what projects/services did your company hire GoMage?

We had a Magento website that was developed by another vendor and we needed to implement the product customization feature and purchased the GoMage Product Designer extension. Once the extension was installed by the GoMage, we have asked them to make some custom changes in the extension according to our needs. The GoMage was making all the necessary changes fast and the quality of the work was really good and we continued asking them to do more and more changes in their extension to implement the features that our business needed.

Once the customizations of the extension started to transform into ongoing work, the Managing Director of GoMage, Yuriy has contacted me directly and proposed to move our cooperation to the next level and proposed much better terms and conditions and better dedication of their team after signing the long term agreement.

What were your goals for this project?

The main goal at the beginning was to implement the product customization feature into our Magento website.

How did you select this vendor?

As we were going to introduce print-on-demand services, we needed the corresponding functionality. GoMage’s extension Product Designer fit our business requirements and allowed us to implement the needed functionality within hours. We got in touch with GoMage for extension customization and after a great work was done, we decided to go on with our cooperation.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Initially, our website was just the ordinary Magento eCommerce site and then GoMage has added the unique feature to our website that allowed our clients to create a unique design for the products (t-shirt, cup, etc.) and purchase it. Later we have decided to change the business model and turn the website into a multi-vendor crowdfunding platform where there are the designers that are creating the products with their unique designs and selling those designs on this website and have the dashboard where they are monitoring the statistics, sales, profit, etc. and the users who are purchasing those products from the website.

GoMage quickly dedicated a team of developers to implement tons of the requested custom features into our Magento website within a short period of time. After making these changes the website become extremely popular in the incredibly short-term and the number of products grew from a few thousand to a multi-million catalog of the products and continue growing with a huge speed and Magento simply wasn't ready for it and GoMage had to quickly find a solution for this issue under a lot of pressure.

The solution was the following: they have created a custom entity instead of the heavy default Magento products and fully customized Magento to work with this custom entity instead of the default products. We had to re-develop about 70% of the website functionality in order to do it and it worked great! The number of products continued to grow and until this day we didn’t have any issues with the website speed and stability.

Right now we have 29 million product variations on our website and the website still works fast and stable. Also, GoMage has created a sophisticated cluster of servers and optimized them properly to handle the load that is constantly increasing and they are providing 24/7 support for our servers and our website.

In addition to that, GoMage has developed the fully custom standalone micro-service to work with the media files because we currently have about 12 TB of the media files and Magento obviously couldn’t handle such amount of media files by the default. Right now GoMage is migrating our website to Magento 2 and they are developing an additional micro-service that will replace the current heavily customized GoMage Product Designer extension.

What was the team composition?

The team has been changing a bit over the years but the core team of developers remained unchanged. All of them are really strong Senior Magento developers and system architects. They all had a high level of competence and are pleasant to work with.

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

GoMage team provides us with the quality of services and expertise that our previous agency could not guarantee. They easily increased our website’s speed by 10 times, which directly influenced our revenue.

Overy the years, they showed their deep expertise and ability to turn even our unrealistic ideas into robust features. They always deliver results on time and guarantee high quality even if they need to work within short deadlines.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Working with GoMage had always been easy. We mainly communicate with Alexander, our project manager, and can track the progress of every task in YouTrack. Before they start on any task, they tell us the time they are going to spend so that we know how long each task will take.

If we need to implement some feature super-fast, they are fine with working beyond their usual hours. That’s why we always know that if we have some urgent tasks, they will be there for us. Sometimes they even deliver results faster.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their expertise is beyond the highest expectations. They always go out to offer the best solutions and to bring new functionality and improvements as fast as possible. They have Magento certified developers, which results in the high quality of work they deliver. They are a strong team, and we have no doubt that they will be able to take on any task, regardless of its difficulty.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I don’t see any area for improvement right now. Over the years, they’ve refined their processes to perfection.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work at an e-commerce website design and development agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with GoMage?

We contract with developers when we need additional resources, so we hired GoMage for a specific project.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We focus on the Magento e-commerce platform. GoMage assists us with frontend and custom backend development. Every project is unique with individual challenges and requirements. They assist in planning and executing integrations and customizations we need for specific projects. 

What is the team composition?

It differs for each project. GoMage assigns a project manager for each project along with a single frontend resource or backend resources as needed. I’m in touch with both the project manager and developers throughout the processes. 

How did you come to work with GoMage?

I don’t remember exactly; it might have been a referral.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $180,000–$240,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in May 2018 and is ongoing

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

GoMage does white-labeled work so we don’t have customer feedback on their parts. From my perspective, having additional resources at our disposal just adds a layer of reliability on our end. We can give them short notice and have them assist us on urgent projects. With that level of resource availability, GoMage is like an extension of our team, which has definitely helped us substantially

How did GoMage perform from a project management standpoint?

The communication is pretty good. We can talk as a team to clarify project specs and timelines. They’re good at diagnosing and identifying issues that might arise beforehand. We use Slack for day-to-day communication and Utrecht for project management. They’re also good with timelines and keeping deadlines. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their reliability is what stands out to me. We can contact them on the fly and have resources available for whatever work we need that day. It’s a good relationship.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Their communication is good but could always be better. I can’t think of anything specific on that.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be specific with your product requirements upfront. Work with them to analyze all those specifications and identify possible scenarios that might require additional planning.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner of Bounce Back Sports, a sporting goods store. About 90% of our sales take place online through our website and third-party channels, like eBay, Walmart, and Amazon.

What challenge were you trying to address with GoMage?

Our website was done by another organization in 2013. It was having lots of issues, but the company was not being responsive.

What was the scope of their involvement?

GoMage took over my company’s website. They wrote modules to get our products over to third-parties channels and to troubleshoot our errors. They also notified us that we needed to upgrade our Magento platform because it would no longer be supported. They presented the different things we needed to do and what steps they recommended. We followed their recommendations and successfully integrated a new Magento platform. 

As we were doing that, I needed another website for another business I have, GoMage built that from scratch.

What is the team composition?

Alexander (Project Manager) is my main contact, but I worked with someone else first. There are also usually several other team members.

How did you come to work with GoMage?

I went to Upwork and put out a job looking for people experienced with Magento. I looked at how each company’s previous assignments and the way they answered my questions when I interviewed them. I consulted with friends who know a little about this work, and they gave me more questions to ask. 

GoMage was confident and gave examples that matched up with what they were saying. We started with little projects, and they provided to be responsive and able to do what they said they would. They’re now the only people I use for my website. 

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent about $45,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in maybe February 2013 or 2014. GoMage is currently tweaking our site, and the other site for my other business is ready to go live.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Everything GoMage has done has been good. For example, once we had an issue where Google marked us an unsafe site. Even though it wasn’t their responsibility, GoMage got in, fixed the problem within 48 hours, and didn’t charge me. That really impressed me.

In addition, they don’t sell me on things that won’t benefit my company. GoMage instead gives me a wide range of options, and when I decide what to do, they proceed with it and make it happen. It’s also been an affordable experience.

How did GoMage perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very responsive to my ideas, questions, and goals. They bring back options that would work best for what I’m looking for. They also work within my time zone. 

The communication is outstanding as well. There is a language barrier, but they have translators with full English fluency. We communicate over a Utrecht system, which they walked me through step by step. I also talk with Alexander once a week over Skype, and we email every couple of days. They’re really responsive. I have nothing bad to say about them whatsoever; they’ve done good work for me, and I’d have no problem referring other people to them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their quality of work is tremendous. Compared to other people’s sites, ours looks phenomenal. Our marketing agency was blown away by the quality and the way it looks, and so are other people. Also, thanks to GoMage’s modules, we also no longer have to use a channel advisor to manage our inventory with our third-party channels. It was huge to be able to cut that cost. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’d love it if GoMage could add more graphic design, but I don’t know if that’s in their realm. I’d also like them to be more familiar with other third party sites like Facebook Marketplace and Groupon; I want to launch there as well. Otherwise, I can’t think of anything. they’re responsive to email and answer in language that I understand. If I have questions about an invoice or finances, they go through it and explain it to me. I hope they continue progressing and learning other sites to help me grow. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Gave a clear goal about what you’re wanting to accomplish. Find a website you like and identify what you like about it. It’ll save you money and time. That was my biggest fault; I knew nothing about websites, I just knew I wanted one. It took a lot of time to communicate what I was looking for from there.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of Make My Blinds. I oversee mostly all the operations side of the business, including managing web development tasks.

What challenge were you trying to address with GoMage?

Our company was previously working with another agency local to us in Bristol. However, we were really struggling to get the quality of development work we needed, both in terms of output from an agency and just having the technical knowhow. We needed to find a new agency that was good enough and met our needs.

Essentially, we had a long list of jobs and operational efficiencies that needed completing. One of the most important tasks was improving the speed of our site because it was terribly slow. We wanted to find the best people we could and had to go international to find them.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our team has an ongoing list of jobs we’ve always wanted to do but were held back by our previous agency. First and foremost, GoMage performed a full code audit of our website. This helped identify issues that had been botched by the last agency. A lot of the problems involved some needed clean-up and fixes on the backend coding. GoMage also implemented Algolia, which is a quick search system for websites.

Their team handled the process of reformatting our site’s frontend, which encompassed entire category and search function rebuilds. They also automated our manual process of sending free samples to customers who request them.

Another big task they’re currently working on is electronically linking our website directly to our supplier. We won’t have to manually place any orders anymore because our Magento site will talk to the supplier’s interface.

GoMage provides 24/7 server support and also does some work for our blog. They swapped the blog platform hosted on Magento and used a plugin that one of their developers built. Mostly everything is project-based and clearly allocated in terms of time and resources. The Algolia search transition is one of the bigger projects.

What is the team composition?

I mostly speak to Yuriy (Customer Success Manager) for issue-related things. We also interact with about four people, including an account manager and frontend developer.

How did you come to work with GoMage?

I conducted a Google search for Magento agencies in Kyiv. Magento originated from Kyiv, so if we wanted the best people for the job, we had to go to the source. My co-founder and I traveled there and met with 3–4 different agencies.

GoMage had the best office setup. They didn’t have the largest number of developers, but they were purely focused on Magento rather than doing lots of different coding languages. This would present the risk of their team stretching themselves too far, which is what some of the other agencies seemed to be doing.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $16,000–$20,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement began in January 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Their team has massively improved the speed and performance of our website. Because we’ve experienced several agencies now, we have a good sense of who’s good and who isn’t. When it comes to GoMage, our requests have never been a problem. They’re always fine with every task we present them. If not, they suggest an even quicker or better way to handle something. There’s never any resistance from their side, and they’re very solution-oriented.

A particularly amazing feat was when they handled the free sample process automation. They finished that project in just eight hours. They went from a concept we didn’t know was even possible and by the end of the day had built it on our development site. They rolled it onto production the following morning. It was extremely quick.

Their work with electronically linking our website directly to our supplier has saved us hours of work a week and has become fully automated.

One time, we had an issue where our site went down on a Saturday morning. Within five minutes of me contacting them about this error, they responded that they had fixed it. They work at a rapid speed. The best way to describe them is that they’re constantly thinking outside of the box to come up with different ways to fix problems and provide solutions.

On top of everything, the value we’re getting is immense in terms of the fact that they’re half the cost of a UK development team who isn’t fully qualified in Magento. Overall, we’re very happy and very satisfied.

How did GoMage perform from a project management standpoint?

We put the GoMage team onto a dashboard that features screenshots of what we’re looking to achieve. The information gets passed from the account manager to a developer. There’s always clarity on who’s working on what projects. We have a Slack channel we use every day for quick questions here and there.

When we put a project on the dashboard, our account manager will estimate that it’ll take X number of hours. We give them approval, and they go off and complete the project. Once finished, they provide feedback reporting on how long it actually took them. They’ve always come right on the money or just under what they quoted in terms of hours.

Before starting anything, they always communicate time expectations so there’s never any shock or guesswork in how long they’re spending on certain projects. Everything is tracked through YouTrack so we know how many hours are spent on different elements. There’s clear reporting on their work so we’re able to see all project stages.

There’s fluidity in our conversations with them. We don’t need everything to be very structured because we trust them to do a good job. They’re even good at chasing us down if we’re the ones causing a delay. We have a very good system.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their speed is the most impressive attribute about them. An example of this was when we quoted our previous agency to handle some speed optimization for the website. They quoted it would take 150 hours — GoMage did it in about 15 hours. They took our desktop site from a 45 on the Google Lighthouse speed check to a 92. Compared to other agencies, they completely blow their competitors out of the water, especially when it comes to speed.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there are no areas for improvement.