November is the busiest time of the year for online retailers. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) being the two busiest (and most lucrative) days EVER then leading into Christmas. So imagine getting a call from a client asking us to rebuild and migrate their website from Magento to Shopify, design a custom brands page, redirect 40,000+ URL’s, and devise a marketing strategy to help maximise sales three weeks before BFCM? Nut’s right. What’s more stressful is that Maqio sells, toys, games, Lego sets etc which are hit products in the run-up to Christmas.
But after speaking to the client we moved a few things around and got to work, even asked the Pear Digital team to work weekends which they were happy to do, so that we can get everything ready. In true Pear Digital style, we got everything ready a day before BFCM.

Normally we allocate 6-8 weeks for a website project and Q4 is always a busy time for us as well, so we don’t usually take on new website build projects during this time. But there was something about Maqio that made us want to come out of our comfort zone, and it made us better for it. The extremely tight deadline and the myriad of requirements seemed like a mountain of a task but the Maqio team were amazing to work with and they helped things by getting over items we needed pretty much as soon as we requested them.

They had a Magento website that was in a bad state, customers would go on the old website and were unable to make a purchase and those that did make a purchase did not get purchase confirmation and the client had trouble locating orders in the backend. Needless to say, this was frustrating for the client, created a terrible customer experience and to make matters worse the Magento website was less than a year old so it really should not have had these problems.

It was all hands on deck and we got to work. The first task was to find a theme that we could customise heavily which suited the clients business (children’s toys’ games etc), once we found a suitable theme we then had to log and migrate all the URL’s and Magento website data over to Shopify.

Within three weeks we got the website ready and the client was naturally happy. The next step was to implement a profitable marketing campaign. Given the client’s business margins were really tight which meant we couldn’t offer huge discounts, so we got creative with our ads to entice customers and the results were amazing. The client saw a massive ROAS of around 63X across Google and Facebook and it was one of their best BFCM and Christmas’s in over two years.