Culture Kings Shopify & Laravel Websites

Overview

During my time as a senior web developer at Culture Kings in 2016 and 2017, the brand had large eCommerce growth, with their online revenue surpassing that of all of their Australian stores. This can be attributed to the significant improvements to their online store that we did, and partly to the investment into digital marketing across Facebook ads.

Challenges

Magento Limitations: The Magento website faced difficulties handling the increasing traffic, impacting user experience and leading to regular caching issues, and even users experiencing MySQL errors on the checkout when large sales were on, often resulting in lost sales.

Solution

As part of a small in-house team, I played a crucial role in redesigning and developing Culture Kings' new website on Shopify, alongside developing their middleware application using Laravel that sync'd the products from their internal ERP to Shopify, and acting as a spot that staff can manage the extra marketing content such as images and product descriptions before it was sync'd to Shopify.

During this period, Shopify was relatively new in the APAC region, and Culture Kings emerged as a significant client, pushing the boundaries of the platform.

Key project deliverables from the team:

1. Platform Migration: Successfully migrated the online store from Magento to Shopify Plus to enhance performance and scalability.
2. Website Redesign: Implemented a comprehensive redesign of the website for an improved user interface.
3. Laravel Middleware Development: Developed a Laravel middleware that seamlessly integrated with the ERP platform, facilitating the transmission of product data to Shopify.
4. Custom Shopify Scripts: Created custom Ruby scripts in Shopify to manage various sales promotions that didn't exist as features in Shopify at the time, such as 2 for $100 and free gifts for purchases over $500.
5. Full-featured Product Search & Filtering: Detailed Product Search was difficult in Shopify 1.0 and before the days of Algolia Real-time Product Search, a full tagging system was used to develop a feature-rich product search so users could filter by category, type, colour and more.
6. Ads & Analytics Integration: Integrated a range of Ads and Analytics software, developing custom events for transmission to these platforms.
7. Klaviyo Platform Integration: Successfully integrated the Klaviyo marketing platform for enhanced marketing capabilities.
8. Integration of ERP: Successfully integrated the internal Infor M3 to the Laravel middleware software, which sync'd through to the Shopify Plus store(s)
9. Custom Product Bundles Functionality: Developed custom bundles functionality, a feature not native to Shopify at the time.
10. Custom Product Tagging System: With Shopify 1.0, many features required tagging products and using tags to find products for a range of features such as specific sales (2 for 1), search and more.
11. Product Video Enhancement: Implemented compressed product videos to play on hover over product images.
12. 'NFS' Code Development: Created the 'NFS' (Not for Sale) code for Culture Kings, allowing the inclusion of exclusive products in specific carts.

Results

The efforts of the in-house 'dream team' led to a successful migration from Magento to Shopify Plus, which resulted in a more modern design, better user experience, significantly increased sales, reduced bounce rates, and supported the marketing capabilities of other teams.

These improvements positioned Culture Kings as the leader in the streetwear industry. Supported by a strong digital marketing and online advertising strategy, the online store now contributes 60% of Culture Kings' revenue.

Services provided

Website URL

https://culturekings.com.au