metals4U Case Study

Business Overview

metals4U is a dedicated online metal, tools, and equipment supplier in the UK offering a wide spectrum of high-quality and specialist metal products to a broad range of end users such as individuals, companies, enthusiasts and more. With over 50,000 products and a significant number of regular, business, institutional and individual customers, metals4U custom cuts materials to size and delivers them, thereby saving customers’ time and money. metals4U is also favoured for their large stock of raw materials and top-notch customer service.

The Brief

metals4U had been looking to take the next step in their online and offline business model. The previous metals4U site had been built on bespoke technologies and had reached a point where a full rebuild or application either via a custom build or proprietary solution was being considered due to poor mobile responsiveness, lack of advanced payment and shipping options and scalability for inclusion of advanced filters and navigation capability. The key imperative was to update the site so that the user experience and the site’s search visibility could be enhanced and optimized leading to improved conversion and sales.

Solutions Overview

metals4U required a secure and feature-rich platform that could easily manage warehousing and shipping. We started our journey with metals4U by helping them migrate from their older platform to Magento 2. We improved the site’s navigation, integrated it with a wide range of external parties, and developed it employing a mobile-first approach. We preempted issues ahead of time and embedded solid QA and testing frameworks.

We created custom cutting options, complex shipping rules that gave clients efficient delivery costs, extensive filter functionality that improved user experience, reduced time to purchase, integration of advanced search, and optimizing for advanced tracking and SEO capabilities, all ensuring a clear and measurable ROI.

In addition, we also carried out an extensive exercise to remodel the site's mega menu by reducing the number of clicks that would allow a user to move 5 levels down into the site in just two clicks. This helped potential customers move to their required product more quickly. As a result, we have been the brand’s core technical partners for several years and counting.

Services Offered

Development
Support
Application Maintenance
Upgradation of Core Application
Site Performance Improvements
Consultation

Technologies

Adobe Commerce Cloud
HTML
JSS
jQuery
AJAX
PHP
Cloudflare
Fastly
New Relic

Partnership Highlights

4+ Years of Continuous Engagement
Bespoke Development Projects
Efficient Project Management & Communication
Round-the-Clock Technical Support

Results

Attraction of a wider audience
Increased customer retention
Improved engagement
Smoother simpler checkout
Greater admin efficiency via improved backend functionality

Recent Milestone Projects

Single Page Checkout

We redesigned the basket and checkout area which implied a major change to the UI and UX. This provided a single-page checkout experience for users ensuring greater conversion and decreasing dropout. This involved extensive user testing and management to ensure that we were capturing the right security questions in a way that improved the user journey by not cluttering the page or impeding the business. We also integrated automated detection of fields such as postcode to shipping costs to make the user journey faster and more efficient.

Express Payment Systems

Inclusion of express payment gateways including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Amazon Pay to the site offering significant benefits to the business and a streamlined experience for customers.

Moving from Google Analytics 3 to Google Analytics 4

Moving the business to the latest version of Google Analytics to ensure tracking, PPC and platform compliance were all brought in line to maintain and enhance site tracking and conversion.

Google Site & Speed Performance

We brought about several site improvements and achieved the Google green status for mobile performance. This required a radical rebuild of several sections of the site. We achieved this by following Google’s lighthouse and site performance reports. This required major reengineering such as rewriting cleaner code, removing unused java or rewriting in CSS where possible, using a leaner template, and much more.

Custom Functionality Builds to Enable Better Management

To make internal business processes faster, we added custom reporting tools for improved flexibility in managing and reporting business data. We added new fields in the shipping area to help the business optimise its processes. We also built new functionalities to offer discounts, block discounts and present special offers to customers.