An Online Store That Added A R30 000 Per Month Income Stream

Indola Mountain Bike Apparel is a company that produces South African made cycling clothing which includes lycra riding shorts, bib shorts, and their most popular product the Enduro Perrenial Mountain Bike Baggy. We met Philip, the owner of Indola, in a local Cape Town bike shop. We loved his clothing  but noticed that he didn’t have a website, although he had registered a domain name.

When we searched for Indola online we noticed there was quite a following online who were looking for an Indola Mountain Bike Apparel website. We met up with Philip and worked together to design an online shop for Indola that was simple and easy to use and conveyed all the information necessary for buying their clothing online.

The online store was so effective that sales started within the first week of launching the new site.

indola-mountain-bike-apparel

Philip challenged us to some unique and challenging goals for the Indola website.

  1. Make it easy to see and find all of Indola’s products

  2. It must be simple to understand Indola’s male and female size curves

  3. Customers should be able to see exactly what stock is available for each product

  4. It should be simple for customers to understand the purchase process on Indola’s site

Make it easy to see and find all of Indola’s products

indola-mega-menu

The answer to this problem was to add what is called a megamenu, where every product was visible by whether it was a top or bottom and if designed for men or women. This menu makes it easy for shoppers to navigate to any of Indola’s products from whatever page of the site they were on.

Over time this menu continued to evolve as we added sale tags to show which products are on sale for a special price as well as indicating which products were new in the Indola range.

Finally, we added the prices of each product to the mega menu so customers can get price information before they even travel to the page.

It must be simple to understand Indola’s male and female size curves.

One of the biggest problems with shopping for clothes online is not knowing whether the garment is going to fit you when it gets delivered. With the indola site, we solved this by adding a sizing information curve into the main megamenu that can be seen from whichever page the customer is on.

This table splits sizes by male and female and gives the size and the measurements relating to that size so that customers can measure themselves at home to know exactly which size they are. It also gives some instructions on how to measure yourself.

indola-sizing

Customers should be able to see exactly what stock is available for each product

Woocommerce already comes with the ability to indicate whether a product is available or not, but one has to select each color way and size in order to be shown this information. This can be quite tedious when there are a lot of choices within one product.

To solve this we created a matrix which related each color way to size and whether that item was in stock or not. We then displayed this matrix on the product page so a customer could immediately see whether the product they were looking for was in stock or not.

It should be simple for customers to understand the purchase process on Indola’s site

Philip found online shopping on most websites confusing and overly complicated. He wanted the buying process to be as simple as possible and easy to understand.

The first thing we did was create a simple 1 – 3 step buying process on the product page.

  1. Select Color
  2. Select Size
  3. Add To Basket
indola-product-process

Customers would then also skip the normal cart page which showed what you were going to buy and be transferred directly to the checkout page, where we added the cart table listing everything in the customers shopping cart.

We also made the buying process as visual as possible, by allowing customers to choose their colors from an image rather than a drop down menu.

indola-color-ways
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