WordPress and WooCommerce development, UX, UI, Support
An inflexible, time-wasting website
The MS Trust was established in 1993 to help people with MS live the best life possible. The charity receives no government funding and relies primarily on fundraising, events and donations. Their online shop is an important sales channel for them, but it wasn't working well.
Poorly designed and unengaging for their users, the shop provided limited tracking and reporting information, and was inflexible and difficult for their team to maintain. These limitations were restricting the charity’s ability to grow online orders and meant that managing the site was wasting valuable staff time.
They asked for our help to deliver a modern online experience that would increase online orders, be easier to manage and maintain, and would be expandable in the future as their needs change. Improving the design and user experience would allow users to more easily browse and order an increasing range of products and printed or downloadable publications.
What we did
We created a modern, mobile responsive, easy-to-use front-end experience. The administration of the store was simplified too, saving valuable time for the busy MS Trust team.
We worked with the MS Trust team to help assess the most appropriate platform choice to meet their immediate needs as well as longer-term goals. We recommended using WordPress and WooCommerce, combined with a purpose-built Raiser’s Edge WordPress plugin. This allowed us to deliver the solution at a lower cost compared with an entirely bespoke integration.
Post launch we also helped integrate the solution to a third party Christmas card fulfilment provider, meaning that sending orders to be despatched is now automated, creating a more seamless process and reducing admin time within the MS Trust team.
The outcome
The store was delivered successfully and on time, in order that revenue could be generated on the Christmas card sales in 2020. This was even more important given the impact of COVID-19 on normal charity fundraising activities.
The website is easy to manage and highly configurable to support the various needs of the charity. We implemented additional features such as related products, gift aid options and donation features on checkout in order to help maximise revenues.
“We had a fixed project deadline so that we could sell Christmas cards online for 2020. Weekly meetings with our project manager gave us clear visibility over how our new shop was progressing and allowed us to resolve any obstacles quickly and efficiently. We were extremely pleased to launch on time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We now have a shop that offers our customers a simple user experience and gives us new functionality that will allow us to grow our online sales.”
Right from the beginning Versantus were hands on. They kept our goals at the forefront of the project and would proactively challenge our thinking to make sure we ended up with a solution that would meet our needs
MS Trust
