In With The New, Welcome to HfxExtensions




Technologies: HTML, CSS, PHP, Wordpress, Woocommerce, E-Commmerce, Web Development, Paypal, RESTAPI,

Industry: Retail, Hair and Beauty,

About the Client

HfxExtensions is the brainchild of Ms Jennifer Kpolu. The business is an upcoming Halifax-based retailer specialising in hair extensions, both human and artificial. Disclaimer, she’s a friend of mine.

The business has been in operation for roughly 2-3 years, as of writing, and has since slowly grown its clientele in the HRM region and even outside the province of Nova Scotia. Suffice to say it’s growing and with that growth came the wake up call to adapt for the sake of its ever increasing customers and business volume.

Business Challenges

When we started the project, we discovered at the interview stage that an e-commerce site wouldn’t be enough so we couldn’t settle for just a new website. I like to remind my clients that this is the difference between hiring a web developer/programmer vs an IT consultant/business analyst. Right away, she agreed we needed something more than just a website; we needed a system that would be a solution to all the following challenges:

  1. Cost: When it comes to business, cost cannot definitely come into play. In this particular situation the budget was very limited and so we had to work with what we had. My client had some great ideas and vision for her business and the project itself but the cost was a determining factor in what she could have and when.

  2. Time: HfxExtension was looking to a 2020 New Year’s launch ceremony and had decided to proceed with the idea of going online sometime mid-November. This left us with a little over 45 days to determine the project’s scope and requirements, design and implement a solution, test it and debug then finally go live all by the first week of January, 2020. I can set up a full, five page website with all the bells and whistles in under 3 hours. However, when it comes to developing long term solutions for business processes, you want to have more time on your hands.

  3. Inventory Management: As with all businesses, with the growth comes a need for better tools to organize and deliver to its customers. Before the start of the project, HfxExtensions didn’t have an inventory system in place. Like most student-owned businesses at the time, everything was entirely by hand and memory which worked for a time until the number of orders and requests from clients began to grow.

  4. Tracking and analytics: Without an inventory system in place, inventory tracking also became virtually impossible if not difficult. It’s one thing not knowing exactly how many hair extensions and which type you have on hand and a whole other challenge not knowing which products are selling and who’s buying what.

  5. Electronic Payment Transaction: The last challenge that needed addressing was the payment methods that were in place at the time. Prior to deciding to set up an e-commerce store, most of the business was processed through interac and cash which, as a fellow business owner, I knew was difficult to keep track of unless there was a deliberate setup that separated the business’ accounting from the owner’s personal funds. In Canada, if you’re operating as a business under a different name other than yours, separate bank accounts and bookkeeping are required for tax reasons. See: Small businesses and self-employed income

Usually I would include the knowledge barrier as another challenge we had to prepare for however, thankfully my client was well informed with technology it was a quick walkthrough when it came to training.

Solution Story

Wordpress and WooCommerce were the combination that came to mind as the challenges were being outlined. I have experience with Drupal 8 and pre-Adobe magento back when it was entirely open source. While magento specializes in creating e-commerce experiences, this was a case of using a backhoe for a shovel’s job. Drupal was also a fairly tempting option considering I had recently gotten used to the platform and grown rather attached to it. However, besides the issue of the learning curve of Drupal & Drupal Commerce, the platform was in both the early days and latter days of transitioning from Drupal 7 to 8 and then 9 and with no automated upgrade procedure in place, the cost of an additional upgrade even from 8 to 9 just wasn’t worth it. But Wordpress had all we wanted and none of what we didn’t want;

  1. Fast and easy setup with low-cost entry barrier
  2. Easy upgrade process between major versions
  3. WooCommerce extension allows for adding a shopping feature to the website
  4. Large and diverse extension marketplace
  5. Large and active community that’s not showing any signs of slowing down
  6. Relatively small learning curve

Now with the platform settled on, it came with a lot of features that helped us address some of the challenges we encountered.

Wordpress’ only cost of entry, minus developer fees, were hosting and we managed to lock in a great deal with one of my recommended hosting providers, HostPapa. For a first time online business, this was a great feature that minimized risk to my client’s finances by reducing the cost altogether. Besides this, we also opted for the milestone approach for the project where we break down a client’s project idea/vision into two parts, functions and forms. The functions are the features that allow a client to start and continue operating their core business and the forms are those that only serve to improve it after. In this case, Hfx Extension could do without a custom-developed theme, dropshipping, worldwide shipping etc. The essentials were to have an operational online platform to showcase her products and process transactions. Once we agreed on this, we proceeded to select a woocommerce-compatible theme that was easily customizable and combined it with a few extensions to create the experience my client was looking to give her customers. With regards to time, while I was used to 90 timelines for such projects, doing this in 45 days became much easier due to the reduction in the workload from breaking it down and although it did take some extra hours past 5 to get things in place, it was well worth it. Moving on to inventory management. Considering businesses can (and should) now be entirely cloud-based, we decided to use WooCommerce for all inventory instead of procuring a separate application to do this. This would reduce fragmentation and reduce cost and time of development. It’s nice to have specialized systems in place for each business task/process. However, when it’s a single person running everything, you want to eliminate the feeling of being all over the place. This also serves to preserve data integrity by eliminating redundancy across platforms. Finally, for payments, we decided on a combination of Paypal and Square’s APIs to process payments during transactions. Square was included as a special request from the client to process payments both online and in-person including contactless and interac during events like expos.

Results

As with all my clients, I do my best to maintain a close relationship with them and occasionally check on them occasionally to ensure things are going well and that seems to be the case with Hfx.

This is the impact we’ve had on the business since setting up this website:

  • Increased reach and, effectively sales, by increasing accessibility to customers
  • Comprehensive organization and tracking for transactions and sales volumes.
  • Visitor tracking and conversion analytics
  • Provided the owner with real-time inventory tracking per product and, for customers, real-time inventory updates
  • Double-digit percentage increase in revenue due to increased reach and conversion
  • Better/improved customer relations management across email and social media through detailed product organization, description and FAQ pages to provide more info
“Since I got the website, it’s been easier to manage and they’ve (her clients) been receptive to it.”
Jennifer Kpolu, Owner

Within the 45 day deadline, we were able to have a new, mobile-friendly e-commerce solution up and running and we managed to get more than just a pretty homepage and some products online. HfxExtension is now able to cater to clients across Canada and is still working on plans to expand into US markets with time.

Her bookkeeping headaches are all but gone with Wordpress + Square generating invoices and keeping an accurate history of all transactions on and offline. This also works great for her clients who now have receipts for every purchase and the ability to order from anywhere in Canada, for now.

You can visit HfxExtension.com here to checkout the site and perhaps signup as a customer to support the business.