Ariane Poole E-commerce

About the Client

Ariane Poole is well known as a makeup and beauty guru, especially for older women. She appears regularly on TV and in the press, showing women how they can look their best, and how the right products and application techniques can really improve their look and confidence. Ariane works all over the world, particularly in the USA, Australia, and the UK.

Overview

Online Distribution Critical for the Brand

Ariane has developed her own brand of cosmetics, which are particularly well suited to the older customer, as they are formulated to work well with more mature skin types. She has a loyal global fan base. Because her cosmetics are made with high-quality ingredients, they are more expensive to make than most, so online distribution is critical, in order to keep them affordable for Ariane’s customers.

Stuck With an Unwieldy and Over-Complex Site

Ariane saw the need for an online shop some years ago, and originally had a site built using Magento, a well-established e-commerce platform. Although this worked in terms of handling sales, it was difficult to for Ariane and her team to use or update. Some parts of the site also had to be closed down for security reasons, which led to significantly reduced functionality, with no easy route to restore the site.

How We Helped

New Platform Required in 4 Weeks

Ariane approached us to rebuild the site in a more usable way, which would not tie her in to us or any other supplier going forward. This was in October, and the site had to be up and running in time for Black Friday and the Christmas period, so we only had about 4 weeks to migrate all her products and customers from the old Magento site to the new site.

We recommended the site be built using WordPress and WooCommerce – both systems are free and very widely supported. WordPress has well over 50,000 plugins available, so virtually any required functionality can be added with a plugin. WooCommerce is ideal for shops selling relatively small numbers of high-value products – up to 1,000 SKUs is no problem. We added plugins to show prices in local currencies around the world, and added a Stripe payments gateway (significantly cheaper than PayPal).

Easy to Update

With a fresh clean look, which can be easily updated or changed as required, the new site has been doing the business for Ariane.

• We migrated the customer’s shop to a more flexible and simpler system
• Uses free WooCommerce
• Customer can make changes in-house
• WordPress is open-source and widely supported, so customer is not tied to one supplier
• Site migrated, built, tested and making sales in 4 weeks

It’s just so much easier to change things around, there’s a lot more flexibility on displaying our products, and my customers can easily find the products they need. Thank you!