Vapour Hub Limited Case Study
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Dylan Smith
- Dec 5, 2022
Vapour Hub Limited are a UK-based Vape shop franchise, spanning 7 different locations across the country. They began as a single store in Doncaster, stocking a wide variety of vape-related products such as tanks, coils and liquids.
The Problem
Vapour Hub’s original website was poorly constructed. It wasn’t just the unappealing visuals that made it hard on the viewer, but also the lack of functionality. Several key features related to bulk ordering and automated discounting simply didn’t work well, if at all. For example, customers would have to enter individual promo codes for each offer – instead of being added automatically.
They had over 1000 products on their website, but due to improper names and lack of descriptions given to the items, their SEO was suffering.
The team behind Vapour Hub came to us, with the plan for a completely new website and correctly done SEO
This was one of the biggest projects we had taken on. A fully custom-designed e-commerce website with well over 1000 products to be transferred over. We needed to quickly integrate the new website with their payment provider to ensure they had minimal downtime.
The Solution
Creating a fully custom website design, 20-30 unique designs, responsive for any device.
Improve the special offers and discounts implementation
SEO, conversion rate. Full product SEO with over 1000 products
First, we looked at their current website. We determined what the key issues were and what we could use in the new website. Vapour Hub already had its own colour scheme and branding, which we used for the new website.
Our web design team developed 20-30 fully custom page designs to be used sitewide, all fully responsive on any device. We created an entirely brand new home page with clear branding and an emphasis on User Experience.
Due to the large number of products on the site, we needed to organise them properly. We already had designs for both product pages and category pages, so they just needed to be optimised. Our SEO team worked through over 1000 products, adding the correct names, and accurate and SEO-ready descriptions and moving them into the appropriate categories.
Our SEO team took the time to curate descriptions for each of our products, which include vape kits, e-liquids and accessories. Though it was a lot of work upfront, adding these unique descriptions increased the website’s ranking and traffic significantly in the long run.
Early on in the Search Engine Optimization phase, we found a problem.
We discovered that Google is fairly strict on what type of products and services you could promote on their search engine – including e-cigarettes and associated products.
This put the SEO team at an early disadvantage, as keyword research was almost impossible (every search term appeared with 0 search volume). To combat this, we instead turned our attention to competitor websites.
Looking at Vapour Hub’s competitors, we were able to determine which products and brands were the most popular and required the most attention.
Vapour Hub’s former website also had issues with improperly executed discounts and offers. Offers are a great method to motivate more sales on an e-commerce website, and Vapour Hub has some excellent deals. To make the site successful, we needed to implement them seamlessly.
The website plug-in we installed allowed us to integrate special offers into the payment system so that they would automatically be added to a customer’s cart. We spent some time transferring and adapting each promo code from their old website and testing them periodically. Additionally, we had to double-check that there were no issues with crossovers or discounts cancelling out other deals.
Pushing the special offers as much as possible was one of our main goals. Vapour Hub have special offers that are much more attractive than the majority of its competitors, so we believed it was the best way to convert visitors into customers.
We also developed a product filter. Initially, users were greeted with a page full of the products that fit under a category with little way of finding specific brands, products or variants. Our SEO team worked on organising each product into different filters and ensured that every single filter combination worked correctly. This was another incredibly complex process but was very beneficial to the user experience and conversion rates.
Eventually, we had a fully custom-designed website with over 20 different page templates, full product and category SEO and an integrated special offers and discounts feature. The new Vapour Hub Limited website was ready to launch.
The Results
We continued to work on the website for a while after launch, ensuring that any issues that appeared were fixed, optimizing for SEO even further and adding extra products or features that the team at Vapour Hub requested from us.
Just over a year after its launch, the website is about to reach 1,000,000 impressions across hundreds of keywords and products and has maintained a fairly strong 1.2% click-through rate. With the huge range of products available on the website, Vapour Hub Limited has been able to pick up large amounts of traffic through product or category-specific searches.
We can then push this traffic towards the special offers, making them much more likely to convert
One of our biggest achievements with this project was page speed optimisation. Through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, the Vapour Hub website secured a score of 100 on both desktop and mobile, almost unheard of for a site with this many pages.
This was one of the most complex projects we have ever worked on at Sood, and it took the efforts of the whole team to bring it to life. The project was a fantastic learning experience for the whole team, helping us to refine our process for large projects and giving us valuable lessons in user experience in e-commerce. We’re extremely proud of the end result and look forward to seeing Vapour Hub’s continued success.
