Breastmates Review

I have been working with Canz Design for the past few months, getting my new CMS site ready. My previous website was something I’d done myself, and had been using for the past 5 years, but it was reaching its limit because it was such a manual process for me to add new pages or new products. It was very time consuming and labour intensive to create the pages so that the side links would all update, and I would have to check my emails daily just incase a product had sold out, and would then have to update my website. I always had ideas on articles to write, and pages that my customers would fine useful, but it was always such a time consuming process.

I have been helping create the pages for the new site, and transferring everything over from my new site. But in the process, I added 1,000 extra pages of useful content because it was just so easy to make new pages. Even easier than writing blog posts. So my page number has increased from 700 to 1700 since the new CMS site is loaded. I am sure this will really help my google ranking – but will update you on that in a few months.

With the new CMS site I love how the menus are so easy to change, and navigation around the site is very easy for the shopper. But its also really easy for me to keep all my pages neatly filed in the different folders.

Canz design worked with me tirelessly to get the right look for the site. This was something that I was very conscious of, and wanted the site to look 100% perfect. To tie in with the image of my brand and existing use of colours.

Its been one week since we launched the new baby. I’ve definitely noticed an increase in the sale of obscure little products, the things that were slow sellers with my old site. It was probably because no body could find them or knew that I sold them. A lot of these “obscure” things, I have actually added as a small thumbnail “related product” at the bottom of popular pages, and it has helped increase the Add on Sales. Its really easy to do these things with the new site.

Preparing the new site beforehand did take a while, but there was plenty of opportunity for me to learn how the new system worked. Canzdesign loaded everything onto a temporary server for me, so that every page could be fully tested before we transferred it over. Then the transfer process took less than an hour, I was really surprised. It was almost like ‘click the switch’ and the new website was loaded. Not a single customer was inconvenienced.

I was initially quite dubious about changing to a new CMS site, but this has really made my life easier and I can see the benefits for the future. Although it has only been one week here are a couple of examples:
• A supplier notified me on Friday that they were discounting products by 25% for 72 hours. I decided to pass on the savings to my customers. Within 60 minutes I had discounted all the prices for about 40 products (of their brand) on the website, contacted my database of 7,000 to tell them about the quick sale, checked all stock available. Then my family and I actually went to Rotorua for the weekend, and I had no computer access. With my old website, I would have had to update the store pages when a certain size had sold out, to ensure that noone else would purchase it (so I had to be around whenever there was a web sale). But with the new CMS site, if a size sells out, it just drops out. So I did not need to worry about this at all. And just came home to lots of orders to pack.


• Another example, is for some of my products we have lots of different spare parts available. With my old site, I just had a long list of the parts available and people would email me for a quotation. This was purely because the thought of loading all those separate products into my old store was daunting, and I was too lazy. But today I loaded the popular spare parts, it was painless. This was something that I should have done at least two years ago, but had never got around too. Now people can just buy them online, and they don’t need to email me about it. So this will cut down on my workload too.

I’ll give you another update after we settle in, as it has only been a week.

Frances McInnes
Breastmates Specialty Breastfeeding Store
www.breastmates.co.nz

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