Note : Fastbreak has since closed down (August 2020) with the sad passing of owner Rod Culverhouse.

Fastbreak sports is a traditional local sports shop retailer based in Chesham High Street, reliant on passing and local trade. Chalfont Web Design has been working with them since around 2012 on their supporting web site. This year, we launched a new web site for them based on WooCommerce / WordPress.

We had previously successfully launched their web site on Sellerdeck in 2013. This needed an upgrade and also a migration to our new hosting platform. However, SellerDeck will not work on shared 20i hosting and the upgrade pricing to the current version of SellerDeck and their hosting costs put it out of range as an option. We therefore recommended the SellerDeck migration to WooCommerce.

The first step of the project which we started at the beginning of 2019 was to extract the data from the existing SellerDeck web site. To do this, we used a data export tool from CodePath which we have used for other projects. This is a great lightweight tool, the only minor issue is that it cannot extract tiered pricing (which wasn’t an issue for this project).

Once the data had been extracted, the next step was to marry all of the images with the products. In SellerDeck you need / have the option of multiple images for each product – thumbnail, standard and extended image. For WordPress, you only need one image (the large one) as it does the rest of the work for you. Sorting the images obviously took time, but we then also re-sized any non-square images and re-crunched them to make them as small and optimised as possible.

WooCommerce is an e-commerce plug in for WordPress so this was the next step, to set up a fresh install of WordPress and then add the necessary plug ins and then the theme. We use Studiopress’s Genesis theme and bespoke it from there. It is lightweight and simple to manipulate, ideal for speed again.

With the data imported into WordPress / WooCommerce, the web site was uploaded from our local Desktopserver install to staging on 20i. Steve at Fastbreak then took over to add more products and update anything else out of date.

Once they had cleared away their busy ‘school uniform’ autumn rush we launched the web site, switched on the Google Shopping and immediately started taking orders.

Features of the web site includes:

• Speed – essential for SEO, so optimised images, lightweight framework, on Cloudflare CDN and according to Pingdom Tools the home page loads in under 1/2 a second
• Features retail recommended price as well as their special pricing.
• Google shopping including a plug in to upload each shoe size or colour with a unique EAN
• WorldPay on page checkout, the account was painful to set up despite being an existing customer and disappointingly doesn’t include Apple or Android Pay at the moment (Use Stripe is our advice – slightly more expensive but has both of these – much better for mobile transactions)
• SSL as part of the Cloudflare setup
• Mega Menu for at a glance of what they supply
• Mobile friendly

The launch on WordPress means the team at Fastbreak and Chalfont Web Design can access the web site from any location or device rather than just the local laptop as was the case with SellerDeck. This means if there are any issues, we can log on straight away and try to resolve. For Steve it also means he can update directly from a mobile walking around the shop.

This project is just at the start and we are looking forward to working on an ongoing basis with them including click and collect, Google My Local Business, blogs, team kits and schools. We are also constantly looking at how to speed the site up and improve other metrics.

The Fastbreak team of Rod, Steve and Terry are great partners to work with and are very friendly, with customer service their top priority for walk in customers, something that cascades to their web customers.

Visit their web site to find out more.