How Hyvä helped Italian fashion retailer improve Google Ads ROI by 55%
Magento 2 project snapshot
- S2sport.it
- Country: Italy
- Industry vertical: Sporting goods, apparel, fashion, shoes
- Business model: B2C, Omnichannel 1 physical store
- Skus: 100k+
Hyvä project scope and key results
New website launch with Hyvä: January 2023
- Page speed: +45%
- Organic search +23%
- Lead to conversion: + 19%
- Conversion: +25%
- Average basket size: +23%
- Revenue: +30%
- Google Ads ROI: +55%
Client's quote:
With our new blazing fast Hyvä website based on Magento 2 (our third e-commerce project with Synthetic), our customers can enjoy a better shopping experience and we get the business benefits of maximizing our advertising spend with more new and returning customers.”
A 45-year-old family business owning a sports apparel store in Italy
The S2 Sport company is, like many others in Sicily, a family company. So, this is a family story.
Their family business has been around sports equipment and apparel since 1977 and went through the decades trying to “fit” as well into the market while making their customer “fit” into their sports desire and needs.
The main store is located in the center of the little town of “Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto”, in the north of Sicily. But the S2 Sport’s soul is wider and bigger than the whole Sicilian island.
All the brands, equipment, and fashion articles are selected with their customer in mind, willing to bring the best and most attractive selection of sports brands down to the store, offering a great experience to buyers in terms of quality, appearance, and brand new materials.
S2 Sport’s product assortment includes lifestyle brands Adidas, Nike, Puma but also more premium brands such as Lacoste or Gant, and more specialised and technical brands such as Asics, Wilson, Head, or Aqua Lung for diving and swimming. Categorywise, they go from wide-appeal sneakers to more niche and sports’ specific items.
The key success factors for S2 Sport are:
- Outlet and good pricing items opportunities on older models
- Being familiar and kind to their customer as the first strategy for customer retention and satisfaction
The Italian Fashion Market and the Store’s Digital Strategy
Italy and fashion are often used synonymously. Starting from the big names of high fashion and ending with the taste we find at every level. Although globalization has led to a flattening and standardization of style, it’s fair to say that Italian trends and creativity are always present in the productive fabric. The growth of the sportswear segment within the apparel industry is definitely a great wave to ride for S2 Sport.
S2 Sport targets customers aged 16-50. It is an expanding market, and the company is still well below the European average in terms of online purchases. To compete with marketplaces and websites who might have huge advertising budgets, S2 Sport decided to compete by offering efficient and fast customer service. They noticed that a prompt and competent response on social or WhatsApp channels builds loyalty and facilitates the purchasing process compared to large competitors who often have complex and slow structures.
Going online: an inevitable path for fashion retailers
According to a recent report from Statista1, 42% of total apparel sales in Europe are sold online. As such, going online was an almost “forced” choice for S2 Sport. Initially, they opted for a more “institutional” site but it was immediately clear that eCommerce was the next important step, to be taken quickly. Having a physical store, eCommerce helps them not only to increase their customer base (whole Italy-based) but also facilitate sales in the store. Customers are now used to seeing online catalogs and having a clear idea of their purchase before entering the store.
Evolution of the S2 Sport’s eCommerce store
2015: first fully custom online store
“Passion for his customers and careful selection of his products” are the values that Filippo De Pasquale came with when he first met his Italian agency Synthetic in 2015. Both the merchant and agency clicked with shared values on customer centricity and from there, S2Sport was brought to the web in 2015.
Right from the beginning Synthetic chose to fully bring the whole S2 Sport’s data and experience online, making a customised, fully automated system integration between the client’s warehouses, ERP, and eCommerce website, totally synced together by a custom middleware.
The first eCommerce website that was made for S2 Sport was a fully custom product as well, internally developed by Synthetic based on Zend Framework, and when looking back, here were the pros and cons:
Pros:
- Good speed
- Limitless customization possibilities
Cons:
- Required a lot of effort
- Not ready for a big step in scaling up
- Long time to market for every new feature
The results started to come, right in the next months after the go-live (spring of 2015) with good organic traffic and a good result in terms of sales and ROI.
2018: Re-platform on Magento 2
S2 Sport then continued to grow, and in 2018 the agency decided to re-platform the eCommerce site on a relatively young Magento 2 product, and this is what it brought them:
Pros:
- More stable and ready for scaling
- Robust and customisation-ready
Cons:
- Great effort to develop
- Slow speed
- High costs on new integrations and maintenance
Fortunately, the customer’s trust in Synthetic has been strong also during these first Magento 2 years and that allowed the agency to overcome little and big troubles we crossed along the way.
2021: the Hyvä Epiphany
Then a solution came! When Salvatore Capritta - CTO at Synthetic - first gave a talk about the “new” Hyvä revolution that had just started in November of 2020, Filippo was in the audience. As soon as the talk finished, he contacted Salvatore asking for more details about this brand new Hyvä technology.
Synthetic just found the right customer with whom to share the new adventure on Hyvä!
It was time to look back on the S2 Sport online store, once more, and address the big challenges they then identified:
- Increase the visibility of the site
- Improve browsing speed
- Make the entire sales process simpler and faster, from item selection to the shopping cart
In just a few months the new S2 Sport eCommerce version on Magento 2 + Hyvä was released with the following results:
Pros:
- Stable
- Robust
- Customization ready
(No more) Cons:
- Less effort to develop
- High speed
- Lower costs on new integrations and maintenance
Synthetic immediately understood they were on the right path. They also took their middleware - syncing the warehouses and the ERP - to the next level thanks to the Hyvä frontend, bringing their product where they really wanted it to be.
Now:
- The “smiles are back” in the agency’s faces (and in Filippo’s too)
- They feel again sunnier (however, that is what a Sicilian is meant to be)
- The eCommerce platform is more aligned with the agency and client’s customers’ expectations.
All has gone so incredibly well so far… that the client decided to come up with another website request, using Hyvä again! But that’s another story :)
Hyvä re-platform results:
- Better shopper experience: performance, page loading speed, stability: gtmetrix passed from d to a/b, google page speed from 60 to 90
- Better onsite metrics across the whole sales funnel
- Page speed: +45%
- Organic traffic: +23%
- Lead to conversion: + 19%
- Conversion: +25%
- Higher Sales and ROI:
- Average basket size: +23%
- Revenue: +30%
- Google Ad ROI: + 55%
- Faster time to market: integrating new features, about -30% of the time needed
- Savings: not entirely measured but for all the integrations and change requests, they’re now saving around 10%-20% because of time and solutions used
- More conversions and less returns. Customer retention is higher than before
Key learnings on the migration from a Magento 2 to Hyvä?
The implementation of Hyvä gave new vitality to the S2 Sport eCommerce store. It was an opportunity to completely rethink the architecture of the front end, increase speed, ease of use, clarity of basic information, and simplify of the purchasing process.
Make sure you consider more closely the time needed to convert many features and modules already used in the previous version.
The pilot project worked so well that the merchant wants to implement it in his other online stores.
Important tips to merchants from Synthetic:
Don’t take anything for granted if you are going to choose your storefront technology.
First of all, don’t choose your platform based only on “business” suggestions from a sales representative, but talk with the CTO and devs, look at the real results, and ask for the technical reasons behind solutions.
Don’t forget to think big and ask for all the ways that will be available (or not) on the platform proposed; because all the ideas (you will surely have in your next steps after go-live) will need room for implementation.
Agency’s quote:
Here in Sicily, we love traditions, family, and being helpful to friends and people we care about. And that’s what S2 Sport and Synthetic people have in common. We created a sincere relationship with Filippo at S2 Sport and all our common values have been transformed into great projects. Based on that, we were able to experiment early with Hyvä and come up with fantastic technology and business results for the company. ”
About your agency
Synthetic is a Sicily-based eCommerce agency.
We love to develop tailor-made products based on our customers’ values and desires from the early 2000s.
We try to give our best to create a great relationship with our customers because we know this will be the source of great products for customers and big learning for us.
