Founded in 2008, High Street TV is one of the UK’s largest Omnichannel retailers; operating four 24 hour shopping channels across SKY and Freesat, you will find their product range available to buy online, in-store and over the phone.

High Street TV’s extensive product range is stocked in over 5,000 retail outlets, including, but not limited to, Argos, John Lewis, Selfridges and all major supermarkets nationwide.

Since the website launch, HSTV and CTI Digital have gone on to win 'Best B2C Project' at The Big Chip awards.

Having operated their existing website on Magento 1 for a number of years, High Street TV were familiar with the feature rich capabilities provided by the Magento platform.

However, with Magento 1 approaching end of life in June 2020 they were keen to explore the comprehensive set of new features, performance improvements and security enhancements provided by the Magento 2 platform.

Following an in-depth discovery and scoping session the following high-level goals were defined for the project: 

Owning multiple online shopping channels: High Street TV’s direct to site conversion was generally higher than that of the industry average. An Examination into the companies, analytical data revealed that majority of users began their purchasing journey on a mobile or tablet device; and proceeded to view and purchase a single product.

Further research into High Street TV's consumer behaviour concluded that users were purchasing products whilst sitting in front of their television after having viewed a High Street TV infomercial.

As a result of the data gathered, a responsive design was put in place with a 'mobile first' approach, designed to support and assist the 'second screen' experience.

Working in close communication with the product owner the design process began by prototyping a responsive design system which featured all of the essential components which would come together to build the final website.

As the existing Magento 1 platform had traded online for a number of years the client had amassed a tremendous amount of data that needed to be migrated over to the new platform.

Following a migration workshop that was conducted with High Street TV, it was decided that customer information and accounts would be ported over to the new system using the Magento Data Migration Toolkit.

As the existing Magento 1 website would be trading during the development of the new website a two-phased approach was implemented for data migration which consisted of:

• Phase 1: Major Import: A ‘Major Import’ was conducted against the High Street TV’s existing database in order to migrate all existing customer and account records into the new platform.
• Phase 2: Delta Import: Subsequent smaller ‘Delta Imports’ were conducted to import only the records that had been changed following the initial import.

One of the key drivers for the project was to simplify inventory management and reduce the manual activities which were currently taking place in the warehouse.

After reviewing the client's existing product data structures we discovered that configurable options were being used to manage product selection.

Configurable options do not support the ability to control inventory available at each configuration and this was preventing High Street TV from managing stock statuses for variants of popular products such as the NutriBullet which comes in multiple colours and models.

As part of the product import process, CTI Digital converted High Street TV’s entire product catalogue over to use configurable products which in-turn created a separate product record for each configuration thus simplifying stock management.

As an Omnichannel retailer, High Street TV required a holistic view of orders throughout the entire estate so that they could effectively manage their supply chain.

With an existing Order Management System in place, CTI Digital were tasked with interfacing to the existing business system by developing an order export interface which pushes website orders across to the warehouse in real-time.

With previous research into the businesses analytics concluding that customers are coming directly to the website in search of a particular product a ‘quick view’ feature was developed which provides users with the ability to configure and purchase a product directly from the existing page, removing the need to visit a product page.

Increasing the customer's trust in both the product and the brand is a key component in influencing the customer's decision to purchase. 

In order to build credibility and reinforce the quality of High Street Tv’s product portfolio Magento’s standard review engine was replaced with Reevoo which connects consumers with honest and direct feedback from validated consumers. 

With a product portfolio that consists of several thousand SKUs finding the right product, first time is no easy feat. That’s why replaced Magento 2 Community Edition’s standard search with an Enterprise level search technology.

Using the power and flexibility provided by ElasticSearch the website provides search auto-completion along with advanced features such as weighting, ranking and mis-spelling corrections.

A scalable cloud-based hosting solution was implemented which allows High Street TV support seasonal demands. The solution implemented will scale up virtual instances during peak trading periods and scale them down again automatically with zero downtime and the service is monitored and maintained 24/7 via our Magento Support Service.