Out of Ireland

The Client

Out of Ireland sells an eclectic collection of Irish inspired and made products from all the most popular Irish brands, including knitwear, clothing, jewellery, fashion accessories, and gifts. These products are sold from their shop, located in a beautiful heritage building in a prime downtown Victoria location.

The Situation

We developed Out of Ireland’s website several years ago as a brochure website designed to display the wide array of fine products they have to offer. This website was a continued success for many years, attracting strong visitor numbers monthly. However, with the advent of COVID-19, Out Of Ireland has had to adapt. In response to the pandemic, they shut down their store, and to help their business stay competitive they asked us to convert their website into a full e-commerce online shopping site so that they can continue selling without in-store visitors.

Our Work

Having already designed a successful website for Out Of Ireland, our most recent challenge came in the form of converting that pre-existing brochure site to an e-commerce website. Figuring how to pivot to being an online-only business as quickly and seamlessly was possibly the biggest, and most common, challenge facing website designers and businesses in 2020. For Out Of Ireland, we were able to quickly add the necessary e-commerce functions and ensure they were not missing out on this vital revenue stream.

Special Features

• A mobile-first responsive design, optimized to display well on all devices from smartphones through to desktops
• An easy to manage CMS (Content Management System)
• Easy to use shopping cart
• Ability to add and edit products, complete with images descriptions
• User friendly shipping and billing address forms
• Credit card security protocols
• Product schema, doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes for search engines
• SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for enhanced security

The Result

The e-commerce website has been a tremendous success, with over $47,000 in sales recorded in the first 6 months of being live. The goal of the site is not to replace their physical store - which is now back up and running - but to augment meant it going forward. Not only does it give them an additional revenue stream, but it also helps to boost their foot traffic and grow their audience.

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Prior to the Pandemic we were complacent about online shopping. Having a vibrant bricks and mortar location we felt that a shopping cart on our website might take away from our instore sales. Radar Hill were able to advise us as to how our new website would work to our advantage and how best to set it up to maximize online sales. Radar Hill is not Shopify which definitely would have been the wrong fit for our business. The team at Radar were there to answer every question not matter how rudimentary the query. They truly gave us step by step support advising not only on the basic set up of our website but also giving us input on the types of products which would appeal online and be most practical to ship. As we built our shopping cart during the early days of the Pandemic all training was done by Zoom and it is a testament to the professionalism and patience of Dan and his team who gave us lots of extra support and encouragement in what was a big project for our business. It has been really rewarding to deal with a small company who are invested in the local community , the local market and who have taken the time to understand what our business is about.