It took us a while to get it right, over 1 year in the planning, testing & data migration phase, but we can now announce finally that our Mobile Compliant Online Toolstore is live! And I must say right off the bat that congratulations & thanks are in order to WA company Cirrena for an outstanding effort with our HUGE database of clients & products.

People may think that changing an existing webstore to a new storefront and/or back-end operating system is easy. That indeed may be so for some stores with a small client/stock database or start up stores. However Transquip Tools has been around since 1999 which means we have a current (as of 1 feb 2018) client list of over 16967 individuals, businesses & government. And this data migration must be 100% correct in every respect. Notwithstanding the obvious reasons such as usability of the new store and correct upload of the data to it's respective areas, other factors are at play that must be considered.

"However Transquip Tools has been online since 1999 which means we have a current client list of over 16967 individuals, businesses & government agencies"

Here are some of the issues that we needed to overcome:

• Client logins: Most customers have their own account (unless they make a guest purchase) which allows a returning customer to easily sail through the checkout as the system will remember their billing & shipping address(es) as well as their previous orders. Clients have the ability to view past orders & print up past tax invoices and re-order items directly from their account page. They can also add new shipping addresses to their list for future purchases to (say) an onsite workshop or another business/residence. So this needed to be correctly negotiated in the data transfer. In this particular case we could not migrate client passwords so the decision was made to launch the new store with a link to the "re-set your password" page. This has worked very well with no issues reported to date.
• Product Database: Tools are one of those products that has a huge sub drill down menu. Take for example a simple Rattle Gun (also known as an Impact Wrench). These actually come in multiple drives, so the sub menus of 3/8", 1/2" & 3/4" need to also be created. It was very important that the drill down menus were exactly as required, otherwise items will not display correctly & may be hard for clients to find.
• Contacts List: With such a huge list of contacts we need to make sure our list of emails is accurate. When creating a list on our new email marketing mail server "Mailchip" we need to provide them with a "clean" list. As you can appreciate any emails sent to our clients cannot (should not) be marked as spam, because we do send excellent value specials bi-weekly to our members. If we provide a list to mailchimp that is not clean (i.e: doesn't have a high number of invalid addresses) then our account can actually be suspended or shut down. So authenticity is the key here, we need to make sure the emails are going to our clients only, and that is fair enough.
• Operating System: Our operating system was the old version of BigCommerce. As the old system was no longer receiving updates we needed to make a change both for this reason, and mobile compliance. We originally went with the open source (and free) Megento system however half way through the build it was decided to run with BigCommerce which was the best outcome giving the client a better more reliable experience.

In April of 2014 Google announced that any Web Store that was not mobile compliant would begin to lose some of it's organic traffic (from google search). We certainly did experience a reduction in traffic, however this was also due to the downturn in the Mining Industry. We expect that this new venture of fully complaint platform will make a positive change in our organic traffic flow.

With all of these issues to be considered plus much more not mentioned here we now have a fully mobile device compliant Online Toolstore. Looking at the stats of the new back-end we can see that around 30% of our clients are currently making purchases using either an android or apple in tablet & hand held form , with 70% still using a desktop PC. These figures will change as time progresses.

If you have a moment jump on your phone or tablet and check us out, and while you are there grab a bargain as we have hundreds of Cool Tools during our Launch Sale!