Space48 Logo
FUNCTION 18

A migration to Shopify Plus to become more customer-first

The challenge

With the end of life looming for Magento 1, Function18 needed to protect their ecommerce business and migrate their data to a new commerce platform. With Space48’s expertise help, they made the move to the safe and secure Shopify Plus, providing them with flexibility and the opportunity to become more mobile-first to increase conversions in response to new user behaviours.

The brand

Function18 is a specialist golf apparel store with over 20 years of experience in selling designer golf clothing to golfers not only in the UK but across the world. Stocking over 15,000 SKUs from the biggest global sports brands including Nike, Under Armour, and Galvin Green, Function18 had high growth plans on the horizon.

To better realise their current ambitions for online growth, UX was at the forefront of Function18’s mind when it came to the chosen platform. A key objective was to streamline the purchasing journeys to make navigating the site simpler and to help customers find their desired product effortlessly. Function18 trusted Space48’s experience in building completely custom and optimised responsive websites, as well as our senior partnership with industry-leading technology platform, Shopify Plus.

Known for its ease of use, responsive design, and ability to integrate with a selection of third-party apps, Shopify Plus was chosen to ultimately provide the best return on investment. A focus was placed on utilising our experience in seamless integration between tech systems during the development and implementation stages.

This included:

  • Product catalogue data migration
  • Payment functionality
  • Customer journey tracking
  • Automation
  • Loyalty implementation.
  • SEO migration to mitigate any risk against Function18’s organic search ranking.

Utilising our expertise in integration and collaborating with our technology partners to build a customer-focused eCommerce site. Space48 worked closely with our partners at Klevu to support them with implementing a custom smart collection script into Shopify.

Function18 is an example of a really strong Klevu implementation, with exceptional design and front-end development work from our partner Space48 and some powerful customisation work on our end to allow for F18’s complex multi-currency setup, powered by Global-e.

Previously on Magento 1, Function18 was only using Klevu’s core search product, when migrating to Shopify Plus they also implemented our Category Merchandising solution. This helps to reduce the manual overhead needed to visual merchandise collections in Shopify and add an additional layer of automation. Prior to go-live we extracted the machine-learning data from M1 (clicks through search, sitewide conversions) to bootstrap our search engine in Shopify Plus. Lastly, the combined team working on the implementation made sure all aspects of both search and the collection pages work seamlessly across all device types, with a real focus on mobile. Overall, we’re really happy with the end-result and the quality of the site is testament to the hard work put in by both the client team and Space48.

Klevu Claudia Photo CLAUDIA DITRI,
UK STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS MANAGER

The results are in!

50
%
increase in sales YoY on Black Friday
33
%
YoY conversion rate increase
98
%
YoY increase in transactions
96
%
YoY increase in revenue
49
%
increase in sessions
56
%
increase in new users

“We are delighted with the results of this re-platforming project and would like to thank everybody involved in the process. The collaboration between Space48 and our design team has been a huge success and we are excited to see what a long term relationship between the two parties can bring. We chose Space48 because of their e-commerce experience and agnostic technical expertise, which they brought to the project at every stage of delivery. We have worked with Klevu previously on our Magento store, and knew that their AI would add another layer of capability to the Shopify Plus platform. Smart merchandising rules and multi-layered filters have helped with two important areas of the new site, significantly improving both search and collection page UX.”

Function 18 Logo BEN SLAVEN,
FUNCTION18