Business Outcomes

• On time and on budget. The new website was launched 3 days before the deadline, and was completed within the allocated budget.
• Immediate ROI. Sales are up 250% and the website’s conversion rate is up 200%. Streamlined business processes. The time required to manage orders and customer communications is down 30%.
• Professionally executed migration. The new website launched without downtime, and all crucial customer data was migrated from the legacy system into Drupal.
• Happy customers. Unsolicited feedback has been received from Smartpen customers commenting how much easier the new website is to navigate and use.
• Powerful new marketing opportunities. Because the new website is based on the Drupal platform, Smartpen staff can now create, add and organize new content for marketing initiatives easily and without assistance from technical staff.
• Website traffic trending upwards. The new SEO optimized website is improving Google search rankings.

Services Delivered

• Requirements gathering and business analysis
• Migration of data from legacy e-commerce system into Drupal
• Drupal theme customization
• Copywriting
• Custom Drupal module development
• Custom Drupal Ubercart e-commerce development
• Social media integration Drupal optimized hosting in the cloud
• Ongoing maintenance and enhancement

Project Summary

Smartpen Australia is a leading retailer of Livescribe Smartpen digital pens and accessories, serving customers across the Asia-Pacific. The Livescribe Smartpen is a revolutionary new digital technology that records everything you write and hear, storing it in a searchable format for later retrieval and use.

Smartpen’s existing website, in operation since the inception of the business, had performed well for around 2 years, but the business was beginning to outgrow it. Managing large numbers of orders was cumbersome. In addition, the existing e-commerce platform was rigid and inhibiting new marketing initiatives.

The Managing Director, Mark Parker, had already experienced the power of Drupal, using it in his other business units, and saw an opportunity to leverage the open Drupal’s platform to solve the growing pains that Smartpen was experiencing.

In consultation with Themesandmodules.com, it was determined that a Drupal e-commerce system would indeed solve all the major pain points in the business. Themesandmodules.com was selected as the Drupal consultancy tasked with the migration, and a tight launch deadline was set to coincide with a social media campaign and new product launch.

Themesandmodules.com worked with Mark to collect, analyse and prioritise business requirements and set the success criteria for the project. At the top of the list was ease of use for Smartpen customers, increasing the website’s conversion rate and reducing the administrative overhead that the old system was creating.

There was also a need to have key products and categories just a single click away, no matter where the customer was on the site. This was achieved by writing a custom Drupal module to provide rich content drop-down menus, where any content - images, links, text, or even special offer banners - could be placed.

It was also determined that the ability to easily embed product lists into marketing pages would have a strong and positive impact on sales. Customers ought to be able to learn about the use of a product in a particular market niche, watching a youtube demonstration video for instance, and then instantly add the products discussed to their shopping carts. This was achieved by custom Drupal theming alonside some advanced Drupal configuration.

Technical Highlights

Exisiting community modules were leveraged for a lot of the functionality required for the site, reducing development cost and allowed the very tight deadline to be reached.

Table Wizard and Table Migrate modules were used to import data from the old system and a custom Drupal module was written to allow easy mapping of these import files to Ubercart objects such as Products, Orders and Customers. This module was contributed back to the community as the Ubercart Migrate module, and is now maintained by themesandmodules.com.

The Drupal Panels module was used throughout the site, but most importantly, for the front page. Smartpen Australia now has the ability to easily change the front page depending on marketing priorities. This is having an enourmous impact on sales.

Unlike its competitors, Smartpen Australia adds a lot of value in the sales process by providing extra support and running an up-to-date blog and twitter account, where valuable Livescribe tips and information is posted to help customers make the most out of their Smartpen.

It was therefore crucial that social media was integrated into the new site to communicate this extra value to potential customers. Drupal twitter and rss feed modules were selected, and blog posts and tweets are positioned on the front page. These are automatically updated every 5 minutes.

Various Ubercart hooks were implemented to provide additional functionality, particularly around complex tax and shipping rules to make the website formally compliant with Australian Tax Office regulations.

To meet the objective of single click navigation, a custom module was built to integrate the very popular “qTip” javascript menu library into Drupal. The module allows a website administrator to assign a “mini panel” to any menu item. Using this technique, a hover menu can contain anything - a Drupal page, plain html, custom PHP code, list views, grid views - anything possible in Drupal, can now be easily shown in a hover menu.

This module was contributed back to the community as the “Menu Minipanels” module, and is now maintained by themesandmodules.com.

About Smartpen Australia

Smartpen Australia is the largest Livescribe Smartpen superstore in Australia, stocking all Livescribe Pens and accessories. Launched in 2008, it has customers across Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific. Individuals, small businesses, large corporates and tier one universities and educational institutions all trust Smartpen Australia as their Livescribe supplier.

They pride themselves on providing a wide product range, top quality support, and for 2 years has been going the extra mile to ensure that over 90% of orders are shipped the next business day.

Smartpen Australia is a business unit of Smartselling International Pty Ltd and is located in Brisbane, Australia.