Foundation Commerce
Foundation Commerce is a specialist Magento 2 agency and an official Adobe Solution Partner that lives and breathes eCommerce. They are a team of experts with a driving passion for helping merchants grow their businesses and sell more online, providing the technical foundation that all ecommerce businesses need to succeed.
Partner Spotlight
We caught up with Ryan Copeland, Director of Foundation Commerce, to discuss Hyvȁ Themes, advice for retailers looking to migrate to Magento and why product discovery is so important to their client base.
Tell us about Foundation Commerce
Foundation Commerce is a specialist, developer-led Magento agency. We were the 1st agency in the UK to launch a Hyva Themes project and continue to lead the charge with this revolutionary product.
Our focus is working with merchants for the long term plugging in a specialist magento development team and/or performance marketing expertise into our clients businesses with the sole aim of increasing revenue.
A saying we live by “Our clients’ success will lead to our own success” and it’s built into everything we do. If our client isn’t succeeding, then neither are we!
What sets you apart from other ecommerce agencies?
The fact we are developer led makes a huge difference and really sets us apart from the competition. Most other development focused agencies are run by marketeers or people that are not technical and this shows in their processes, quality of work and the agency’s output.
We’ve proven time and time again that our methods work when it comes to growing ecommerce brands with case studies boasting up to 150% year-on-year increases in revenue.
What would you say to someone looking to migrate to Magento?
I would say do your due diligence on the agency that you are looking to carry out the migration. Unfortunately there are a lot of agencies out there that talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. Magento is the world’s best ecommerce platform when it’s implemented correctly.
Magento gets a bad rap as a platform but in the majority of cases we come across its poor implementation that’s the issue rather than the platform itself. We’ve proven time and time again that the platform can be a huge success for merchants!
Tell us a little bit about Hyvä Themes?
In a nutshell it’s the saviour of Magento. If it wasn’t for Hyva I would definitely be specialising in a different platform now. It’s provided solutions to the majority of the challenges that developers face when delivering on merchants requirements and allows us to do a lot more in much less time.
Why is Hyvä Themes a better alternative to other modern front-end solutions??
Hyva Themes enables developers to build frontend themes that pass core web vitals, take much less time to develop and maintain and cost the merchants a fraction of the cost when compared to other modern frontend frameworks.
What are your biggest accomplishments so far??
For us as an agency it’s definitely the Citizen Watch case study. We were able to grow their revenue by 150% in the 1st year of working with them and it’s looking likely that we will continue that trend into our 2nd year.
We were also the 1st agency in the UK to launch a Hyva Theme project so that was also a huge achievement for us.
Why is product discovery important to your client base?
Put simply, if customers can easily find what they are looking for they are much more likely to purchase from you and return in the future to purchase again.
In today’s age customers don’t have the time to search through thousands of products to find what they are looking for nor do they want to. There’s an expectation that it should be easy to find what they are looking for and if they can’t then Google or Amazon will do the job for them and save them time. Don’t allow that to happen!
Why did you decide to partner with Klevu?
A lot of our merchant partners complained about the relevancy of their search results. This led us to search for a solution to that problem and Klevu certainly does that and some! Throw the production recommendations and category merchandising into the mix and you’ve got a pretty powerful set of tools that you can use to help customers find what they are looking for.
What are some of the most overlooked elements of a website that you find to be of importance?
I touched on it in the previous question but relevance of search results it’s definitely a problem often overlooked by merchants. Customers that use search on your website are a lot more likely to purchase from you so long as your website returns relevant results.
Page speed performance is another that is vital to an ecommerce business’s growth. If your website’s performance doesn’t meet the expectations of your customers then your conversion rate will take a huge hit, organic search rankings will suffer and your cost of acquisition will be higher. Don’t be that merchant that ignores their websites performance!
What are you most excited about for the future of e-commerce?
For us at this point in time its AI and the advancements that we are seeing appear so quickly. We definitely don’t see AI as a threat. For us it’s an amazing tool that allows us and our merchant partners to do more in less time.
Internally we are currently experimenting with generating product data like descriptions and using it in our development workflows to write up documentation and perform code reviews.
For our merchant partners we are actively working with Moi and seeing how we can use this tool to help drive conversions on our clients website.