Web Development for leading UK manufacturer of Oriental catering equipment

Web development for Advanced Commercial Kitchens (ACK)- a UK manufacturer and supplier of Oriental catering equipment to commercial kitchens worldwide.

Since 1982 they have developed a market leading position through their design and quality craftsmanship of woks, wok cookers, steamers, ovens and ventilation systems. The safety-excellence approach to all their services and products has been the driver for their growth across catering businesses up and down the country, including some of the UKs leading restaurant and take-away brands.

Their large and growing customer-base requires significant after-sales support through callout and repair, servicing, maintenance and the supply of spare parts to maintain the highest safety standards for equipment and the kitchen environment. The existing website was not providing customers with a stable platform to make enquiries or place orders for spare parts and accessories, and maintaining an up to date product catalogue was a labour intensive exercise for ACK admins.

Despite regular online sales, the performance of the website was deteriorating, shopping baskets were being abandoned at an increasing rate and visibility on Google was being affected. The one time darling of page 1 for 'wok cooker' searches on Google was under serious threat, and a new solution was needed to arrest the slide.

Web development to inject new life into online sales and Google visibility

Oxfinder were introduced to ACK to inject new life into their website and restore online visibility for the benefit of the company as well as its customers. After workshop analysis of stakeholder challenges and requirements, Oxfinder identified a new web development solution which would launch as a minimum viable product to address all the priority issues, and a growth plan for the first 18 months after re-launch. Visit ack-wokcookers.com

The idea was to launch with a new eCommerce website to enable customers to easily browse and order spare parts and accessories; and create an environment where all ACK services were clearly visible. The site would be developed for users to select their preferred language with a particular need to give access to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai language versions. With the site launching in English, design and functionality had to give full consideration to adding new language versions over the first 18 months.

With a beautiful collection of new product photography, and a complete re-write of all content, web development was completed and the site was launched in June 2019. Ack-wokcookers.com is custom-built site built in WordPress and WooCommerce and is fully accessible to all modern browsers across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

Web design makes use of a bold colour and large images and video where the structure and placement of content is suitable for optimised user experiences. Integrations were required for UPS shipping including pulling in custom rates; and for international customers, provisions for ordering in different currencies. Equally important was the attention to site performance to enable Google to begin to reinstate the site as a credible and authoritative online destination for Oriental catering equipment.

Results achieve boiling point within 1 month

User questionnaires are currently being distributed to customers to get direct feedback, and to obtain useful insight which can be considered for future updates. 30 days after launch enough data is available to analyse the performance of the new site, measure against goals and look at comparisons to the old site and the impact it is having on ACK's business and staff.

Compared to the previous site the number of transactions and average value of each transaction has increased. The headline improvement is 149% increase in sales split almost equally between new and returning customers. Already within 30 days, Google has reindexed 90% of all pages and the priority keywords relevant to 'wok cookers' have already re-established in the top 3 positions of search results. Time for some Dim Sum while we continue to work on the first additional language version - Chinese.