EPK’s eCommerce Website Overhaul Boosts Sales and Conversion Rates

EPK Colombia was born in 2006 with the aim of becoming the benchmark for children's fashion in Colombia.

The company creates collections of clothes and accessories with a modern and chic style for babies and children from 0 months to 12 years old. EPK aims to awaken the interest in children to learn about other cultures through clothing of excellent quality and design.

Today, EPK has 61 stores in 60 of the main shopping centers, and generates more than 600 direct and indirect jobs in the country. EPK is focused on expansion, so they plan to inaugurate 50 new stores in the next five years, which will allow the company to significantly establish its presence and continue to act as one of the fashion brands with the greatest impact on Colombia.

While the majority of EPK’s sales come from their brick and mortar stores, due to the popularity of online shopping the business needed an enhanced platform to optimize sales. Just one year ago, EPK’s eCommerce sales were well below 1% of the business’ overall sales. Since their company growth strategy planned for eCommerce sales to sit closer to 3%, improvements needed to be made to their existing platform.

As the retailer’s business began to grow rapidly, their outdated, out-of-the-box content marketing management system (CMS) crashed due to its inability to scale. EPK was left with a faulty website that ran an unintuitive UI, and provided no way to collect payment for their goods.

EPK needed a new, customized solution — and fast — so they partnered with Koombea to perform a complete eCommerce website overhaul.

At the launch of their business, EPK built a website using a free and open-source CMS. As the business grew, the out-of-the-box CMS proved to be incapable of scaling.

The more traffic that EPK’s site received, the more disruption occurred to the site’s UI, and the more issues such as the inabilities to integrate with back-end software and create unique reports inhibited the business.

Ultimately EPK grew frustrated by dealing with security concerns, inflexible processes, and faulty functionality during times of heavy traffic to their website.

Specifically, EPK’s out-of-box CMS solution presented the following critical issues:

All of these issues were negatively impacting EPK’s bottom line. For example, users on shopping websites that search for products via the site’s search bar are twice as likely to purchase. However, EPK’s search bar was barely distinguishable from the rest of their website and they were not able to change it’s aesthetic, so they found that a less than ideal percentage of users on their site were able to leverage the feature, ultimately costing EPK sales.

While the free CMS might have been a good fit when EPK was just a small business, now that the organization was growing the CMS proved to be outdated, unreliable, and ultimately obsolete due to its inability to handle large amounts of traffic.

EPK’s frustrations came to a head when they began ramping up the cadence of special product promotions that were driving large amounts of traffic to their site. Their platform simply could not handle the traffic, and the site crashed, leaving EPK without any historical data that could be used to inform their company’s strategic direction.

In order to recover from their site crash and continue growing their eCommerce sales, EPK needed to move beyond the bare minimum provided by their out-of-the-box CMS and instead leverage a customized solution with the following features:

After investigating potential partners, EPK chose Koombea due to their expertise with Shopify Plus, which met all of their technical, commercial, and budgetary requirements. Koombea offered to build a solution with endless customization options instead of EPK having to rely on plug-ins as they had in the past.

With a new customized solution produced by Koombea, EPK would be able to capitalize on the following advantages:

Within just two weeks, Koombea was able to put out the fire of the website crash by providing EPK with a fully functional, customized platform that enabled them to continue selling their goods to customers. Once everything was functional, Koombea continued to improve the platform that would ultimately enable EPK to grow their eCommerce sales.

EPK’s new solution included only the aspects that their eCommerce business required. The site now meets and serves their business requirements and fits their enterprise resource planning (ERP) strategy.

Koombea’s agile-focused approach allowed EPK to iterate, improve, and optimize their site by enhancing everything from the overall design, to the integration with other systems, to the granularities of the user experience.

EPK has experienced significant growth across the business since partnering with Koombea.

While their site’s desktop experience has been enhanced, EPK has also been able to capitalize on having a much smoother mobile experience.

Another key to EPK’s current success is the ease with which they can run promotions on products — something that presented serious challenges in the past. Today, EPK is able to conceive, promote, and execute on three to four deals and promotions per week, which has resulted in a serious uptick in sales.

With cart abandonment rates floating around 75% while EPK was using their out-of-the-box solution, they were missing out on significant revenue. Koombea enhanced the shopping cart experience, making it quicker, easier, and more intuitive. Today EPK’s cart abandonment rate sits closer to 30%, which is well below the industry average.