about the project

iMakr are the world leading reseller of 3D printers and scanners. As well as Imakr.com, iMakr have two retail offices situated in the Clerkenwell, London and Mahattan, New York. iMakr are now the world’s largest independent 3D printing store. They supply printers to the engineering, architecture, product design, medicine and university sectors.

The business requirements

iMakr are the world leading reseller of 3D printers and scanners. As well as Imakr.com, iMakr have two retail offices situated in the Clerkenwell, London and Mahattan, New York. iMakr are now the world’s largest independent 3D printing store. They supply printers to the engineering, architecture, product design, medicine and university sectors.

iMakr needed a robust, reliable and secure ecommerce platform to promote and sell its 3D printers and scanners. iMakr had a preference to stay with Prestashop due to price, scale modules available, good SEO, open source code and, importantly, the ability to create multilanguage online stores, particularly for France and Germany as well as UK and USA.

iMakr was running on Prestashop 1.6.0.9, which was released in July 2014, approximately four and a half years prior to chilliapple undertaking the upgrade. By not upgrading, the site was becoming out of date and security on the site was vulnerable.

Our solution

We proposed migrating their existing site from Prestashop 1.6 to Prestashop 1.7.5.1.

Database Migration – It was necessary to create several scripts for the migration of products, images, users and order history. After migration of all content, it was also essential to reorganise it, with the restructuring of categories. We´ve created custom modules.

Hreflang tags – This is a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. The goal is for search engines to send people to the content in their own language. This intervention involved the improvement of the online store positioning in multiple global markets, with the main focus being on the US and UK. Having this goal in mind the website has been deployed with multilingual features.  As well as improving the user experience (it helps users land on the most relevant version of the site), Hreflang tags are a great way to manage duplicate content issues caused by international websites.

IP redirects – As higher rankings in Search Engine Results become increasingly important for businesses wanting to stand out online, we recommended a strategic approach to internet protocols and location based searches. This ensures the correct version of the site will match the searcher’s location and be displayed more prominently.

Enhanced website and data security – chilliapple installed the latest Prestashop security patches and conducted security tests for system protection.

Optimised website performance – Having detected issues with loading speed, chilliapple’s team conducted a number of website performance enhancements including optimized images, reduced HTTP requests, and minified CSS and JavaScript.

SEO Friendly URLS – chilliapple integrated the PrestaShop Advanced URLs Module to make iMakr’s URLs SEO friendly by removing auto generated IDs / numbers from URLs of products, categories, manufacturer & other pages. The module also automatically 301 redirects old to new URLs to avoid 404 errors.

Improved Translators – Prestashop 1.7 has improved translators through which iMakr can translate the content of their website to many languages.

Brand new design – chilliapple used a Laber Eren Prestashop theme to give a contemporary, modern fresh and clean feel to the site that would reflect iMakr’s hi-tech products. Using this theme has also made transferring between stores very simple for the user.

The results

chilliapple developed a total refresh of the company website whilst creating a new online presence for French and German search engines in addition to their established authority within the UK and US markets. Five websites were created that are easy to use and update by the company internally whilst ensuring consistency of their different brands and divisions.

chilliapple also provides technical assistance for iMakr’s business ideas and guides them on their development strategy.

Technology used

Platform Used
Visit Website

The technical bits

  • Hreflang Tags
  • Pretty URLs Integration
  • Advanced CMS – For creating flexible content management for landing pages
  • Live chat integration
  • Stripe Payment Integration (for US site)
  • SagePay Integration
  • Warehouse Management Integration for their locations and quantities in stock for products
  • Mailchimp Integration
  • Fedex Integration

The finished product