about the project

Rugs of London has been a retailer and distributor of rugs for over 60 years and has established a worldwide audience for their extensive collections of carpets, rugs, Kilims and tapestries. To showcase to the world the 15,000+ rugs available in their London showroom they had an ecommerce website, originally built in Magento 1.

The business requirements

After originally coming to chilliapple with some new ideas to expand the website’s offerings, such as a new Auction area of the site, we also included this within a migration to the new Magento 2 platform. Since then, Rugs of London have taken out our Silver Support Package with us, allowing for the continued support and development to their site.

Our solution

In the first phase, the client wanted to keep the bespoke design of the original Magento 1 site, so these designs were mapped onto a fresh Magento 2 installation. The data was then migrated over – products, categories, customers, orders, and content.

The new feature that the client wanted was an “Auction” area of the website. We selected a few different third-party Magento modules that created an auction functionality, and ultimately the client went with our top-most recommendation – the Webkul Magento 2 Auction Module. This allows for multiple different types of auctions to be set on products – standard, incremental and automatic auctions. It allows for reserves to be set and email notifications to be sent out to buyers who have been outbid or an automatic bid has been made. We created a new “Auction” category and configured this module for Rugs of London.

The original Magento 1 site used an image API called Kraken.io, to optimise the large number of images on the Rugs of London database. Kraken does not support Magento 2, so we found another image optimiser tool called ImageOptim API. This compresses images, loads images faster and improves website speed.

After completing this initial project for Rugs of London, we have since undertaken exciting new development work including redesigning their homepage, as well as implementing an interactive quiz to help customers find their perfect rug. Through our partnership with Pure Clarity, we have also configured this on their site, helping to increase conversion rates using customers own shopping habits.

The results

Rugs of London continue to work on developing their site to reach its maximum potential, which an established company of over 60 years deserves. We have recently made changes to their product pages and the image layout for easier navigation, and we continue to work together to find the best new developments for their site.