Inside BULK POWDERS’ Quest for Global Expansion
Food & Beverage eCommerce Website
How the sports nutrition company created dozens of international eCommerce stores.
+17.58% Conversion rate in France
+21.67% Conversion rate in Italy
Global Expansion: Into Europe, and beyond
When BULK POWDERS launched in 2005, they caused a huge stir in the sports nutrition industry. The British-based company manufactured most of their products in-house and sold their quality protein powders, probiotics, and multivitamins direct to consumers — at prices so low that they annoyed competitors. This direct business model delivered extraordinary growth for BULK POWDERS, who quickly outgrew their small self-storage unit. They soon moved into a state-of-the-art, 16,000 square-foot manufacturing facility and warehouse in Colchester, Essex.
As word spread across Europe that BULK POWDERS offered the best deals in sports nutrition, the company realized they needed to aggressively expand into new territories. With traffic pouring into the BULK POWDERS eCommerce website from countries beyond the UK, they also needed to protect their operation from traffic spikes. In 2017, they decided to upgrade their Magento Commerce 1 platform to Magento Commerce 2. They needed a platform to spin-up dozens of international stores and help their global expansion with different currencies and languages while providing the best customer experience — even during peak times.
Magento Commerce hosted in the cloud has ensured our website has the agility to respond to a rapidly-changing environment, and can easily scale to meet unexpected demand — crucial in peak trading periods — providing a fast experience regardless of visitor volume.
Adam Rossiter
Managing Director, BULKPOWDERS
Their eCommerce website got a big lift
Together with their solution partner, The Pixel, BULK POWDERS launched new web stores in dozens of locations: France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, all supported by regional teams. Orders are received by the UK warehouse, processed by the warehouse management system, and shipped out to customers.
On the back end, BULK POWDERS implemented Klarna Checkout, so they can offer multiple payment options, including Pay Later and other payment installments, with a focus on international payments. The Yotpo artificial intelligence engine collects and displays user generated content, like reviews, and centralizes this content across all their sites and languages. Meanwhile, SLI Search, powered by predictive analytics, suggests what products shoppers are most likely to buy, based on customer data.
Migrating to the cloud allowed BULK POWDERS to greatly reduce their baseline implementation costs and the cost of global expansion, compared to using a multi-tenant SaaS solution. Today they enjoy scalability, high resilience, PCI compliance, and global availability. Most importantly, the cloud offers a simplified integration with their existing systems and the ability to respond rapidly to changing technology.
Extraordinary gains
The results of the BULK POWDERS migration to the Magento Commerce cloud environment were spectacular. Year-over-year conversion rates on key trading dates, like Black Friday and other sale periods, are higher. The cloud has given the website the agility to meet unexpected demand, providing a lightning-fast experience regardless of visitor volume, in any territory.
Since launching on Magento Commerce 2 in the cloud, BULK POWDERS has enjoyed a strong year-over-year lift in conversions. Pages now load 32 percent faster, which has helped to lift conversion rates in the UK by 17.4 percent. Internationally, the biggest conversion rate increases have been in France (+17.58 percent) and Italy (+21.67 percent). The company is currently working on a new US store, launching later in 2019. And after an upgrade to Magento 2.3.0, the company will augment their global expansion with Magento Multi Stock Inventory to support multiple warehouses, enabling orders and stock to come from new, regionalized locations across Europe, and the rest of the world.
Magento Commerce has been hugely influential in our ability to expand as a business and into multiple territories around the world.
Adam Rossiter
Managing Director, BULKPOWDERS
