Building a stable and secure solution for Beer Hawk

Craft ale etailer, Beer Hawk, began in 2012 as two guys who shared a passion for one thing. Beer. Seven years on and today, they stock and sell more than 1,000 ales from around the globe, opening interactive bars across London and Leeds.

The brief

An unstable Magento 1 Open Source website stalled Beer Hawk's growth ambitions. Their in-house development team needed an expert consultant to help get their site back on track.

The goal was clear. Build a stable, secure website to support their rapidly growing business. Initially consulting on how best to tackle the project, substantial work was needed, so we lent a hand working together with Beer Hawk on the development.

Beer Hawk Web page

The solution

Recommendations were pulled from detailed audits of Beer Hawk’s website infrastructure, functionality and hosting. Intended to support internal planning, website requirements, functional specification writing, hosting infrastructure, and a website migration plan were documented. A bigger job than anticipated, IDHL were brought onboard to support the full project, working as one team with their developers.

Scoped as a ‘Lift, Shift and Tidy Up’ of their existing Magento 1 site, the design was refined as the build was completed, focusing on small improvements that smoothed transitions and user interaction. Working to an incredibly short timeframe, development began at the beginning of January and the site went live just 12 weeks later at the end of March.

A stable, secure, and lead-generating website, the site was replatformed to Magento 2, improving site speed, efficiency and security. For a trouble-free migration, a robust strategy was followed that covered everything from data sources, SEO redundancy, hosting, and risk mitigation.

New technology powered by Magento 2 Commerce now underpins their business. A flexible, scalable solution that will continue to support their accelerated growth, Beer Hawk have benefited from streamlined back end processes that put them in a better position to deliver customer orders on time and with enhanced shipment options.

Beer Hawk bottles
"“When we met with Magento and IDHL it was obvious that they fit very closely with our values and how we work... they became an extension of our team.”

Mark Roberts, Founder, Beer Hawk

The result

63%

revenue increase (1st Apr – 31st Oct vs prior year)

50%

transaction increase

29%

website conversion rate increase

9%

average order value increase

11%

decrease in bounce rate

9%

average time spent on site increase