Countryside Ski & Climb

The Ask

Countryside Ski & Climb came to us to overhaul their online retail experience from the ground up. Their existing platform was dated, difficult to manage, and failing to keep pace with the needs of a modern digital audience. It needed more flexibility, mobile optimisation, and needed to showcase the scale and diversity of their growing product range.
 

We were given the following requirements:-

• The redesign was to be realignment based on their current logo and colour scheme
• The technical solution must be a scalable and extensible CMS
• It must integrate with the current back office system and Sagepay
• It must be able to handle high levels of traffic
• With those in mind and being very open to ideas we proposed we utilise the power of Drupal Commerce and build a brilliant multichannel e-commerce solution.
   

The approach

We tackled this project with a full end-to-end strategy, from e-commerce planning and UX design through to technical implementation, CMS architecture, and platform integration. 

E-commerce strategy & planning

We worked with Countryside to fully understand the goals of the new eCommerce website and how it will complement their other retail channels. In understanding the business requirements and key objectives we could plan the major deliverables the site needed:

• Increase conversion rates and online retail sales
• Showcase the breadth and depth of products Countryside offer
• Present a modern, user friendly, accessible design
• Scalable and extensible CMS framework to build on over the coming years
• Improve SEO and increase traffic from natural search
• Create informative, elegant product pages but also integrate a social touch

UX and customer journey optimisation

Before bringing out the paint brush it was essential to understand the customer journey and user experience. After reviewing the current site, we identified 3 main objectives the new site should fulfill:

• Improve navigation
• Increase visibility of products
• Improve conversion

1. Improve Navigation

We settled on 2 traditional paths to navigate to products; they were by product hierarchy and brand. We followed industry standards with drop down navigation, clear breadcrumbs; but this was supplemented by using “Apache Solr” as our platform for search. Having used Solr on other Drupal implementations, we knew that it would be capable of providing faceted search, advanced sorting and a fast response time over many products.

2. Increase Visibility of Products

We offered product cross selling points through the main areas of the site to allow the client to showcase individual or multiple products. This was alongside pre-defined product categories which would show the full product range, with the latest products added first.

3. Improve Conversion

Using our extensive experience of e-commerce design and online shopping behaviour, we wire-framed with these main points in focus:

• Clear calls to action
• Clear product information
• Easy ‘add to basket’ flow
• SEO optimised

We drew up a set of product page wireframes that focused on these main points and through an internal iterative approach settled on an agreed page structure.

Design & UI and development

We took design cues from competitor benchmarks and industry best-in-class aiming for clean layouts, bold imagery, and a modern aesthetic that performs equally well on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Built on an HTML5 Adaptive theme, the frontend was responsive, fast, and accessible.
After reviewing the available platform options with the client, we both settled on using Drupal Commerce due to the exciting possibilities that it offers, and the flexibility it has in dealing with existing back-office systems.

Handling product data

One of the main challenges that the project presented was that the website needed to be driven from an existing back-office system called “Top to Toe”. This system provided a one way data feed to the website that gave information on:

• New product additions
• Price updates, VAT bands, discounts etc.
• Stock availability

This information arrived in 3 separate data feeds that we needed to grab, parse, pre-process and import into the system. Before we could tackle this data syncing challenge, we needed to migrate the existing data into Drupal Commerce so that we had a baseline of content to begin with.

Data migration & syncing

One of the project’s biggest challenges was data integration. Countryside’s legacy system generated three separate product data feeds in CSV format. We:

• Migrated all historic data into Drupal using the Migrate module
• Built a pre-processing layer to clean and structure incoming feeds
• Synced this data into Drupal via an intermediary database, only updating records that had changed
• Automated product creation and updates, while allowing the client to enrich new listings with rich content through a moderation workflow

This syncing process gave Countryside a near real-time connection between their stock system and the website — reducing admin burden and keeping data accurate across all touchpoints.

Search, reviews, and brand management

• Search: We integrated with Apache Solr to deliver lightning-fast, faceted search that could scale with their growing product catalogue.
• Customer Reviews: We implemented moderated product reviews using Drupal’s Comments module.
• Brand Pages: Fully searchable and customisable brand listing pages helped highlight featured products and seasonal offers.
   

The results

The new Countryside site delivered a modern, scalable platform that transformed both customer experience and back-office efficiency. Real-time data syncing kept stock, pricing, and orders accurate, while responsive HTML5 design ensured seamless browsing across devices.

With Solr powering faceted search, product discovery became faster and smarter, and Drupal’s CMS gave the team flexibility to create campaigns and manage content with ease. Hosting on AWS provided stability and scalability during peak trading periods.

Most importantly, Countryside moved from an outdated system to a future-proof platform that can grow alongside their business.

Visit website

www.countryside.co.uk