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Case Study: VW Spares

If websites were classic cars, this one would be a 23 window Samba.

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Classic cars and vintage relationships

The story of our relationship with VW Spares starts in 2009. I knew Jon White, the proprietor through buying spare parts for my own vintage Volkswagen from him (that's me, pictured in 2007). Jon approached us with a view to taking his spares business online. At the time we were building small e-commerce websites using our own custom coded e-commerce solution. It was simple to use and effective but did not meet the needs of a large business like VW Spares. Shopify was available at the time, but back then it was even more basic than our own offering and very expensive. We chose to use NopCommerce for Jon’s business. 

A 2009 kinda solution

In 2009 the e-commerce market was very different. Websites were heavily designed and a lot of the standards and optimisations we are used to today did not exist. Everyone had their own ideas of a great checkout experience and different providers offered very different sets of features. NopCommerce was the daddy of them all and the preferred choice of larger companies. As a full-service software development company, we felt experienced and skilled enough to take on such a beast. We were not wrong, but with hindsight we probably sold a Rolls Royce to a man who needed a Volkswagen and knowing me at the time I probably charged Dacia money. However, over 15 years later in December 2024 with our help Jon turned off that NopCommerce website for the first time and for the last time. It had served him and his business well for over 130,000 hours.

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A very 2025 solution

So why change? The world has moved on and frankly in my opinion NopCommerce just doesn’t sell as well as Shopify. The total cost of ownership is higher and because you are managing your own hosting and databases, I think it is best suited to a company with in-house developers. In 2024 Jon was also 15 years older than he was in 2009 and he wanted to spend less time administering his business and more time with his family. He needed to move away from Excel and manual stock takes and Shopify allows him to automate inventory, goods incoming, trade orders, and much more. VW Spares also had a technical and visual debt at this stage – the website was old, and design was very old.

Working with our in-house designer Paul, we created a new fresh visual brand for VWSpares and we built a brand new Shopify website. We imported almost 6,000 products and recategorised them to make better use of Shopify’s structure and cataloguing. We introduced a blog for SEO and we integrated the site with Klaviyo for email marketing. Gift vouchers are designed and tailored to Ireland’s favourable tax breaks on employee gift vouchers. On the backend we introduced inventory management, workshop invoicing and inventory tracking (when the service department works on a vehicle all the parts they use and the labour are tracked and can be charged to the customer in the same way as any other order), and purchase order functionality for incoming stock.

Driving sales for the next 15 years

Our new journey with Jon has only started, but this one will be very different. In 2010 we built a seriously complicated technical solution that took deep knowledge of databases, servers, and coding. We then handed it over to Jon with an invoice and we went our separate ways. Of course we supported Jon over the 15 years, but we never took an interest in the sales, the optimisation, the marketing, or the efficiency of the website. Those were problems for the business.

However, Jon was the one customer that always niggled in the back of my head. I always felt we were not doing him a service. Well, we literally were not doing him a service other than basic maintenance. It never felt right to me. He would call me sometimes and I would ask how business was, and his reply would always be “yeah, alright mate, the website seems to work fine”. I am not being negative towards Jon at all when I say I am sure he had nothing to compare it to and he likely no idea if it was doing fine or not.

It didn’t sit right with me and when we changed Perfidious Albert to an e-commerce strategy business in 2023 Jon was the first person I called. It took a while for us to find the right time, but as I write this in late December 2024 we are about to go live with a new website for VWSpares, and starting in January 2025 we will be working closely with Jon every month to make sure that the next time anyone asks him how business is he will say “it’s amazing, I own the bloody market, and Shopify does the work of 3 admin staff”.

Watch this space.

Meet the VW Spares Family

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Why You Should Work with Perfidious Albert

We don't just build websites. In 2025 that is too easy. Anyone can build a Shopify website in under a day. We are masters of our craft who work hard to understand your product, understand the mind of your buyer, and to give you the most profitable e-commerce business possible. Our expertise in online retail is backed by an exceptionally strong track record in software development, project management, and technical know-how. In a nutshell, we are e-commerce experts.