Saucal

Phlearn -the #1 Photography, Lightroom, and Photoshop tutorial website in the world approached us as they wanted to change their entire business model, switching from a video download store into a subscription-based streaming platform.

The project involved complicating the checkout process and dramatically increasing transactions, burdening the already-slow WordPress database. Moreover, the changes were to affect 10,000+ customers so the stake was really high!

Despite the challenges and risks, the transformation project was successful and the Client felt that working with Saucal was a great experience.

As a result, in the first 3 months, Phlearn went from 0 to 10,000+ subscribers (including 5,000 gained in 10 days).

BlueSnap is a global online payment processing SaaS designed to increase authorization rates, decrease checkout abandonment, avoid cross-border fees, and reduce technical debt. The platform comes with everything eCommerce sites need built into a single account.

By partnering with popular shopping carts like WooCommerce, BlueSnap offers merchants a better way to process payments.

BlueSnap had a disappointing experience early on working with a development team, and, in their words, “spent a long time going nowhere”. Because of this, and the fact that BlueSnap were rookies at WooCommerce, they had missed some opportunities.

BlueSnap felt it had wasted time, and was ready to make progress. There was huge untapped potential: more than 4,000,000 WooCommerce sites that could potentially use BlueSnap.
That negative early experience meant they had been unable to deliver on customer demand for WooCommerce plugin.

Worse still, their sales team was fatigued by the resulting lost business. They’d been down a rabbit hole with the first development team. This time around, they needed to get it right!

Saucal produced the BlueSnap Payment Gateway for WooCommerce in a short period of time. It is a state-of-the-art, plug and play, fully functioning multi-currency payment gateway, and includes support for popular Woo extensions Subscriptions and Pre-Orders, and support for Apple Pay, 3DS and Google Pay (coming soon).

With this new WooCommerce plugin, BlueSnap generates revenue quickly, retains sales staff, and is growing its customer base.

Saucal’s approach was thorough. The team went through Bluesnap’s APIs with them, and got to understand the business and problems they were trying to solve. BlueSnap rated Saucal’s support and follow-through as excellent.

No Pong makes an extremely effective, all-natural, all-day deodorant that is 100% paraben, aluminium, cruelty, and plastic-free - available online only. No Pong’s deodorants are made from 100% natural ingredients. Launched in 2018, No Pong has strong and clear values, one of which is no animal testing.

Built with WooCommerce, No Pong had been through what they describe as 18 months of “technical hell”, convinced that WooCommerce just wouldn’t scale. They were so cynical that they didn’t believe Saucal could help them. So Saucal said: “We’ll show you”, fixed something critical, and the No Pong site was suddenly flying!

No Pong had already spent (wasted) $100,000 searching for an alternative eCommerce platform before partnering with Saucal. That money didn’t account for the lost revenue, money spent on site crashes.

Saucal migrated No Pong to Kinsta, a better and less expensive solution. They stabilized the website with few coding changes and installed debugging tools.

Next, Saucal optimized the site performance, removing non-performing indexes and plugins and adding new ones that helped with the site’s overall performance. Customized plugins were added to allow for dynamic pricing, wholesale offerings, and more!

With the website stable, Saucal then connected the website to a robust analytics platform and email marketing. A markedly improved website allowed No Pong to focus on its core business, which contributed to a 30% growth in business and the ability to expand into new markets.

McKeen Metro Glebe offers a diverse range of products from gluten-free treats and organic produce to everyday grocery and household staples. Based in Ottawa, the family owned business has an impressive century-old reputation built on trust, service, and quality.

McKeen Metro Glebe sources products from local suppliers and supports the near-by farming industry while striving to provide the freshest and most delicious foods all year round.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, in-store shopping was limited and McKeen Metro Glebe’s online sales skyrocketed, increasing sevenfold quickly. While this sounds great, problems soon arose with heavy traffic causing their site to crash.

This meant an erosion of customer trust and, in some instances, serious consequences for customers who couldn’t source their food elsewhere. For some customers, this was a matter of life and death!

Canceled orders and refunds would cut into profits and take time away from ensuring customers had what they needed. An overwhelmed staff will make mistakes that could cost them — and customers — their lives. The owners of McKeen Metro Glebe feared for their legacy.

Saucal solved the crisis by implementing an effective online ordering system to keep customers informed. The result? Happier customers and increased sales for McKeen Metro Glebe!

There are now caps on the number of orders processed in a day, meaning effective order management, the ability to meet customer expectations, and happier staff. A card-on-file functionality frees staff from manually taking credit card information over the phone.

The ability to self-schedule in the calendar for future deliveries has helped customers get what they need in time without jeopardizing the health and safety of the community and staff.

Hello Subscription is a subscription box discovery platform which was started as a little personal blog and grew to an affiliate site generating over 1 million page views monthly.

At the beginning the site was maintained by the Founder Brandy O‘Grady but at some point she needed help maintaining and enhancing it and that's why she approached Saucal.

Saucal made some crucial fixes that improved site performance and reduced the costs of managed hosting. We also rebuilt the site making it more user-friendly and developed custom features like "notify me feature"

As a result of the changes we implemented, the managed hosting costs have been reduced dramatically and website performance has improved significantly.

Lens Distortions offers cinematic music, original SFX, and visual assets for creators and filmmakers. Their platform offers curated content, available through a monthly membership plan. There are three plans, available on a monthly or annual fee basis. Content is grouped according to type, making it easy to find assets that complement any cinematic project. Lens Distortions assets are used in a lot of famous movies, including Batman, Stranger Things, and the Adam Project.

Lens Distortions approached Saucal because they wanted to redesign their site, improve its performance, and implement a few new features to refine their new way of selling their products as subscriptions.

Saucal redesigned the site by building a child theme from the Kadence parent theme and developed a custom Gutenberg Blocks plugin to achieve all their needs.

Leggari Products sells high-end DIY countertop and floor epoxy kits at affordable prices. Its aim is to sell the most durable and user-friendly epoxy products while providing user-friendly installation.

They came to Saucal to get their website issues sorted! Their site was underperforming, leading to transaction failures, which meant lost revenue for Leggari.

Given past bad experiences with WooCommerce agencies, Legarri needed to find the best web developer and stop wasting money!

The site was originally built using a premium theme & plugins, which are notorious for being bloated and badly coded.

The site structure created a lock-in effect, because the content was entangled with theme-specific code, which in turn required complex data manipulation to migrate that content to a more open and versatile format (based on the native WordPress block editor).

Saucal’s solution was to build a custom theme based on a bespoke design. With the codebase optimized and badly performing plugins replaced, the result was a drastic improvement in site performance!

Moreover, we developed and implemented a custom solution that allows Leggari customers to configure their epoxy kits using an intuitive step-by-step guided UI. (Steps process calculator).