Comet – Velstar

One of the most recognisable names in the UK's consumer electronics space, Comet was established in 1933 and was a feature of most retail parks by the time of its closure in 2012.The brand was resurrected in 2020 by its new parent company Misco Technologies, a UK electronics retailer operating in the public sector space.

The brief

The strategy

The process

The results

Comet was referred to Velstar by Shopify as they were looking for a site that would build upon elements of the brand’s style while refining the look and feel of the overall design.

The new design would also need to improve the customer experience and the ability for customers to easily navigate through the site and find what they were looking for.

The site would also need to be ready to rank, and capable of helping Comet regain some of the huge online presence it had when it shut in 2012. The brief that Velstar received, therefore, went as follows:

Comet is looking to replatform due to limitations in its current e-commerce systems and needs support from a Shopify Plus partner who has experience in direct to consumer brands.
The solution needs to be able to scale with relative ease and accommodate the different types of products from multiple suppliers, each with their own challenges for onsite display, delivery and data feed integration.
Migrate the extensive amounts of customers, order and product information to Shopify.
Leverage the current email database to drive increases in LTV and AOV. Velstar can support as a Klaviyo Gold partner.

The aim of Velstar’s strategy initially was to implement best practice ecommerce techniques to ensure that the site was easy to use, converted well and looked great.

Comet’s previous platform was dated and restrictive, there was also minimal opportunity for integrations to suppliers, meaning that customers could have inconsistent experiences with their orders. We planned to migrate all customers and order histories using migration tools we have developed in-house.

Furthermore, to integrate suppliers, we planned to use our own ‘middleware’ platform (TRANZIT) which would help to integrate 20+ suppliers, orders, stock, product data, delivery options, warranty etc. and additional rich product data from sources such as CNET Icecat, GfK Etilize, FlixMedia.

As a specific addition to our standard middleware integration, we also determined that we would implement a pricing engine that would run a custom built algorithm. This engine would continuously evaluate and select the most cost-effective supplier for orders that included items available from multiple suppliers. The reason for this is to ensure optimal pricing for such products for every single purchase.

Design and development

Consumers have a set of very specific needs when it comes to large appliance and electronics purchases online - the website needs to inspire trust, needs to quickly and easily deliver their required information and must be intuitive to navigate. For this reason, our design work for Comet was UI and UX driven - focusing on getting the customer quickly to where they needed to go, while providing them with everything they would need to know in as few clicks as possible.

With these requirements in mind at all times, and using Comet’s distinctive orange and black brand palette, we created a site which has a modern, sleek feel while inspiring confidence.

From the easy to use product filter and clean and informative product card layout, to landing pages with key information and actions above the fold, and product deep-dives below, the site is as effortlessly smart as it is functional - like a well built appliance.

Growth marketing

Ensuring that SEO was a core part of the initial build and launch was key to the quick growth of organic keyword rankings after launch.

The existing site was mapped thoroughly and optimised to ensure it catered optimally both to product and topic authority and also to the shortest path to purchase.
Content was produced to highlight product features and to sell the product as much as to attempt to earn rankings - making it user, rather than ranking focused.
Page titles and meta descriptions were optimised to better target customer intent and to capture attention while schema implementation allowed for richer search results (such as the inclusion of images in one of the standard ‘10 blue link’ positions).

Complex integrations & middleware

Although we’re incredibly proud of the design and development of Comet’s site and accompanying marketing activity, some of the truly exceptional ecommerce work undertaken for Comet has been in the back end.

Our unique middleware platform (TRANZIT), algorithmically calculates the lowest possible price at which Comet can purchase an item and ship that item to a buyer (from a set number of designated suppliers and distributors) so that at the moment of purchase, TRANZIT is optimising both the cost to order the item from a supplier, the cost of delivering the item and the speed at which that item can be delivered to the customer.

As well as setting the sell price based on the cost price and margin, it integrates 20+ suppliers, orders, stock, product data, delivery options, warranty etc. for the client and additional rich product data from sources such as CNET Icecat, GfK Etilize, FlixMedia to allow Comet to improve customer experience, align delivery across the UK and cut costs.

This purpose built in-house middleware solution has allowed us to make a difference not just in the revenue column with improved conversions and visibility, but also in the costs column, reducing overheads for the brand through expert integration with suppliers and courier services.

Since launch, the following are among the highlight results:

32% increase in total revenue from all users
2.6% increase in revenue from organic traffic
36% increase in ecommerce conversion rate
33% increase in ecommerce conversion rate from organic traffic
54% increase in total transactions
9.6% increase in total transactions from organic traffic

In addition to this, there has been a reversal of the slow loss of organic traffic and rankings that had been taking place over the preceding 18 months to two years and a significant boost to organic visibility.

In fact, the improvement in visibility was enough to be recognised as among the largest organic increases for the year of 2023 by Sistrix, thanks in no small part to our content team’s human for human approach to creating copy which offers genuine value for Comet’s target customers.

SEO - the results