Mental Dental – E-commerce website design and development

Client

www.mental-dental.com

Mental Dental is one of the largest full-service dental dealers in the USA, supplying more than 12,000 dental practices with everything from toothbrushes to specialist dental equipment.

STARTING POINT

We based the website around the logo design and brand identity guide we made earlier. You can read a case about it here.

GOAL

To design and develop an e-commerce website that would give the business an ability to expand to online market and give it a bigger reach of US based dental offices. To broaden the reach even further, the site and the brand feel should break the boundaries of a boring, corporately looking dental supplies websites. It should stand out.

PROGRESS

Phase 1. Researching and prototyping the e-commerce website.
We started with researching websites selling dental supplies with a goal of finding the ideal site structure and figuring out their most glaring flaws. Most of them seem to have a catalog of 25-35 categories, which isn’t particularly user-friendly. We decided to slash it down to 7 (though we extended it to 11 later) to make catalog logical and in line with modern usability practices. Then we finalized a sitemap and navigation according to client’s feedback.

Phase 2. Design.
First, we created wireframes of the main pages according to the sitemap and navigation defined earlier, and worked with the client to make sure it makes sense from their perspective as well. When the wireframes were approved, we designed the home page, category page, product page, and other key pages.

Phase 3. Front-end and theme development.
To start the front-end development we prepared responsive layouts for a few pages and made layouts for mobile and tablet views. Then we completed cross browser and cross platform testing to make sure the website would look great in different browsers and devices.

When the layouts were approved we installed and set up Magento 2 e-commerce system on the client’s server. We then applied a proper category structure and added a few sample products to test how our work translates into the actual website.

Phase 4. Functional development.
One of the most important features for an e-commerce store is searching among thousands of products. The faster the search and more relevant the results, the more dedicated and loyal clients you will likely get. To enhance the search capabilities, we set up and customized Sphinx Search Ultimate plugin which was more than enough in our case.

We also added a top sellers block to the home page so there’s a high chance that people make a purchase decision on those items much quicker or get interested in other similar items.

Since dentists often repurchase their orders we included reordering functionality to every personal account. One click is all it takes for the user to top us his stock.. The payments were made as secure and easy to use as possible, using PayPal.

Plus we made it easy for the people to generate additional sales through a word of mouth and get paid for it, by implementing a Loyalty program. This functionality was implemented by a Magento 2 Affiliate extension and customized by our team.

For SEO optimization we installed and set up the SEO plugin from Mageworx. It had improved the site’s search engine indexation and made it more search engine & user-friendly.

ACHIEVED RESULT

The client got a new, modern and user-friendly online store which is a great platform for his growing dental business. The site looks great and easily usable on any type of devices – tablets, smartphones, desktops. Our tailored optimised search engine helps user find the right product among hundreds taking into account the specifics of the business. And repeat clients enjoy a very easy to use reorder functionality, saving time and making it easier to come back for more.