KangarooUK and Duda eCommerce: Making it easy for clients to sell anything online
Using Duda’s highly customizable native eCommerce solution, KangarooUK is helping more clients quickly build and maintain their eCommerce sites, encouraging them to go beyond just selling products online.
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60%
60% of clients reach out about eCommerce
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Growing demand for customized stores
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3
New payment gateway integrated in only 3 days
Most clients want to sell online
Many small and medium sized businesses reach out to KangarooUK because they want to sell their products and services online. Inquiries about eCommerce have doubled in the past few years, growing from 30% pre-pandemic to around 60% of total contacts now. This is why the full-service digital marketing agency based in the UK has always offered eCommerce services.
Their eCommerce clients sell a variety of products online, ranging from wax candles to parts of commercial kitchen equipment, and even vintage home items and NFTs. Beyond products, the agency supports clients selling services such as courses and membership fees.
Sharon Keevins, Managing Director at KangarooUK, notes, "More clients are exploring online sales, and we actively encourage them in this direction. For instance, we are collaborating with a local civic society organization to facilitate the sale of membership fees through their website."
Despite the increasing interest in eCommerce, both KangarooUK and its clients face challenges building and maintaining online stores.
Testing different ecommerce platforms
KangarooUK had previously used several platforms to build eCommerce sites for their clients, including WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla.
“We’ve been around them all, and we don’t like them,” says Macauley Smith, Head Developer at KangarooUK. He explains, “I hate WordPress, and I’m a coder. The average person doesn’t have any chance to do any kind of customization on WordPress beyond what they give you through plugins. And the UI is horrible.”
With Shopify, although it is a very robust platform, to do anything different than what is provided in their templates he needs to go straight into coding. And that is definitely very time consuming and expensive for the client.
Choosing Duda for eCommerce and transactional sites
KangarooUK has been using Duda to build their clients’ websites for more than six years. They were able to reduce website building time by 75% after migrating from WordPress to Duda. After switching to Duda, building websites became their primary source of revenue, and the agency has experienced a 300% growth year-over-year over the past 3 years. Check out the full story!
Whenever possible, KangarooUK is migrating their clients’ stores built in other eCommerce platforms to Duda, including many new stores built on Duda’s native eCommerce. The team prefers working with Duda because of how easy it is to integrate specific payment gateways and to make alterations to the payment checkout flow to meet their clients’ expectations.
With Duda’s API and detailed documentation, customizations are easily and quickly done. In a recent example, one of KangarooUK’s clients needed a specific payment gateway to be integrated into a Duda eCommerce store in only two weeks. The client offered to pay KangarooUK a bonus if the integration could be done in one week.
“We had never integrated a payment gateway into the Duda native eCommerce before, and we got it done in three days because Duda’s documentation lays it out for you. It guided me throughout the entire process”, Macauley says.
Duda’s native eCommerce delivers composable eComm at scale. Yonatan Shaham, Director & Group Product Manager at Duda, explains that “the simplicity and flexibility of our eCommerce API allows agencies to add or replace almost anything. They can use API-based store customizations to deliver the exact shopping experience clients are looking for.”
Easy to build and maintain
Another reason for KangarooUK to choose Duda native eCommerce is how simple and easy it is for clients to maintain their websites and online stores.
“After we provide training, they are happy to be able to add, remove, or edit their products and services themselves. They don’t want to be tied down to developers; what they really want is to run their online businesses properly,” tells Sharon.
Thanks to Duda native eCommerce, KangarooUK can offer eComm websites to service-based businesses, like a coffee shop or a band, that would not normally sell online. This is an opportunity to provide clients with a new revenue channel. It also unlocks an upsell opportunity for the agency and increases client satisfaction and stickiness.
Macauley concludes, “We really think that Duda is the best CMS for creating websites at scale and allowing clients to take care of their own websites. And we believe Duda eCommerce is a great solution which is getting better and better. It doesn't have the full feature options like some of the other platforms just now, but there are new features constantly being added and soon there will be no competition.”
