Farm and country store giant TFM has shipped its first orders to the USA within weeks of going live with its new website - developed and upgraded by a Shropshire firm.
TFM is one of the largest and most successful stores of its type in the UK, providing agricultural supplies and equipment to farms and small holdings, broadening its scope over several years to also cater for public and commercial clients.
The company, which has several stores in Shropshire (One being in Newport) and the surrounding area, called on local Shifnal-based Ascendancy Internet Marketing to develop an upgraded website which would be more efficient, easier to navigate and better support its business.
Ascendancy has a reputation as a market leader in helping firms of all sizes strengthen their business through digital marketing and improved web design.
Hannah Littleford, of TFM, said: “Our new website has now been live for around six weeks, we have been pleased by its early performance and look forward to seeing where we can go with it in the future.
“We have had orders shipping through the UK and have shipped our first few orders to the USA. The potential the new website has given us is very exciting for our business and we also feel that it places us in a much better position for keeping up with consumer trends and demands.
“Although we had a TFM website prior to the relaunch we had stopped selling via the internet about five years ago, but the website had remained live as a non-transactional site. The old website was looking dated and was not particularly user friendly in terms of navigation, searching and so on.
“Our initial aim was to revamp the website but still not sell online. The focus was for the website to drive footfall to our stores, however, we couldn’t ignore the rapidly increasing consumer trend towards online purchasing and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to go back into online sales and in turn massively increase the geography of our potential customer base.
“We decided to work with Ascendancy because they grasped and understood the complexities of our particular business selling online and their initial proposal to us in terms of design and functionality reflected our business well. We are now talking to Ascendancy about working together on the longer term project of increasing traffic to the website and optimising sales.”
Helen Culshaw, Ascendancy director, said: “The website went live before Christmas and since then traffic has doubled, visitors are spending 39 per cent longer on the website and looking at 95 per cent more pages per session.
“We planned the website around key messages TFM wanted to get across, so we started by looking at how best to achieve these aims, how to show visitors at a glance the services and products available, why they should choose TFM and, most importantly, how to get potential customers into the store.”
