October 2016: Launch of our new website!

Incredibly, we've had a website since 1999 and today marks the launch of our latest online store!

As mentioned in our history section, way back in 1999 we had a website that pretty much replicated our popular magazine adverts of the time.

When Andy became a full time member of staff, we had a further upgrade to our web presence in 2004 when we moved from a rather static offering to a more dynamic site where you could change currency, sort and filter products as well as an improved ability to order online - at the time all pretty exciting stuff!

They basic infrastructure of our website remained largely the same for over 10 years, and although we moved to Rackspace for an improvement in our hardware provision and security infrastructure, it wasn't until April 2014 when we made another leap forward.

We choose to adopt Magento as our eCommerce solution and with some help from Strawberry Soup, that is what our store has been running on since April 2014.

Using Magento has not been without some challenges and with a major upgrade looming over us in the form of Magento CE 2.0 we made a cuppa tea, had a meeting and decided to not rush into it.

As luck would have it, the launch of the Raspberry Pi had a hand in our decision to adopt Shopify Plus as our new eCommerce platform. I had placed an order with Pimoroni and noticed the sheer volume of orders that they were processing and decided to investigate further.  Prior to this I was guilty of going along with the myth that Shopify was only suitable for small “spare bedroom” stores.

Long story short, Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SAAS), meaning that many of the tasks (like security updates essential for any store) that used to take up hours of our time are now handled by the platform itself.  So after some initial chaos, this should free up more time to better serve customers, create new products and generally do more fun stuff!

From a security stand point, Shopify is also better for us and you.  You may notice that all pages from prendas.co.uk are now served using HTTPS (providing encryption) plus Shopify is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant meaning your data is protected with the good level of security.

Whilst a website is never finished, we hope that in the next few weeks we will have ironed out a few creases and that you find the new site easier to use than the previous.

Thanks for reading!

andy