At Vincentius Apparel, we were grappling with a double-edged sword.
Football transcends languages and borders. Like the sport we love, we wanted to make our high-fashion hats and jerseys available to fans across the globe—and in their own currencies. Selling our products in a single currency might alienate or even confuse customers. The American dollar symbol, for example, is the same as the Canadian dollar symbol, the Australian dollar symbol, the Brazilian real and so on. Our hope was to create a truly tailored experience for our customers—to set them at ease by freeing them from the hassle of juggling various currencies and exchange rates. Essentially, we wanted the visitors to our site to feel at home.
That’s where the double-edged sword cuts in. Trying to serve up different versions of our site to different countries forced us to turn off page caching. We’d receive the benefit of being able to offer our apparel in multiple currencies at the heavy cost of slowing the site down.
To accommodate our global customers without sacrificing the speed of their experience on Vincentius.com, we needed an innovative solution—and we found it in WP Engine GeoIP.
GeoIP let’s us serve content to our customers based on their location. This gives us the ability to effortlessly and automatically serve our site in euros for customers in the E.U. or rubles for all the fans in Russia. We’re currently selling our products in 13 currencies and plan to expand that in the future. And if a customer visits us from a country whose currency we don’t currently support, our site will automatically default to our home currency, the British Pound.
A Vincentius Apparel snapback and strapback in US dollars.
A Vincentius Apparel snapback and strapback in Russian rubles.
We’ve been on GeoIP for a few weeks now, and the difference we’ve experienced is enormous. Vincentius Apparel now caters to customers all over the globe with a site that’s ultra fast. And best of all, I’ve already noticed more sales coming in—something I attribute not only to GeoIP but to the performance gains we’ve seen since migrating to WP Engine from our previous hosting provider.
In the world of ecommerce, first impressions count. A slow site builds distrust on the consumer end. How can a customer trust their money to a site that loads slowly or goes down? Having our storefront on WP Engine has eliminated that problem by allowing us be consistently fast and scalable. Without that foundation, and without innovative products like GeoIP, I don’t think we would’ve been able to grow as much as we have.
To learn more about how Vincentius Apparel uses WP Engine GeoIP, download our case study.
And for more information on WP Engine GeoIP, download our ebook.
Bruno co-founded Vincentius Apparel with his younger brother at the age of 20, at the same time as studying for his degree in Modern Languages. The brothers are life-long season ticket holders at their local club, Crystal Palace – a team whose name outshines its players! His motto is “make your passion your work.”
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