Northern Shoe Store

ClientsWebsite designSwan HillVideographye-commerceSEO
Written By Paul Dillon

Northern Shoe Store is the oldest retail family business in Swan Hill, North West Victoria. Established in 1930 by Harry Jennings it has served Swan Hill and district for over nine decades and is now run by third generation owner/operator Terry Jennings who took over from his father Barry.

Regional Rising was approached by Terry in 2018 to build a new website with online sales capability to replace a static website with an aging look and feel.

So which platform meets Terry’s needs?

Our “go to” platform for new websites is Squarespace but it soon became clear that it wasn’t going to meet Terry’s needs.

Terry wanted his online store to synchronise with his physical store’s point of sale (POS) system so inventory levels were always accurate and to avoid situations like selling the last pair of size 8s in one style in the shop but the website still displaying one “in stock”. Northern Shoe Store’s POS supplier did have an existing integration with e-commerce website platform Shopify so it became a straightforward decision and it provided Regional Rising with an opportunity to build a client website on Shopify for the first time.

Fast forward 5 years

Fast-forward to 2024 and Terry’s online store has experienced “double digit” sales growth year-on-year since 2018 and every week shoes fly out the door to customers in every corner of Australia.

We are very proud of the results we have achieved with Terry and his team and it is always exciting to see new online orders come in and to check which state this customer lives in. It’s incredible to think that in today’s day and age customers in communities all around Australia can find a 90+ year old family business in the bush online and spend their money with them.

Thanks to SEO, 80% of online customers are from outside local area

We have invested many hours since 2018 optimising the Northern Shoe Store website to not only be crawlable by Google but to also rank highly for strategically important keywords (ie. shoe brand and style names) that customers enter into Google as part of their search journey.

It is a fantastic result to see evidence from Shopify Analytics that 80%, or 8 in 10 online customers, are not local to Swan Hill.

Such is the power of e-commerce, that when combined with SEO (and other tactics such as social media), a small business can bring in new customers and revenue streams from outside its local area. And an online store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It never takes sick leave and doesn’t take holidays.

 

Content creation for social media campaigns

Regional Rising Frankie4 digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store
Regional Rising digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store
Regional Rising Los Cabos digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store

Here is a selection of the social media content and animations we have created for Northern Shoe Store since 2019 for use both in their social media profiles and ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.

Regional Rising Birkenstock digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store
Regional Rising Black Friday digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store
Regional Rising Cosgrove digital marketing example for Northern Shoe Store
 

Northern Shoe Store website design project

Homepage

Here’s a full page image of the homepage in August 2024. We changed Shopify template design several times since 2019 to try to stay contemporary and we refresh the imagery, colours and products as the seasons change.

We love including powerful lifestyle images provided by brands such as FRANKIE4 as “hero” images in a carousel above the fold and additional lifestyle images are used in banners we design and insert as visitors scroll down the page. Homepage product feeds such as Winter Sale and This Season’s Favourites pull products from “collections” created and managed in Shopify.

The homepage also features a feed of content from Northern Shoe Store’s Instagram profile.

Northern Shoe Store website design project

Product pages

Here is an example of a product page from the Shopify website we developed for Northern Shoe Store.

While the design is based on a template we purchased we customised it somewhat, prepared all images in square format using Canva and performed copywriting and SEO on pages and images to make product collections and pages rank higher in search engines.

Rural website design - Northern Shoe Store product page Birkenstock
 

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Paul Dillon https://www.regionalrising.com.au
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