Your Water Birth is the US distributor for La Bassine Water Birth pools, the best pool in the market.  In addition to selling La Bassine, they sell other pools and accessories for Water Birth. When we met them, they had an HTML information site linked to a simple implementation of osCommerce.  The HTML site was bringing in the traffic and the osCommerce site was doing little to support that.  So talks of upgrades had to factor in SEO impact.

Their target demographic is both Midwives/Birthing Centers and the general public.  Within the general public, the demographic is largely pregnant women wanting to have a home water birth and/or their relatives buying these water birth items as gifts for them.

For pregnant women, the site owner wanted to make it a no brainer as to what to buy for a  home water birth.  During pregnancy, especially your first, you have so much information to take in that sometimes the buying decision can be paralysing, especially when it comes to something as serious as your birth equipment.  Everyone knows you have to buy the pool, and the site offers a several options in that regard,  but you have to have the accessories to inflate and fill it.  You also need the all the bibs and bobs requiring just for giving birth at home like gloves for the midwife, maternity pads for the new Mom  and don’t forget the umbilical cord clamp!  So she introduced the concept of Water Birth Systems ( the accessories for the pool) plus the concept of Home Birth Kits (all the bibs and bobs needed for a home birth).  She also introduced the concept of an Essential Lists, the bare minimum recommended for a Home Water Birth.  Bottom line is to buy a Pool, buy a Water Birth System, buy a Home Birth Kit.  And you’re done. And if you cannot afford all that, then just get the Essentials.

Because preference can vary among Midwives, the site invited Midwives across the nation to create their own Kits including their preferred water birth pool.   With this new Midwife “brand” concept everyone gains: the Midwife can be sure that the client has got the equipment with which she prefers to work, the client does not have to think about what to buy plus she gets a discount on her purchase and, of course, YourWaterBirth gets the sale.

From a technical perspective, we implemented the Systems and Kits as a enhanced version of “bundled products” which is a collection of other products.  On this site bundled products needed to handle products with options such as size.  When a Midwife creates a Kit, the price and weight of the bundle defaults to the total of its products.  When the Kit is being  approved in Admin,  the price and weight can be over-ridden.   If the Midwife wants to add a product that the site does not stock to her Kit then she can.  Admin can then change it if it was a mistake, cross sell the product to an equivalent item or get the item in stock – allowing market demand to assist her product selection.  

When we implemented the new site, it was crucial they maintain their excellent SEO position.  We were confident the new osCommerce site could draw the traffic without the need for an HTML landing page. However to mitigate the risk, we had an HTML page all ready to go should we be proved wrong.  We weren’t. Contrary to popular belief amongst HTML designers,  osCommerce can hold its own with HTML for optimized page content, blowing the whole code to text ratio argument of out the water. That HTML page is sitting dusty on the shelf!

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