HoliQuip is a business borne from the pandemic. It is co-founded by HoliFit’s founder Jose Villablanca, with his other business partners, & Jose found an opportunity in the market when COVID-19 struck. As someone who regularly goes to the gym, he knew he wasn’t alone when he was looking for gym equipment to setup his home gym when COVID-19 shut down all gyms. And true enough, there were other Filipinos in the middle class & above looking to setup their home gyms because there’s still no end in sight for the pandemic.
When Jose met me, they had a basic 3rd party hosted e-commerce website setup, and they were not happy with it. At this time, this e-commerce platform business was booming, and it was safe for them to raise prices for their subscription. Using the e-commerce platform’s payments platform also ate into their margins (at least 2.5% per transaction). Finally, their sales used to be very strong with Facebook Ads, but it died down in the middle of the pandemic.
When I built their website, I did a few things:
First, I changed it from the 3rd party e-commerce platform to WordPress + Woocommerce. Moving to WordPress + Woocommerce allowed them to fully own their website, because hosting it in Shopify means Shopify owns your business, not you. This slashed their website operating by 1/3. On top of that, it allowed them to save on the pricy transaction fees Shopify was charging, which can be substantial when scaling their marketing efforts.
Second, I rewrote their website copy to talk about their ideal customer’s pain, not about gym equipment. There are so many gym equipment sellers that it was hard to stand out from the crowd. When I onboarded them as a client, I learned that their ideal customer is a middle-upper middle class Filipino spending a lot in gym fees. The angle we approached it became: saving money from going to the gym (a by product of that was saving time from waiting for using a specific equipment, saving time from commuting, etc.).
Third, we used a lot of design psychology & CRO (conversion rate optimization) to make it as conducive for their customers to buy. A good example would be placing payment processor logos & testimonials near the Add to Cart button to alleviate fears of buying online & from other Chinese seller in Shopee & Lazada.
Fourth, they also have proper analytics installed in their website. Some of them include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, & Microsoft Clarity Analytics. Basically, these 3 tools together allowed them track which products are most popular, how long people are staying in the website, how engaged they are, & “spying” how they behave in the website. This allowed them to make better digital business decisions.
Finally, the website is integrated to local payment gateways, such as GCash & Paymaya. The Philippine market is massively unbanked without a credit card, so adding these payment methods allowed them to capture a larger Filipino consumer market online.
After the website is rebuilt & tweaking their Facebook ad strategy & copy, they were able to generate an additional ₱183,954.24 of revenue in just 3 months.
