The dilemma of whether to use ready-made or custom solutions has always been relevant for e-commerce businesses. The degree of the debates has become increasingly sharp these days, when each and every solution provider underlines the importance of customizing every feature the store wants to implement.
But the truth is that custom solutions are not a magic pill – they can really help when it comes to unique functionality for a specific niche. But in most cases, modern ready-made solutions offer everything a business needs to stay ahead of the competition without imposing additional development and maintenance costs.
Today, we’re presenting a case study that demonstrates how the usage of ready-made Amasty solutions on a Magento e-commerce website helps improve operational efficiency, optimize TCO, and customer experience.
Client Overview
Mastershoe is one of the UK's leading independent footwear retailers, offering a wide range of footwear, including popular brands, in a seamless and customer-focused online shopping experience. With over 40 years of expertise in the footwear industry, Mastershoe has built a reputation for providing quality products and exceptional service. The company’s mission is to offer an unrivaled shopping experience, making it easier for customers to find the perfect shoes while ensuring every step of their journey is seamless.
Business Goals & Objectives: Improving the Customer Journey
The client’s core business goal is simple yet ambitious: to keep growing online sales while providing an effortlessly smooth shopping experience for customers. Their focus is on making it as easy as possible for customers to find the right shoes, feel confident in their purchases, and navigate the site without any friction, right from browsing to checkout.
Improving the overall customer journey is a key priority. Mastershoe understands that better usability, faster page loads, and an enhanced sense of trust are all key ingredients to driving stronger conversion rates and encouraging repeat business. They are continually refining their online store to ensure that customers not only make one purchase but come back time and time again
Initial Platform Decision: Why Magento
When it came to selecting the right platform for their business, Mastershoe needed a solution that could handle a large, diverse product catalog and integrate smoothly with their EPOS Volo system. Given their growth, flexibility, and scalability needs, they found that Magento stood out as the ideal choice.
Magento provides the scalability and flexibility required to manage complex catalogs, offering powerful customization options and room for growth. The platform also allows for seamless integrations with other business systems, ensuring a business can continue to scale efficiently as they grew. Magento offers the right combination of flexibility and robustness, a level of customization that simpler platforms can’t offer.
Solution Architecture & Setup: Combining Ready-Made Extensions and Custom Development
Mastershoe currently operates on Magento Open Source, combined with the custom theme they have developed before.
When it comes to site architecture, Mastershoe combines ready-made Amasty extensions with custom development for business-specific requirements.
This hybrid approach helps save time and reduce complexity, leaving custom development for aspects that can’t do without it rather then customize for the sake of customization.
Total Cost of Ownership & Cost Efficiency: Why Extensions Make Sense
For Mastershoe, TCO isn’t just about upfront costs. They consider every aspect of running an e-commerce site, including development time, ongoing maintenance, support, and internal resource costs. Here comes one of the most common traps of in-house custom development – while this may seem cheaper at the beginning, hidden costs like maintenance or development hours always emerge over time, resulting in overhead costs and TCO increase.
In comparison, ready-made Amasty extensions have proven to be not only cost-effective but also predictable in terms of costs and maintenance. Extensions reduce the uncertainty around project timelines and budgets. The clarity of scope and availability of support makes it easier for them to plan ahead and allocate resources effectively.
How Amasty Extensions Help
Amasty modules have proven to be reliable, cost-effective, and efficient, and over time, they’ve become a vital part of their Magento tech stack, fitting into the tech stack as a trusted part of the wider Magento setup.
Currently, Mastershoe uses 14 Amasty modules as part of their daily routine, including:
One Step Checkout Pro – Streamlining the checkout process for customers.
Product Feed – Improving the management of product feeds for better visibility.
Google Page Speed Optimizer – Enhancing site performance and reducing page load times.
A good example of how Amasty helped Mastershoe avoid unnecessary custom development is the Follow Up Email extension. Instead of spending time and resources building a custom solution for sending return labels to customers, the client implemented Amasty’s Follow Up Email extension, which handled the task even efficiently and made up a perfect match with the whole Magento ecosystem.
Recent Improvements: Impacting Operations and Customer Experience
One of Mastershoe’s most recent improvements was the migration of their site search functionality to Amasty Search, powered by Elasticsearch Base and Advanced Search Base. Previously, Mastershoe was paying for an external search provider, which led to delayed updates and less flexibility. The decision to move to Amasty was driven not just by cost considerations, but by the promise of a stronger search experience that would give customers faster and more accurate results.
The impact was impressive:
Faster Updates: Changes to prices, product images, and other details are now reflected instantly on the site, providing a much more responsive search experience.
Improved Search Accuracy: With more reliable filtering and searching capabilities, customers can now easily narrow down their choices and find exactly what they’re looking for.
The client has already noticed improved operational efficiency and reduced bounce rates due to the enhanced search functionality.
Why Ready-Made Solutions Work
The core idea behind our client’s experience is not to default to custom development unless there’s a clear, proven reason to do it. In most cases, e-commerce businesses can start with ready-made solutions and get great business results. Proven Magento extension providers like Amasty can save businesses time, money, and effort. The flexibility and reliability of these ready-made solutions allow businesses like Mastershoe to move faster, with fewer unknowns and complexities.
Using Magento extensions that already meet their needs and connect perfectly with the existing ecosystem, Mastershoe can focus on scaling their business without getting bogged down by the complexity of custom builds. This strategy has allowed them to remain agile, improve efficiency, and ultimately deliver a better customer experience.
Summing It Up: To Customize or Not to Customize
Mastershoe’s journey underscores the importance of combining Magento’s flexibility with the power of Amasty extensions to drive e-commerce success without excessive custom development. Most of the functions that an e-commerce store needs are easily covered by Magento app providers and don’t require custom development. This is especially important for brands on a tight budget, as seemingly “free” custom solutions end up devouring more resources than a business can afford, which results in delayed releases, performance lags, and neglecting business growth. This, eventually, is rarely appreciated by customers, as they don’t enjoy slow websites, a buggy checkout process, and poor UX.
Ready-made solutions for Magento help achieve faster time-to-market, more predictable costs, and improved operational efficiency, all while maintaining the flexibility to scale as the business grows.