Engaging Business Ecommerce

iHasco

A seamless rebuild for a seven-figure ecommerce powerhouse.

Services

B2B ecommerce website development

Custom WordPress development

UX & conversion optimisation

System integrations (LMS)

SEO-led site structure

The Proof

+75,000

Increase in Form Submissions (First 5 Months)

+72%

Revenue Uplift in October Post-Launch

£49,000+

Revenue Generated in a Single Month

£1M+

Annual Revenue Achieved Post-Rebuild

Client

iHasco is a market-leading B2B eLearning provider, delivering workplace training courses through a high-volume ecommerce platform. With UK-wide coverage, iHasco supports over 12,000 businesses, offering 200 courses in more than 40 languages.

To date, the platform has delivered over 20 million training sessions, generating tens of thousands of pounds in monthly revenue through its ecommerce website, making performance, reliability and conversion absolutely critical.

The Team

Brief

iHasco’s existing website was built on Expression Engine, with large sections hard coded into the platform. While it had served the business well, it had become increasingly restrictive. Simple updates relied on scarce development resource, slowing internal teams down and limiting the site’s ability to evolve.

At the same time, a wider group rebrand was underway and the website was becoming a blocker rather than an enabler.

The challenge was clear:
Build a new B2B ecommerce website that could support thousands of customers without interruption. With a large site, complex LMS integrations, high traffic volumes and significant revenue at stake, the rebuild needed to be seamless. No downtime. No loss of visibility. No drop in conversions.

The ambition went beyond a fresh look. The aim was to improve internal efficiency, protect and enhance already strong conversion rates, and create a faster, clearer user journey that made it easier for customers to find, trust and purchase the right course.

Goals and objectives

Empower internal teams with a flexible, easy-to-manage CMS, removing reliance on developer time

Support the rebrand with a modern, scalable ecommerce platform

Maintain — and improve — conversion rates and revenue

Ensure business continuity throughout the rebuild

Create a simpler, faster user journey built for conversion

In short, this wasn’t just about building a new website. It was about creating a more efficient, resilient and conversion-focused B2B ecommerce platform that worked just as hard behind the scenes as it did for users.

Challenges

This wasn’t simply a redesign – it was a business-critical transformation.

The audience

iHasco serves businesses across the UK purchasing workplace training at scale. Their audience ranges from HR teams and compliance managers to business owners – all expecting a seamless, fast and trustworthy buying experience.

Returning customers were already familiar with the platform, meaning any drastic UX shift risked confusion or friction. At the same time, new users needed clearer navigation, stronger trust signals and a simplified path to purchase.

The rebuild needed to feel fresh – but familiar. Faster – but reliable.
The environment

This was a high-stakes ecommerce ecosystem operating at scale.

iHasco’s website wasn’t just a marketing platform – it was a high-volume revenue engine supporting over 12,000 businesses and delivering millions of training sessions. Traffic was substantial. Revenue was significant. Performance was non-negotiable.

At the centre sat a complex Learning Management System (LMS), hosted in a separate data centre with strict security protocols and continuous data exchange between systems. Course data changed frequently, reviews were constantly growing, and a group-wide rebrand was happening simultaneously.

This was a live, commercially critical environment with zero margin for instability.
The complication
There was no documentation explaining how the existing LMS integration worked. Large parts of the previous site were hard coded, and internal system knowledge was limited.

Before redesigning anything, we had to reverse-engineer and fully understand a business-critical integration – then replicate it safely without disrupting customers, data accuracy or revenue flow.

On top of that, we needed to:
- Maintain one-way and two-way data syncing between the site and LMS
- Migrate over 200,000 customer reviews without harming performance
- Preserve SEO visibility and existing conversion rates
- Ensure zero downtime during transition
- Deliver a CMS internal teams could confidently manage without developer reliance
This wasn’t just a redesign. It was a complex technical migration of a live, revenue-generating platform – under real commercial pressure.

Solution

Reverse engineering the LMS integration

With no documentation available, our first task was to reverse-engineer the existing LMS integration. By carefully analysing the legacy codebase, we fully mapped how the systems communicated — before writing a single line of new frontend code.

To retrieve course data securely, we established encrypted communication with LMS endpoints hosted in a separate data centre. Access was locked down to specific IP addresses, with end-to-end encryption and data encoding using Sqids (formerly Hashids) and a custom alphabet. Security was tight — functionality uncompromised.

Intelligent, high-frequency data syncing

We built custom PHP functions and fields within WordPress to poll LMS endpoints and sync course data into the site’s database. This allowed complex LMS data to be presented clearly and intuitively on the frontend.

Because course information changes frequently, syncing was increased from every 24 hours to every six hours, ensuring accuracy without unnecessary system load.

Two-way communication between systems

Data flow didn’t stop at pulling information in. Content such as news articles also needed to sync back to the LMS, eliminating duplication and manual admin.

We created bespoke WordPress endpoints accessible via GET and POST requests. Using WP Query and PHP, data was processed into JSON and exposed through custom rewrite rules — functionality far beyond a standard WordPress installation.

The result:

One source of truth.

No duplicated work.

Countless hours saved.

Scaling 200,000+ reviews without slowing the site

Migrating over 200,000 reviews required a future-proof approach. Rather than relying on short-term optimisation tools, we moved reviews to a separate managed database cluster, running alongside WordPress.

Scheduled SQL queries update totals and average ratings throughout the day — delivering major performance benefits while remaining scalable as reviews continue to grow.

Performance-first infrastructure

To protect performance at launch and beyond, we implemented a load-balanced hosting setup designed to handle high traffic volumes with ease. This improved resilience, ensured high availability, and delivered consistently fast load times — even during peak demand.

UX, branding and SEO refinement

Alongside the technical rebuild, we refined the user journey to align with iHasco’s updated group branding — while keeping the experience familiar for returning users.

This included:

Clearer navigation and sitemap structures

A full content audit informed by SEO and UX best practice

Removing unnecessary pages to improve speed and clarity

The result was a site that felt fresh but familiar, with a clearer, faster path to conversion.

A CMS built for growth

Everything was underpinned by a flexible, intuitive CMS designed to save time, reduce costs and empower internal teams.

We also developed a custom field for product schema markup, allowing teams to safely input structured data such as pricing, availability and reviews. All schema data is strictly sanitised before being injected into page HTML — improving search visibility, enabling rich snippets and driving higher click-through rates from organic search.

Results

We didn’t just protect performance – we accelerated it.

The results were immediate — and commercially significant.

From launch, the new B2B ecommerce website outperformed the previous platform across every key metric. Traffic, engagement and conversions all increased by around a third, compared with both the previous period and year-on-year. Performance wasn’t just protected — it improved.

Lead generation saw a standout uplift. In the first five months post-launch, form submissions increased by nearly 75,000 compared with the same period the previous year — a clear indicator of a faster, more intuitive user journey.

Page speed improved dramatically from the low 30s, supporting stronger engagement and sustained growth across traffic and conversions. Reliance on internal site search dropped significantly, showing users were finding what they needed more easily — without friction.

Most importantly, these gains translated directly into revenue. Following launch in September 2024, year-on-year revenue increased by between 50% and 184%. October alone delivered a 72% uplift, generating over £49,000 in a single month and helping push annual revenue to well over £1 million.

The outcome:

✔ Stability throughout a complex rebuild
✔ Improved performance .and conversion rates
✔ Significant, sustained revenue growth

By embedding SEO, UX and performance thinking from day one, iHasco now has a scalable, resilient B2B ecommerce platform built not just for today, but for long-term growth.