FantasyOnline
FantasyOnline is known for luxury lingerie, lace, chiffon, soft fabrics, elegant lingerie designs, European-made lingerie from France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and beyond.
They have been in the South African market for over seven years, with a number of partner stores and franchised showrooms in various centres around the country. They have built up a reputation for luxury, comfort and beauty over the years.
Behind the scenes though, it wasn’t all as glamorous as it seemed.
Lead Time: 6 Months
Sector: eCommerce (Luxury Apparel)
Target Type: B2C
Demographic: Women aged 25-45 seeking premium lingerie, with a focus on urban areas in South Africa.
Website Goal: Increase online sales, improve mobile accessibility, and expand digital reach.
Services: Mobile Optimization, Onsite SEO, Technical SEO, Digital Marketing, Content Strategy & Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimisation .
484%
Rise in sales demand
The Challenge
Despite having a solid reputation in their industry, FantasyOnline was facing several key digital challenges:
- Outdated Tech: Their old WordPress site was just not cutting it. Ordering was clunky, features were limited, and the system was showing signs of age.
- Mobile Frustration: The site was not optimized for mobile devices, resulting in lost sales and a limited reach.
- SEO Setbacks: Slow-loading pages, broken links and messy metadata were driving Google (and potential traffic) away.
- Lack of Engagement: With little content to engage visitors, it was difficult for the brand to build meaningful connections with online customers.
- Conversion Conundrums: The checkout process was clunky, there were no trust signals and navigation was confusing, resulting in lower conversions.
Outdated Infrastructure
The Old Way No More – The Shopify Solution
The first thing we knew needed to change was the outdated system.
We helped FantasyOnline migrate from WordPress to Shopify, a modern, robust and purpose-built platform for large-scale e-commerce.
We then took the time to build them a refreshed, modern site:
- Fast pages
- Streamlined navigation
- Smooth checkout
- Easy product management
Shopify also made day-to-day life much easier for the team at FantasyOnline. Orders, stock management and product management were all far easier to do from the back-end, without technical headaches.
The end result? A fast-loading site optimized for mobile, with a smooth customer journey all the way through from browsing products to completing a purchase.
No more lost sales. No more headaches with the back-end system.
Just a modern, slick online store that can scale with the business.
Mobile Accessibility
The old FantasyOnline site was never designed with mobile shopping in mind. It showed.
The pages didn’t scale correctly for phone screens and the buttons were microscopic. In a world where more and more people are browsing (and buying) on their phones, it’s no wonder that people got frustrated and left. They did. In droves.
Reading a page on mobile felt like peering through a keyhole. Checkout was a small nightmare.
Low mobile conversion rates were slowly but silently strangling business, but not until after the site was rebuilt to a modern platform did anyone notice how big the problem was.
When moving to Shopify, a mobile-first redesign was not an option or a ‘nice to have’ to consider for the future—it was the number one priority.
Now the entire site scales perfectly to all screens, mobile, tablet and desktop.
Buttons are large enough to tap easily, zooming and pinching to read content has been eliminated, and overall site performance is snappy.
We focused on the mobile basics that matter: site speed, ease of navigation, and a streamlined, frictionless checkout experience. All the design decisions were made with a thumb in mind, not a computer mouse.
The results? Mobile now represents 68% of all site visits and user engagement on mobile is up significantly.
More people are browsing more products on their phones and spending more time on the site overall, which has of course led to more mobile purchases. That’s the definition of a win for us.
Technical SEO
On the other side of the mobile fence, the old site was not making it easy for Google to do its job. Slow loading speed, hundreds of broken links, incomplete metadata—it all added up to pages that couldn’t be crawled, understood or ranked effectively.
Without even knowing it, a few technical fixes here and there had snowballed into a serious issue.
During the Shopify rebuild process, we took the opportunity to do a deep-dive technical SEO review of the entire site. No corners cut, every page and link was addressed and improved.
- Shopify tools were used to clean URLs, alt tags, and page titles.
- Google Search Console was used to find crawl errors and indexing issues, which were fixed immediately.
- Screaming Frog unearthed all the dead links and duplicate content to be removed.
- PageSpeed Insights was used to find performance improvements like image compression, code minification, and more.
- SEMrush tracked primary keyword rankings for competitive search terms like “luxury lingerie South Africa” and now we’re in the lead.
- Schema markup was added to key pages to further enhance visibility in search.
Legacy metadata from the old site was imported with Yoast so that all the years of hard-earned SEO wasn’t lost in the transition.
The results? Organic traffic to the site has increased by 173%. That means more people finding FantasyOnline when they search.
The site is now built to be crawled and indexed by Google properly, which is a huge and necessary first step.
Content Marketing Campaign
FantasyOnline was not really talking to anyone before the rebuild. The brand had a good look, the on-brand identity, on the outside—but on the inside, in the words, there was no real conversation. There was no content. No stories, no tips, no connection.
When people shopped FantasyOnline pre-rebuild, they weren’t sure if anyone was really behind the website, or if it was just selling pretty underwear with no human presence.
We knew that had to change.
We built them a content strategy from the ground up. A content strategy that would help them become a trustworthy site that would appear more often on search, and honestly, help the brand talk like the experts they actually are in the luxury lingerie space.
Here’s how we did that:
- Canva for high quality, gorgeous content: lingerie styling tips, collection promos.
- Grammarly to ensure clean, typo-free blog posts with zero fluff.
- BuzzSumo to determine trending topics and real world interests.
We started blogging about the things their customers weren’t asking, but probably silently wondering to themselves all the same: how to properly care for delicate fabrics, what a good fit actually means, and the little seasonal style shifts people notice but don’t have the language for. It wasn’t complicated—it was just helpful.
Everything we created was posted on Instagram and Pinterest. Where the brand’s audience was already present, so it was just a matter of starting the conversation. And once the brand started talking, people started listening.
Engagement increased. Traffic increased. And that ripple effect was big: a 484% increase in sales demand. FantasyOnline went from whispering online, to now having a personality.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Traffic is great, but when people land on your site and immediately feel disorientated and lost, that traffic is pretty much useless. That was the pre-rebuild reality for FantasyOnline.
Checkout process was complicated, their menu wasn’t intuitive, and everything just screamed, “Don’t trust us.” If you’ll pardon the pun.
So we took a conversion-first approach and looked at the raw data.
- Hotjar told us where people were really getting stuck.
- Optimizely helped us test out new layouts, buttons and trust badges.
- Shopify Checkout allowed us to streamline the checkout process into a single page with a variety of payment methods.
- Trustpilot increased their verified reviews and credibility.
- We added trust icons, CTAs and high quality images to reassure the shopper.
And overall, everything just feels easier now. Once those friction points were removed, the numbers showed an almost immediate increase.
- 22% more conversions
- 37% lower bounce rate
And when you put that with the content, SEO and technical improvements, that’s the same 484% explosion in sales demand.
FantasyOnline doesn’t just look the part. It also converts like a brand that knows who it is and who it’s speaking to.
And in the luxury lingerie industry, it is now one of South Africa’s strongest brands. It earned that position.
The Results
Six months. Six short months, that’s all it took for EcoSEO’s solution to change the tides and, to be honest, impress our team slightly.
The results speak for themselves:
- Organic Traffic: 173% Increase. A combination of solid SEO infrastructure and ranking for those big-ticket, high-intent keywords customers actually use when they’re in “purchase mode.”
- Mobile Engagement: Mobile accounts for 68% of total traffic, with mobile conversions increasing by another 30%. Turns out a cleaner layout and an actually-intuitive checkout really does make a difference.
- Conversion Rate: An overall 22% increase, thanks to more optimized product pages and trust markers that, while small, do a great job at quietly reassuring customers they’re in the right place.
- Sales Demand: The main thing, of course. Demand increased by 484%, as more customers were being driven to the brand, remaining on the site, and feeling empowered to make a purchase.
- Bounce Rate: Down by 37%. Clean navigation and highly-targeted content that spoke to customers really helped to prevent visitors from leaving the site within seconds.
Long story short, FantasyOnline has gone from “online” to actually being visible and competitive.
The brand now features as one of South Africa’s top luxury lingerie retailers with a fully optimized online presence that’s fully representative of the quality of the products being sold.
Technical Tools:
Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Shopify SEO Dashboard, Schema App and Semrush
SEO Services
Technical SEO, Mobile Optimisation, Content Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
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