First Ascent Magento store goes live

Established for over 25 years, First Ascent is a specialist outdoor equipment and clothing distributor, working with some of the biggest and most well-known outdoor brands such as Black Diamond and MSR.

Until now First Ascent have focused on the distribution side of the industry, supplying retailers across the UK.

First Ascent approached us with a requirement to build an ecommerce site for them, to enable them to sell some of their product lines directly. As part of this, the system needed to be able to support a wide range of products from different brands, and also to integrate with their internal Sage system.

Absolute undertook an extensive design and development project for First Ascent, ensuring that the produced design communicated the ‘lifestyle’ nature of many of their product offering, and that the website supported all their required functionality, outlining their key offerings and the brands they worked with.

Working with external data in Magento is a known difficulty, especially when dealing with products with a number of variations (such as size, colour, capacity and length), and dealing with a number of brands. In order to facilitate easy updating of the website for First Ascent, Absolute integrated the Magmi data importer, allowing for more flexibility and simplicity in their data imports.

The end result is an effective, well-functioning ecommerce website, providing the direct route to market First Ascent were looking for, as well as simple product listings and automated Sage integration.