Helping Police Supplies Stay One Step Ahead
Police Supplies has trusted Dock with their website for years. But understanding a business's quirks is just as important as understanding the digital nitty-gritty. We’d already helped Police Supplies migrate to Magento and later developed a slick new frontend with Hyvä. Now it was time to show we could also help manage the demands of their unique marketplace.
After identifying Dock as one of Liverpool’s leading Magento experts, Police Supplies came to us specifically wanting us to migrate their ageing OpenCart website to the platform.
Despite its issues, Magento remains excellent for eCommerce. It’s good for shipping, payments and catalogue management. Essentially, all the unsexy stuff.
It’s also fast, smooth and capable of handling huge volumes of orders and products. Transaction fees are low and, best of all, you own the software and database.
Admittedly, Magento requires more developer support than platforms like Shopify. But with the right expertise behind it, those commercial advantages make it a solid platform for a business like Police Supplies.
Years after the original migration, however, the Police Supplies Magento site began to show its age.
Performance was dropping, the frontend had become bloated, and the site needed to work harder for a changing customer base. So in 2025, we rebuilt the frontend with Hyvä to improve its speed, usability and long-term performance.
Read more about how we relaunched Police Supplies with Hyvä.
The rebuild also changed Police Supplies' perspective on its customers.
The client believed their target market of emergency service workers and private security forces preferred traditional desktop, but we discovered that 80% are now on mobile. So we rebuilt the website with a mobile-first audience in mind.
These optimisations armed us with the tools we needed to help Police Supplies meet the unique commercial challenges of its marketplace.
It’s a sad reflection on society, but the reality is this: when public concern around crime and personal safety increases, so does demand for Police Supplies products.
Our role is to respond to that demand.
Often, this means reallocating Police Supplies’ monthly ad budget to product categories that are increasing in popularity, allowing us to capture demand quickly and generate a strong return on investment.
Along with understanding where demand is moving and reallocating spend accordingly, it’s also crucial to understand which sales are most commercially valuable to our client.
Police Supplies operates in a surprisingly competitive marketplace. However, they sell own-brand products alongside their branded stock. These own-brand products have higher margins.
We iteratively improve search and navigation based on sales and margin data, and enhance category landing pages to make sure their own-brand products appear higher up.
Dock is always looking to drive innovation forward for Police Supplies. Often, this can mean suggesting ideas for new website features or improving shipping routes and product pages.
Other times, it means taking on a big project to help the business leap forward.
It may not sound revolutionary, but getting all the technical product information on the site can dramatically improve search engine optimisation and AI search. For example, if we reinforce the technical specifications of a Gore-Tex shoe, a police force searching for 100 pairs of Gore-Tex shoes is more likely to find Police Supplies.
Police Supplies also offers tiered trade pricing for bulk orders, making B2B sales an important growth opportunity. Again, Magento comes into its own when you offer customers a discount for buying in quantity.
Years of working with Police Supplies means we understand the business behind the website.
Our marketing team speaks to their team every week, supported by monthly sprints that keep us close to what’s happening across the business.
Whether that means improving a product page, changing how marketing budget is spent or identifying the next opportunity for growth, our job is to keep pushing the business forward.
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