How We Doubled ECG Training PGD Sales, Without a Single Marketing Campaign

ECG Training provides essential training to healthcare professionals across the UK. Part of that service is supplying Patient Group Directions (PGDs), legal documents that allow pharmacists, nurses, and paramedics to administer specific medications without an individual prescription. These aren’t marketing collateral. They’re regulatory documents used in clinical settings, and any error has real-world consequences.

We’ve worked with ECG Training for over three years. The relationship started when James was looking after their site at a previous agency. Within a month of him leaving to start Pixelish, ECG Training tracked him down and asked him to take over.

Before we built PGD Docs, every PGD order kicked off a three-day manual process. A customer would buy a PGD, staff would chase them for registration numbers and superintendent details, eventually create the document by hand, and email it across within three working days. Three full-time staff members were dedicated to it, with the wider team picking up overflow and answering chaser emails from customers wondering where their orders were.

For All Inclusive customers it was worse. They’d receive a single 150-page PDF and have to hunt through it to find the PGD they actually needed.

The process worked. It didn’t scale, it didn’t reflect the professional nature of what was being sold, and it tied up significant staff time on what was, fundamentally, data entry.

We built PGD Docs, a bespoke WordPress system that handles the entire PGD lifecycle, from purchase to expiry, with no manual intervention.

A pre-checkout form captures every detail needed to generate a legally compliant document. WooCommerce handles payment. Custom order-lifecycle hooks generate the document the moment the order completes, and it appears in the customer’s account within minutes. PGDs are tracked against the account, flagged 30 days before their 12-month expiry, and automatically removed once they lapse.

Built entirely on WordPress and WooCommerce with PHP 8.2. No third-party SaaS, no off-the-shelf plugin. The system now runs across two ECG Training websites and processes thousands of documents a year.

• Pre-checkout data capture: Custom form collecting registration numbers, role, and superintendent details before payment, so every order has everything needed for compliant document generation.
• Instant document generation: Custom WooCommerce hooks trigger document creation at the point of purchase. No queue, no delay.
• Customer account delivery: PGDs appear in the customer’s account within minutes, each one individually labelled and downloadable as a PDF.
• Automated expiry management: 30-day expiry reminders, automatic removal at 12 months, keeping every customer’s library compliant.
• All Inclusive package overhaul: Replaced a single 150-page document with 50+ individually labelled PGDs, properly searchable.
• Phased rollout: Launched against a small product set first, then expanded across the full range once edge cases were ironed out.

Comparing peak season year-on-year, PGD sales doubled, with no marketing changes, no announcements, and no email campaigns. The system hasn’t even been mentioned on the website yet. The only thing customers experienced was a different checkout.

Processing time dropped from three working days to under three minutes. The equivalent of three full-time roles plus team overflow was freed up to focus on higher-value work. And because the system generates documents directly from customer-submitted data, the transcription error risk on legally sensitive paperwork is gone.

ECG Training plan to start actively marketing the system in 2026. We’re interested to see what those numbers look like.

What started as a few hours a month tidying up a tangled WordPress backend has grown into a long-term partnership. We now manage four websites across ECG Training’s parent group, with a fifth on the way, and we’re currently on Phase 3 of PGD Docs, continuously developing it as the business grows.

This is what the Pixelish model looks like in practice. Not an agency they call when something breaks. Their website team, without the overhead of hiring in-house.