E-commerce Quick Turnaround

About the Client

Marlow & Henley Wine Co

Overview

Diversifying in a changing world

A few weeks into the Covid crisis, we were approached by a client, who ran a successful drinks wholesale business. With the closure of the hospitality sector, he was looking to diversify his business in to online retail. He was keen to get a website up and running promptly, so that he could react quickly to the changes in the market.

Keeping it local

Our client wanted to keep overheads down to the minimum, and to keep control of the delivery process himself, as third-party fulfilment services were already starting to suffer from disruption.

He determined that the best way to do this was to offer very high-quality products at an extremely competitive price, but with a minimum order value of £40. Sales would be restricted to his local area only, so that he could handle all deliveries using his own vehicles and staff. All deliveries would be free, and usually made next day after order.

This presented some challenges for the website, as minimum order value and local area restrictions don’t come ‘out-of-the-box’ with e-commerce solutions.

How We Helped

Quick implementation

We put together a website using WordPress and Woocommerce, both free systems, with some bespoke code to enable the minimum order amount, and a postcode-based delivery area restriction to keep the service local. This also allows the client to easily expand his service to other areas as soon as he is ready. Products can be added and amended via CSV upload, which means all the products can be amended at once, which is a huge time-saver. We advised the client to use Stripe for his payment processing, as accounts can be set up and be running in a couple of hours. The site was complete in two weeks, with another week’s testing and tweaks, then went live.

Immediate results

The client’s hunch that there would be good demand for his service proved to be bang on – with over 100 orders in the first month, it has covered the setup costs already, and has given the client a great additional income stream going forwards.

• Quick website build
• Easy to add and change products
• Bespoke code for specific requirement
• Used plugin to control delivery area
• Competitively priced website to make the project affordable

Whilst I have a good understanding of the sector in which we operate (alcoholic drinks retail), I am not especially ‘techie’ but I had a good idea of how I wanted our new website to look and how I wanted it to work. Angus did a great job of ‘bringing this to life’ quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. He frequently offered sensible and logical solutions to any obstacles in the build process, and crucially – was able to assist us, not just with the website itself, but also the systems required to make the whole e-commerce set-up work – eg: WooCommerce apps, Stripe payment platform, etc. I’ll certainly be working with Angus again on other projects in future.

David Peek, Director – Forty Acres Ltd (Marlow & Henley Wine Co.)