Ecommerce website solution for Slattery

As a ecommerce website agency it was fantastic to be approached by Slattery after a referral from another client. Being down the road in Whitefield, Slattery have been a fixture on the northern Manchester’s high street for decades.

An initial discussion outlined the frustration they had been having with the existing website which was built in Laravel. This included difficulty updating it, we were asked to look at quoting for a WordPress WooCommerce solution.

Slattery had a small WooCommerce website during the pandemic when they couldn’t open fully.

A significantly improved user experience was identified as a requirement. The website design needed updating to reflect the quality of their offering.

The brief for their new ecommerce website came with a number of backend functionality requirements:

1. The ability to be able to bulk increase the prices across 3000+ cakes as ingredient costs fluctuate.
2. The ability to allow customers to create hampers from a specific section, and not by creating a hamper from the shopping cart contents.
3. Customised invoice print outs that allowed gift messages to be split across multiple pages into a sticker area.
4. Integration with DHL
5. Integration with GlobalPayments

We inherited a partial technical specification document which we worked collaboratively with Slattery to complete. Looking at each area, we identified potential solutions for each area which was built into the cost model.

On approval of the technical specification document, we moved to planning and wireframes. Part of the planning included mapping each page and product and creating and a SEO plan to improve their visibility in Google when launched.

The wireframe section proved essential. This allowed us to completely restructure the website to create a simpler user experience.

Over 40 different page wireframes were explored and designed, which enabled us to demonstrate the new and improved user experience and various user journeys required for each key section of the website. This included separating out the online shop element, from their selection of cakes.

The design and development of the website took place in 2024.

The e-commerce website design was created to work mobile first (85% of users are on mobile) the design combined the elegance of Garamond and the accessible Europa as the typographic of the design. We helped create the building blocks of the design style which repositions Slattery to reflect and compliment the position of luxury chocolatiers and master bakers they occupy.

This included improving their brand identity.

We also designed a solution that allows Slattery to add their various menus to the website. Previously these were only available as aPDF.

The design now aligns with their main competitors such as Betty Tea Rooms.

This helped appeal to their wide ranging demographic including Premier League Footballers to retired local residents in Whitefield.

Working closely with the team at Slattery, a prototype was created to show how a bulk price update could be applied across their 3000 cake types.

Starting with a carefully formatted Google Sheet, they can apply a number change that cascades through all their products. A simple import from the website applies these changes.

Working with the WooCommerce framework, we created a Build your own hamper section that allows customers to create a ‘hamper’. As content, or product sizes can vary, the code calculates the volume of the product and once a threshold is met, a new hamper size is selected.

Since launch on the 31st October 2024 the website has seen the following impressive stats:

• Event Count – up 52.2%
• Organic Search Traffic – up 5%
• Direct traffic – up 8%
• Page view – up 20%
• Event count per active user – up 133%