The concerns Betsy's brought to me about its website were not about the design at all. They were about the freezer and the repeat orders.
Customers were finding it hard to change a delivery date or to add something to a repeat order, and the numbers on the website did not always match what was actually in the freezer. None of that is anybody's fault; it is what happens when a business grows faster than the website it started with, and it is far more common than you would think.
Betsy's now has a handsome new website. Most of what I built, though, is the part nobody sees unless they work there or buy from them every few weeks, and that is what this piece is about.
| Client | Betsy's Raw Food, Langtoft, near Peterborough |
|---|---|
| What they make | Hand-prepared raw dog food, delivered frozen, for households, trade customers, breeders and a network of stockists |
| Platform | WordPress, WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions, with a bespoke theme in place of the page-builder theme the shop had before, and around a dozen bespoke plugins |
| What I did | The design, the build, the plugins, the switchover, search, speed, analytics and the privacy paperwork |
| The website | betsysrawfood.com (opens in a new tab) |
Repeat orders that customers can run for themselves.
Most raw feeders buy the same thing every few weeks, so the repeat order is really the heart of the business, and it was also the part customers found hardest. The account pages spoke of “next payment” and “renewals”, which is how the software thinks, rather than “when’s my next box coming?”, which is how people think.
For that reason, each repeat order now has its own page, written in plain English. It shows the next delivery date, with buttons to push it back a week or two or to choose a different day, and it lists what is coming, with a way to take something out. There is also a button to add more food to that delivery, which takes you into the shop and puts whatever you choose straight into the next box. The wording has changed throughout as well, so it says “next delivery” rather than “next payment”, and “repeat orders” rather than “subscriptions”.
On the shop side, every recipe can now be delivered every 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8 weeks, in that order, with 5% off every repeat order, while buying just once remains the default, so that nobody signs up by accident. The point of all of it is simple: somebody who can move a delivery themselves in ten seconds is far less likely to cancel just to escape a box they do not need yet, and far less likely to need to telephone the team about it.
Working out how much to feed, then ordering it in one click.
The biggest question anybody new to raw feeding has is “how much does my dog actually need?”, and Betsy's already had a feeding calculator that answered it, so I built on that rather than starting again.
You enter your dog's name, weight and how active they are, choose how many weeks you would like to order for, and tick any meats to leave out. It then builds a plan from the actual recipes, rounded to real tub sizes, with the total weight, the price and what that works out at per day. The “leave out” boxes now know every animal in every recipe, including the ones hiding in the organ meat, so ticking pork really does keep out a recipe that happens to include pig liver, which matters a great deal if your dog has an allergy.
From there, a single button puts the whole plan in the basket, with a tick box to repeat it every few weeks should you wish. If you have an account, the site also remembers your dogs, even when there are several in the household, so that next time it is already filled in. If a plan weighs less than the 6kg minimum that Betsy's can post, it says so at once and suggests collection instead, rather than letting you find out at the checkout.
The small things that save a sale.
Much of good e-commerce is simply removing the small moments at which somebody gives up, and the site now deals with a handful of them.
The basket has a weight meter, because delivery depends on weight rather than price. It tells you how heavy your basket is, that frozen food can only be posted at 6kg or more, and how far you are from free delivery over 50kg, and it updates as you change the quantities.
When a recipe sells out, which happens with a small-batch product, there is a “tell me when it’s back” box on the page, and the email goes out automatically the moment it is back in the freezer. Past orders have an “order again” button that fills the basket in a single step.
There is a Reviews page now as well, with Betsy's Google rating shown on product pages, category pages, the calculator and at the checkout, instead of a link sending people off to Facebook to find out what other dog owners think.
The guides on the blog link to the recipes they discuss, and each one finishes with the food it mentions, so that somebody reading about single-protein diets for allergies can see the single-protein recipes without going to look for them. And there is a win-back email built and ready, which sends a one-off discount to customers who have not ordered for eight weeks, never to trade accounts or repeat-order customers, and only when Betsy's decides to switch it on.
Behind the scenes in the unit.
This is the part I am proudest of, and it is the part customers will never see.
Packing now runs on a handheld barcode scanner. You open an order, scan each tub as it comes out of the freezer, and the screen ticks it off, warns you at once if you have picked up the wrong recipe or the wrong size, and will not let you finish until everything is there. When you do finish, the order moves on by itself, so collection customers receive their “ready to collect” email and the tubs come off the freezer count, with no separate step to remember. There is a screen for teaching the system new barcodes, too, so when a new recipe arrives you simply scan the tub and it is learnt.
The freezer stock was the other large task. Tubs now come off the freezer count once, at the moment an order is picked, whether it is going out for delivery or waiting for collection, and go back on if an order is cancelled. If two people are updating the freezer counts at the same time, the second is told rather than quietly overwriting the first. Every change is logged with who made it and when, so “why does the website say we’ve got twelve?” finally has an answer.
A few smaller things complete it. Orders with a customer note are highlighted in the orders list, so that a request about a safe place or a missing liner is not missed. Packing slips now warn the packer when part of an order has been refunded, and record who picked and packed it.
Trade customers, breeders and stockists.
Betsy's sells to pet shops, groomers and breeders as well as to households, and each kind of account sees its own prices and pays in the way that suits it, with trade orders paid by bank transfer and everybody else by card, all from the same shop.
The trade application form now asks for the business postcode, so that Betsy's can check straight away whether it can supply that area. Once a trade account is approved, the shop appears on the stockist map on the website automatically, without anyone having to add it by hand.
Being found, and being trusted.
The old site was not giving Google much to go on. Category pages were titled “Archives” with nothing written on them, and the product names are delightful but give nothing away to a search engine, so “Oh Deer” never mentioned that it is venison. Every recipe now has a search title that names the meat and the tub sizes, every category has a written introduction, and there is a line under each product name saying exactly what is in it, without changing the names Betsy's customers already know and love.
There had been two shops before this one, and around 120 old web addresses that people were still landing on led nowhere, so each of those now goes to the matching recipe or the nearest range. I also tidied what Google indexes, so that dozens of thin pages are not competing with the ones that matter, and added the information Google uses behind the scenes for shopping results, such as delivery times and the returns policy.
Speed received the same treatment. The whole photograph library was re-saved at sensible web quality, so a product thumbnail that used to be 139KB is now around 50KB and looks exactly the same. A blog picture that was 2.6MB is now under 100KB, and phones receive a picture the size of their screen rather than one sized for a desktop.
Underneath it all, there is a proper cookie banner and privacy policy, so that Google Analytics is measuring the visitors who have said yes rather than almost nobody at all, and the forms, menus and buttons have been tidied up for people using screen readers, keyboards and small phone screens.
Switching over without anyone noticing.
The one rule for the switchover was not to break anybody's repeat orders, and not to lose a single order in the process, which is a very reasonable thing to ask of somebody rebuilding your shop while it is trading.
Everything was therefore built and tested on a private copy of the site first, and the switch itself was one click, with an exact undo button beside it in case anything looked wrong. It went live on a Tuesday afternoon in October, every existing repeat order carried on exactly as before, and orders kept coming in that evening, which is the best test there is.
I have been designing and building websites since 2001, more than 1,600 of them, and the commissions I enjoy most are those like this one, where the website quietly takes work off a busy team rather than merely looking good on a laptop. In the words of Kelly Newton, at Betsy's:
“Adam has been a huge help to the business. Always suggesting new ideas, is available and implements new ideas very quickly and goes above and beyond. We’re very happy with his services and would highly recommend.”
If your website and your stockroom do not quite agree with each other, or your customers keep writing to ask you to do things they ought to be able to do for themselves, you are welcome to write to me, and we will look at it together. You may also like to read how I approach online shops, and the bespoke tools I build when nothing off the shelf will do.