We were super excited to work with local legends Gingerbeard Preserves recently to launch their wholesale website. This project was a great example of how the client brief can develop and how we use the discovery stage to ensure what we build gives the client what they need.
Gingerbeard already had a successful website handling online retail sales, but they wanted to offer their wholesale customers the opportunity to buy online too. To achieve this, they wanted to create different customer account types that could view different products.
The website also had a few technical issues that the Gingerbeard team couldn’t solve in-house. Luckily these were all fairly minor problems that we could fix pretty quickly. The Gingerbeard team had been wrestling with some of these issues for months! It does sometimes pay to call in a pro as you can save a lot of time and hassle, even if you are pretty tech-savvy.
Considering Gingerbeard’s brief and goals in detail, we weren’t sold on adding the wholesale products to the retail site. This solution was potentially fiddly for whoever was adding products, with complex settings open to human error. There was also a concern that retail customers might be offered wholesale only items or that busy trade customers would be confused by seeing retail prices.
It became clear that a better solution would be to create a whole new site to handle trade sales. This allowed for the two sites to have different content and structure to reflect their customer profiles – for example, retail customers liked sending gift packs and buying seasonal products, but wholesalers wanted to see next season’s products, and weren’t interested in customised gift hampers. It also meant we could tailor the other pages on the site to reflect the different interests. Retail customers could see a recipe blog and special offers, but trade buyers could see more sensitive information about how to display products or breakdowns of product margins.
There were also food service products that came in catering sizes which presented another problem for a one-site strategy. When showing sauce to retail customers they want to see the bottle and the label, but a chef buying products for their kitchen already knows what they want and needs to be sure that they are buying a 5l tub rather than a 250ml bottle. Again, creating a separate trade website meant we could show retail customers an attractive bottle, and food service buyers more utilitarian (but reassuring) photos of tubs and catering packs.
Gingerbeard had a set budget to use on website work, so creating a new site from scratch was not possible. Instead, we came up with a plan to clone their existing retail site onto a subdomain and make significant edits to create a trade site. This saved a lot of time and money, as a big part of creating a website is getting everything set up and structured correctly. Cloning the site took minutes, and meant we already had the basic design and brand assets in place right from the start.
We used the user settings of the site to hide all products from non-logged in visitors. This meant that only approved trade buyers with an account could see the products and the prices. We also created a bespoke error page reminding users to log in, which linked back to the retail site. This removed the potential problem of trade users forgetting to log in and seeing retail prices and helps retail customers who have accidentally ended up on the wholesale site find their way back to the main shop.
Finally, we tweaked the product pages to highlight information that was useful to trade buyers. Again, while this would have been possible on one site, it would have required the team at Gingerbeard to select the correct template when uploading a product. Not too tricky – but when you are making hundreds of product pages a year, the opportunity for human error presents a real risk.
We loved working with the team at Gingerbeard, and can definitely recommend you try their beer and bacon chilli jam!
Client review
“Thank you to Jenny & the team at Red Spark Digital for helping us set up our trade site – felt like it was a real collaboration with Jenny bringing ideas on how to improve our original brief. Thank you all!”
Claire Charras – Sales & Marketing Director, Gingerbeard Preserves.
