Custom BigCommerce Development and Design For A Luxury Goods Feel
OliveOilLovers.com is a BigCommerce site that sells high-quality extra virgin olive oil to discerning customers who love gourmet food. But their outdated site wasn’t properly showcasing their products and it wasn’t optimized to work with their specific business practices, such as offering a monthly subscription box.
We worked with them on a full site redesign with beautiful images, clear calls-to-action, and special customizations to help them with merchandising challenges. The result is a site that not only looks sophisticated but easily guides customers through the purchase pipeline.
Designing An E-commerce Site That Makes The Most Of Great Content
Branding is important for any business, but it’s especially important if you sell either food or luxury goods – or, as is the case with OliveOilLovers, both at the same time. You want your products to look appetizing and to communicate the sophistication of your brand. However, OliveOilLovers’ old site wasn’t doing this. The site was outdated, clunky, and didn’t make the most of design assets like photos to showcase the fresh, high-quality products they sell. Our redesign focused on giving them a clean, modern site that uses sophisticated color accents and looks great on any device.
We also focused on improving the site’s information architecture. OliveOilLovers also has a lot of great informative content, from articles about the health benefits of olive oil to in-depth Product Descriptions about the origin and characteristics of each oil. Such a content-rich site needed an information architecture system that would guide users to the what they needed without feeling overwhelming. The end result is a homepage that preserves all the site’s content, but clearly delineates it into visually-appealing sections with clear calls-to-action.
Custom BigCommerce Development Work Enhances Usability and Information Architecture
Custom Fields on Category Pages Spotlight The Product Specifications That Matters
A significant challenging in building any e-commerce site is how best to signpost the most relevant Product Information and Specifications so that customer finds what they are looking for. In the case of OliveOilLovers, we decided to recreate the experience of shopping for gourmet olive oil in a brick-and-mortar store, where the customer would pick up different bottles to glance at the labels.
Our developers replicated that experience by using Custom Fields to pull in descriptive tag-lines for each Product on the Subcategory pages. As the user browses a specific Subcategory (for example, Greek, Italian, or Portuguese olive oil), they see a short, descriptive blurb with the most compelling information about each specific Product: for example, that the Product won an award, is organic, or comes from a particular farm.
This customization is different than auto-populating the Subcategory pages with Product Descriptions. The actual Product Descriptions would be too long to fit, adding to overall challenge of fitting a large amount of content in a small space. Instead, this customization pulls a separate Custom Field with unique content and displays it below each Product.
Making BigCommerce Work For Subscription Box Services
Subscription box services, in which a customer receives a “mystery” product or sampling on a monthly basis, are becoming more and more popular. OliveOilLovers.com is unique in that it not only sells individual units of olive oil as standalone products, it also offers a subscription service called the Club. From a usability standpoint, it’s important to differentiate the subscription service from the individual Products so customers know what they’re buying and don’t leave the site in confusion after stumbling across a page they don’t understand.
Our developer solved this potential pitfall by building two separate Product templates – one for standalone units of olive oil and another for the subscription service. The subscription service page is visually different, with an explanatory header image and an FAQ. The product options are also different and clearly indicate that this specific page is selling a subscription service, not a single unit of olive oil.
SearchSpring Integration Gives You More Merchandising Options
One great thing about working with a development agency like IntuitSolutions is that our job is to make your website work with your existing business model and processes. For example, OliveOilLovers uses a service called SpringSearch to improve their search ability and merchandising. One of the main ways they integrate with SearchSpring is to organize their inventory by size, so that customers who are looking for individual bottles, larger tins, or gift sets, can find the most relevant products.
We worked with SearchSpring’s developers to implement that internal organizational filter on the customer-facing site. The result is a cool feature that allows the user to filter both Category and Subcategory pages by the size filter, so the customer can find the olive oils that are available in the exact quantities that they want.
Make More Money With A Custom BigCommerce Site Today!
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