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G. Baldwin & Co
G. Baldwin & Co were established in 1844 and have continued to supply the largest possible range of dried herbs, aromatherapy oils, tinctures, fluid extracts, nutritional supplements, incense, cosmetic ingredients, related books and much more. Foresite has worked with Baldwins for over 6 years. In this time there have been various iterations of their shopping website. In August 2002 Baldwins decided to take advantage of their growing web audience and invited Foresite to redevelop their web strategy. Baldwins needed a website that fully integrated with their back-office mail order system and reflected their catalogue in terms of brand, layout and product listing.
Challenges:
- Getting the staff at Baldwins interested and excited about the website and getting their ideas / needs for the site.
- Designing a website that reflected the Baldwin's catalogue and strong company brand.
- Fully integrating the website with a bespoke back-office mail order system.
- Allowing customers to find products quickly and easily at any point on the site and making the shopping process easy and intuitive.
- Creating a Japanese version of the website.
Solutions:
- Before any re-development work took place Foresite undertook an investigative process with Baldwins. This involved meetings with key staff at Baldwins to determine how they use the website and their needs and wants. Foresite facilitated a design workshop with all Baldwin's staff to get feedback on what people expected the site to look like and examples of sites they used and liked.
- As a mail order company, the catalogue is extremely important to Baldwin's business. An output of the investigative process was that the website should reflect the catalogue more closely. The redesign of the site incorporated Baldwin's branding and also allowed for some seasonality in the design reflecting the changes in the catalogue for each season.
- Foresite worked closely with the developers of Baldwin's mail order system and integrated the website with their back-office system. Using an XML interface the website 'pulls' product information into the online database and 'pushes' orders directly back into their account system.
- Foresite introduced simple and advanced product / category searches, replicated the mail order catalogue product structure, allowed customers to register, view and purchase previous orders and used best online shopping practices.
- The intention was to make Japanese customers feel completely at ease with the website, even down to the Japanese domain name. Foresite continued development of the Baldwins shopping system to allow for multiple languages, not just Japanese, and both the UK and Japanese sites run from the same product and customer databases. The site seamlessly integrates with existing back-office systems and Baldwins have the flexibility to add new languages in the future.
Results:
- After 3 months of planning and development the Baldwins site re-launched in October 2002. The website reflected the branding and latest catalogue of Baldwins and allowed customers to browse through the 8,000 products Baldwins offer. As part of the ongoing relationship between Foresite and Baldwins, project meetings are scheduled every three months. Since launching in 2002 the site has been continually redeveloped adding in more functionality and giving more value to customers.
- The workshops and interviews were very well received by the staff at Baldwins and gave all staff a sense of ownerships over the site.
- By involving the staff in the specification and decision making stage a number of issues were raised that Baldwins had not considered in the earlier versions of their website.
- The time savings of the integration have been enormous with Baldwins saving two man days a week on data entry.
- The website now shows all products online.
- The website now follows the product structure of the catalogue so customers who have used the catalogue feel comfortable using the website as they know where to look for products.
- Foresite recommended that Baldwins promote the website in the catalogue and now the URL has more prominence in the catalogue than the free phone mail order number.
- In October 2003 launched a Japanese version of the website. Baldwins had previously received a percentage of sales from international customers, particularly from Japan, but with limited market penetration. Understanding the potential of the Japanese market Baldwins set about creating a new and native Japanese version of their long-running English website to help drive sales.
- Since launching the new site we have seen sales almost double month-on-month. This, coupled with the decrease in overheads that the website provides, means that so far it is an amazing success.
