Umbraco eCommerce website to generate sales and support stockists
Client profile
Wilkinson Sword Tools manufactures and sells original, innovative gardening tools, with 660 stockists nationwide. Their gardening tool collection is a unique, innovative range of products developed by E.P. Barrus, a British company with over 100 years of trading experience.
Challenge
The parent company E.P. Barrus had not sold directly to the customer before, having operated through a system of dealerships and stockists. The previous Wilkinson Sword Tools website existed only to serve these stockists and the sales team.
To generate new sales, Wilkinson Sword needed a new e-commerce website to reach consumers as well as service their stockist network. Their customers needed an excellent customer experience and an engaging way to find products that would be relevant to their gardening activities. Any website needed to be flexible, so it could scale easily as new product lines were added.
Solution
The features
The chosen platform for the new site was Umbraco CMS. As a flexible open-source content management system, it was an excellent fit for the client. As an Umbraco Partner, we could help the client understand their customers through persona development and user stories, improving functionality and user experience. We also integrated payments with SagePay and their product database. We could also import legacy orders from previous systems and export their product catalogue, all while hosting the Umbraco installation in a Microsoft Azure DevOps environment.
The process
We accelerated the entire project by working in weekly sprints. Our interdisciplinary team, within an agile environment, created wireframes, visual design and style guides, prototyped the solution for testing and developed the website using the latest version of Umbraco CMS. Finally, we were able to onboard Wilkinson Sword to the Umbraco Support program for maintenance and retained hours.
Future plans
GrowCreate and E.P. Barrus delivered two further websites for their WolfGarten and Town & Country brands by using the existing code library from Wilkinson Sword. We have deployed updates to the UI and product details and shared improvements with all solutions where required.
GrowCreate continues to support and maintain the full suite of E. P. Barrus websites.
Business Impact
By working with GrowCreate, Wilkinson Sword achieved the following results:
- An increase in stockist location searches
- A decrease in calls to the support term
- A reduction in the cost to serve
- An increase in customers finding product information more easily
