Longacres Ecommerce Case Study

Best in class ecommerce solution for the premier source of gardening supplies in the UK.

Award winning garden centres offer best in class fulfilment and omni-channel retail experience with the tradeit ecommerce platform. Established in 1979, Longacres Garden Centre Bagshot is the largest independent garden in the South of England, occupying a nine acre site in Surrey. The award-winning retailer (7 times number one Garden Centre by turnover - Horticulture Week) also have four further sites in Chelmsford, Shepperton, Chobham and Ashford - Kent, offering a huge range of products including fresh cut flowers, plants, furniture, tools and more, as well as a restaurant and food hall.

"Confidence-inspiring and efficient. The best aspect was feeling that the team at Red were experts, and no matter what the request or issue, a good solution would be found."

IT Manager, Longacres Garden Centres

Project Highlights

Click & Collect
Integration with Click & Collect service including drive through collection from stores
Multiple delivery options
Enhanced delivery options to take into account rules for; local delivery only, national delivery and heavy/bulk items
Conditional Components
Deliver personalised content across the site wherever they want use conditional components
Seamless integrations
Seamless integrations with internal business systems plus reviews engine, payment provider, address autofill and Plant Finder tool
Responsive design
Fully responsive design with 4 breakpoints, optimised for all devices helping to ensure the best possible user experience
Advanced search
Multiple search options including mega-menu, facetted navigation and free text search
Award-winning
Multi award-winning retailer, voted Garden Centre of the year for T/O > £5m by Garden Retail Awards 2016 and Horticulture Week number one by turnover for the last 7 years
Advanced marketing
Advanced marketing tools for; merchandising of products and creation of offer and bundles to excite, convert and up-sell based on user, what is searched for, what is in the basket and value
Integrated blog
Integrated blog driven by ecommerce platform so all content remains on a single website for better UX and SEO performance

Project Integrations

Project Overview

As a customer of Red Technology's for many years they have seen huge growth in their ecommerce business since they began using tradeit and are always looking to keep innovating to drive further growth still. Having recently introduced a new Click & Collect service, their latest project was to update and improve their ecommerce site with particular focus on fulfilment and the customer experience, alongside a new responsive design, delivering the same superb UX regardless of the device type.

Longacres drive through click & collect service

Longacres ecommerce site on a mobile phone

Advanced Fulfilment Options

Upgrading to the very latest version of tradeit gave them a host of brand new features designed to aid conversions such as the advanced promotions engine and advertising system, as well as improvements to the CMS and PIM, making the site much easier to manage and update internally. However, there remained some serious complexity with regard to the fulfilment of orders, primarily due to the vast range of differing products they offer.

Most ecommerce sites have a fairly simple product set and a single warehouse for fulfilment, making deliveries pretty straightforward. Unfortunately for them, Longacres are different. They offer a number of delivery methods which vary depending on the product, destination and time scale required by the customer and/or supplier. These include their own fleet of vans for local deliveries, Royal Mail for smaller items, different courier firms for the bulk of their nationwide deliveries, shipments directly from the supplier, pallet deliveries for extremely bulky items, as well as collection from their Bagshot, Shepperton, Chelmsford or Ashford branches via Click & Collect.

Enhanced Checkout

These different fulfilment methods, and the complexity of the possible combinations available, required a complete overhaul of the basket and fulfilment capabilities of tradeit resulting in an enhancement of the delivery conditions available within the platform. This enables Longacres to now determine the exact delivery cost and fulfilment options available, based on the entire contents of a user's basket and their delivery address, and then present those to the customer at the checkout stage, all in real-time.

Other additions aimed at improving the user experience include facetted navigation on product categories with multiple sort options, Trustpilot reviews (feedback from these is used as part of staff training), an integrated plant finder, and enhanced imagery and zoom on product pages.