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Company: Farmway Limited
Project: Farmway Online
Dates: Apr 2007 to Sep 2007
How did the project start?
Farmway have a strong presence in the North East with nine Country Stores that sell a wide range of products including pet, equine, clothing, footwear, gifts, animal health and farming inputs, so to extend our store offering to an online e-commerce operation was the next step in developing our business. We decided to concentrate our initial product offering towards the ever increasing number of pets including horses that are throughout the UK and the owner’s constant need to provide for them.
What options did you consider?
We debated long and hard as to whether we should opt for a soft launch or go the “whole hog” and make thousands of products available online. We decided on the soft launch as we felt it would allow us concentrate on any issues and also to excel in customer service.
Our priority was to create a site with a good balance between information and design but also allowed the customer to easily navigate between screens and to have that “click click buy” functionality.
We had to be mindful that our traditional farmer customers didn’t feel “left out” if the company diversified into online trading. We studied our base market and found that although our farmers were loyal to Farmway, they were also keen on dealing face-to-face. So the importance of an online farming product range against a more “retail” focused range was reduced. As a result we developed on the back of the e-commerce site a large “brochure” site that reflects our strong agricultural presence throughout the North East.
What help and expertise did you receive?
Initial funding and advice was provided by Darlington Borough Council. We awarded the site design to Visualsoft from Stockton-On-Tees as their priority was the layout along with giving the customer a positive experience so they returned time and time again.
Visualsoft also helped with the online marketing as they have a vast amount of expertise in understanding how Google works. We also took advice from Visualsoft and Jessops regarding photography as the quality of the images of the products was extremely important.
Did you face any challenges or learn any lessons?
Photographs - After purchasing a home photographic studio, we entered a steep learning curve of how to obtain high quality imagery that would satisfy our customer’s needs even though none of us are experienced photographers!
Packaging - We spent quite some time assessing the packaging methods involved to ensure a high standard of “first physical contact” with the customer.
Customer Enquiries - There proved to be more enquiries than we initially had expected and the challenge here is to deal with them all in a timely manner keeping the customer informed.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
In the first 11-weeks, the website has been viewed by over 11,000 people from right across the world. It took 52-days to get our first 50 orders and only 18-days for the second 50 orders. Through the guidance of Visualsoft we appear in the first few sites whenever a potential customer searches Google for any of our products. The site is getting recognition through various internet forums with recommendations coming from many of our customers.
To help fully understand our business we have set up many KPI’s allowing us to review various areas of the site and continually develop the pages for maximum impact.
What are your plans for the future?
We are already starting to think about extending the current staffing to help with developing and expanding our core product range and to help with maintaining a high level of customer service through the packaging processes.
We will concentrate on expanding our current product offering followed by expansion of the ranges.
Along with the E-Commerce operation we need to develop the corporate side of the site to allow better interaction by the farmer.
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