Grape Tree: growing online orders by 40% for a leading health foods store

Despite being one of the UK’s leading retailers in the health foods market, Grape Tree's existing ecommerce website did not reflect their position as a major competitor. With a dated visual interface and poor user experience, the site was in need of a design refresh and improved functionality to transform the online customer experience. The content management system (CMS) was clunky and limited in functionality and the business required a more advanced CMS to update products, promotions and key pages.

Working with Grape Tree’s signature colour palette we redesigned the website, harnessing the brand colours for call-to-actions, incorporating new lifestyle photography and maximising white space to increase content legibility. Although Grape Tree have an attractive product catalogue, one of their core website challenges was highlighting promotions, new recipes and cross-selling products to online customers. We solved this by designing colourful and interchangeable promotional panels that could be edited easily via the user-friendly CMS.

A large proportion of Grape Tree’s customers shop on a mobile device so naturally we designed and built the website with them in mind, simplifying user journeys and focusing on the customer experience. With today’s shoppers requiring products with specific nutritional values, we built in a filtering tool to enable sorting by dietary preference, brand or category. The new website, built in Magento 2, integrates with multiple payment gateways including Paypal Express and Barclaycard ePDQ. We integrated InXpress for product fulfilment and Platinum Online Stock Check for stock levels. As part of the optimisation process we updated Google Shopping Feed to display products from the new website and began ongoing SEO work to drive increased organic traffic to specific areas of the website.

The new ecommerce website now creates a cohesive and modern brand experience for Grape Tree’s customers; it is user-intuitive and offers an uninterrupted shopping journey. Gross sales have increased by 20%* and Grape Tree have seen a 40%* increase in online orders. With a simplified design and more engaging content, dwell time has improved by an impressive 27%**. Internally, Grape Tree have more confidence in the site’s ability to monitor stock levels and dispatching services and review orders, invoices and shipments. The CMS enables Grape Tree to create reports easily, manage customer groups and generate product catalogues.

*Comparing 1st June – 30th September 2019 with the same period in 2018.
**Comparing 1st April – 30th June 2019 with the same period in 2018.