Since the summer, we’ve been working hard to put together a new Ecommerce website for the lovely Sally Tobin, owner of The Healthy Horse Company. Her website needed an overhaul both in terms of design and in giving her customers a modern Ecommerce experience.

Equine Diet Analysis and Nutritional Supplements

The Healthy Horse Company Horses

Sally is an equine nutrition consultant, and offers a unique, scientific approach to horse nutrition, analysing the hay, haylage and pasture content (soil and grass) for mineral and nutritional content and hygiene. From there she can create bespoke feed plans depending on the horse and their activity, and even sells high-quality supplements to help balance out any deficits in their diet. She even offers a regional balancer for South-East, based on her database of forage analysis results for the South East of England.

Like many small businesses, she sells much of her product range on Amazon and eBay, but wanting more control, she had created a website in order to sell her own products and analysis services but customers could only pay for a product externally on Paypal. There was no way for a customer to track progress on an order other than contact Sally. There was also no integration with shipping or automated emails linked to the orders. She approached us to help her modernise her website so that customers could log in and check on their order status, and to streamline shipping her orders. We built Sally’s new website with WordPress, integrating WooCommerce to provide her with product and order management, shipping integration, and more.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress, offering basic Ecommerce functionality, and paid-for extensions, where a small business can choose what services & functionality are useful to their business and only pay for the extensions that they need (e.g. bulk stock management), rather than pay a large sum for bloated software with features they’ll never use (and takes forever to learn).

We tend to hear “Funny name, is WooCommerce popular?” quite often as many people haven’t heard of WooCommerce. According to the website Statista.com,

“WooCommerce was the worldwide leading e-commerce software platform in 2020, with a market share of 28.24 percent. Squarespace and Shopify ranked second and third.”

Given the rise in popularity of Ecommerce businesses due to the pandemic, the global Ecommerce market is currently projected to grow exponentially over the next few years, forecasted to reach a value of over 6 trillion dollars by 2023. So this could be the best time for small businesses to invest in their business by taking their business online.

Good SEO Practise Built-in and a Mobile-Friendly Experience

I worked with Sally, learning all about The Healthy Horse Company, their unique selling point, terminology, product range, and more. I built Sally a great site that is user-friendly, with the web pages, images, and content all Google-friendly, so that when her website was indexed by Google, it would get her better search results.

I also optimised Sally’s website for mobile devices, as “64 percent of retail website traffic comes from the mobile device”. Having the customer be able to research products and buy them smoothly from a phone, was extremely important. UE (User experience) is always my main focus as a web developer, as I completely understand how frustrating it can be when websites don’t work as expected. So every word I write, every detail that’s created, all go through my filter of ‘is this easy to understand – is this easy to use?’.

Bringing it all Together

The final step in bringing Sally’s website up to speed was to create a system to streamline the ability to process orders, meaning that Sally’s preferred shipping couriers were brought into WooCommerce with a number of WooCommerce extensions and everything from printing labels to tracking numbers was integrated, making processing orders much easier for Sally. Shipping is automatically booked, the tracking numbers are passed back to WooCommerce and added to the ‘Order complete’ emails automatically, saving Sally hours of admin in emails to customers. however, the system is also fluid, so that if Sally needs to change couriers for some reason, this is easy for her to do.

Sally’s previous site used WordPress which meant a less-steep learning curve. I gave her a (socially-distanced) WooCommerce training session to bring her up to date with the new site and got an extra-special bonus of meeting her horse, Dylan!

Sally has been extremely pleased with the results and since the new website was launched in December, she’s already processed many orders smoothly. Overall, I feel this website transformation has been a resounding success, and love making clients happy and helping small businesses grow. If WooCommerce sounds like the next logical step for your business, get in touch.