Impactful website customisation
Mahurangi Oysters came to us in 2021. New owners, they needed a new website to promote their business, improve their online presence and increase online sales.
Selling fresh oysters is a little more complicated than selling canned oysters. That may seem obvious and a bit of a no-brainer, but when it comes to web development, the implications are more complicated.
These are some of the features we added:
Time-sensitive delivery customisation
Shopping and website customisation options
Mahurangi Oysters sells fresh oysters. They are picked from the sea, packaged and delivered overnight. Picking oysters is weather-dependent. The team does their very best to open every day during the oyster season, but due to weather and tides, the farm can be closed at short notice.
The restrictions on their existing site meant that if they couldn’t harvest the oysters, they couldn’t sell the oysters and customers were going elsewhere to source them. Mahurangi Oysters were losing sales to other companies.
They needed a shop that could address the complexities presented by the weather. Why? Because of the flow-on effect of having to ‘turn-off’ purchasability of product on non-oyster-gathering days.
Rather than simply only being able to say, “sold out”, we needed to create order delivery date customisation options based on non-gathering days. Customers needed to be able to select a later date for an order if that particular day wasn’t a harvesting day. Plus, because the harvesting is time-sensitive, shoppers needed to be able to place their orders by 6 pm the night before harvest. i.e. order by 6 pm Wednesday for Thursday harvest and Friday delivery.
The shop, therefore, needed options that Jim Aitkin and his team could easily set so that ordering and delivery could continue from the date of the next oyster picking. We created this website customisation for them and so much more.
More than oysters
However, this website customisation is useful for more than oyster farmers. The weather affects all fresh fruit and vegetable producers to some degree or other.
Flowers cannot be picked in the rain. Rain creates mud that can make driving trucks and even walking in market gardens near impossible. Heavy rains and storms can keep pickers out for days on end. When produce gets wet, it does not ship well. Brassicas become prone to spotting. Leafy greens can turn yellow. Wet citrus is prone to mould.
Our order delivery date customisation means growers and farmers can sell online around the impacts of the weather. Their online stores can comfortably manage the complexity of harvesting and delivering fresh food and produce.
Minimum/maximum product order customisation for product batch ordering
Controlling the quantity a customer can order at any one time is helpful for managing profitability and stock control. For example, if orders of one dozen oysters came in, the cost of harvesting, packaging, handling, and delivery per order would be higher than the earnings from the sale. We, therefore, added a plugin to the WooCommerce store so Jim can easily control cart quantities.
Now he can set bulk quantities, with a minimum of two dozen, but still price by the dozen.
As well as managing profitability, setting a minimum order quantity helps keep oysters turning over and the orders flexible; customers can order as many dozen as they like. So long as it’s more than two dozen.
That said, to prevent overselling, such as during a promotion or very busy time of year like Father’s Day or Christmas, Jim can also restrict the number of oysters per order to 6 dozen, for example. This can create a sense of urgency and ensure the current oyster deal is available to as many customers as possible.
Mobile app for easy orders direct from the restaurant kitchen
Mahurangi Oysters’ commercial customers can order faster with a click from the home screen of their smartphones. Chefs and managers place orders for their restaurants, hotels, cafes and bars through Mahurangi Oysters’ branded app. It is convenient, easy to install and easy to use. It boosts sales by increasing customer loyalty and is very affordable.
The branded app points directly from customers’ phones to Mahurangi Oysters’ business website and provides a seamless ordering experience.
And the best part? It literally costs a fraction of what you would pay for a branded app through Google Play or an App Store.
We installed and customised a plugin on the website that creates an ‘app look alike’ on customers’ phones and takes them to a special chef only ordering page on Mahurangi Oysters’ website. It looks the same as a ‘real’ app. It functions the same as a ‘real’ app. However, there are no 3rd parties clipping the ticket, no super expensive, compulsory upgrades and no mega-costly development fees.
Order a branded app for your store and expand your customer reach.
Customer reach and SEO
Websites need blogs to boost search engine rankings. Blogs improve search engine rankings by providing fresh, keyword-rich content. Google likes fresh content because it signals that a website is active and relevant. Blogs also attract backlinks, establish authority in an industry or niche and increase site traffic. All these elements improve a web site’s overall visibility and relevance.
We write fortnightly blog and recipe posts for Mahurangi Oysters. The posts notify customers old and new of upcoming events where they can indulge in oysters. They also serve up interesting facts about oysters, help to dispel myths, and inspire culinary creativity.
To help us create the recipe blogs, we utilise WP Recipe Maker. This plugin helps us to easily create and display recipes on the site with a user-friendly interface. It also automatically adds schema markup, which improves SEO and enhances search visibility.
Telling Google how it is using schema markup
Schema markup is code web developers add to webpages to help search engines, such as Google, better understand the content. When search engines understand what is in each page more clearly, it increases the chances of the page showing when relevant search terms are used. As an example, we add a little piece of code to the word “oyster”, so Google knows that we’re talking about the lovely seafood ingredient in a recipe, not a mushroom. This translates to more traffic and people who are likely to stay on the site longer.
Schema markup will impact the CTR (Click-Through Rate or the percentage of users who click on a link or ad after seeing it). The number of click-throughs from searches impacts your website ranking. When a user clicks on a search result and stays on that web page (i.e. they don’t immediately go back to the search results page), that’s a signal that the search result matched their search query. Google and other search engines place importance on answering a user’s query. So, if your page content answers it well, it will more likely rank well.
Using schema markup makes a recipe eligible for a recipe-rich snippet in search results. It increases the chances that a will stand out from other recipe blogs because Google will include more interesting information about the post, such as a photo, a rating, or ingredient information. This will mean more people will click on your site, improving your click-through rate (CTR).
Newsletters and Facebook posts
By sharing content, recipes, news and site updates with links in them, we drive traffic to Mahurangi Oyster’s site. We send out monthly email newsletters and post on Facebook. The links back to their site which we include in these emails and posts lead to more site engagement and backlinks. The increase in traffic signals to search engines that Mahurangi Oysters’ site is valuable and relevant, again boosting SEO and improving Google rankings over time.
All these website customisations, posts and blogs we have customised and created for Mahurangi Oysters lead to better SEO performance for Mahurangi Oysters’ site, an improved online presence and an increase in online sales.
Looking to grow your online business
By providing more website customisation options for customers, we can also help you affordably grow your business. With the right e-commerce and SEO strategies, you can take your website to the next level. We have built hundreds of websites for companies in Auckland, New Zealand, and the world. So, if you are looking for a professional Auckland web design company with a proven track record, we can help. Talk to our expert team to learn more about how clever website customisation can help you.