Effective E-Commerce for Scotland's Best Deli
Billington’s of Lenzie is a multi-award winning family owned and operated deli based in Lenzie, Glasgow. They’re well known for their friendly customer service, high quality artisan and locally sourced products, and value for money. The coffee is pretty good too!
We’ve worked with Billington's for years, helping them with all aspects of their online marketing. We’ve led their transition from a business with no digital presence, to one that has a punchy and sophisticated set of digital touch points.
Challenge
Billington's is an extremely popular business, based in the heart of Lenzie. Beyond their core retail services, they hold monthly tasting sessions for various clubs (wine, gin and whisky), as well as other ticketed events. Customers can also "call and collect" items from the shop.
All of these systems were managed offline, with no centralised system. There were a lot of emails and notes scribbled on a lot of pieces of paper! There were clear opportunities to make these processes more efficient by taking them online, as well as the potential to scale up their retail business through e-commerce. The owners approached us to explore these possibilities.
Solution
We got to work developing a new e-commerce site using WooCommerce. The Billington’s team was already familiar with WordPress, so they quickly grasped the back-end features and settings needed to manage their new e-commerce store. Additionally, WooCommerce offers powerful built-in features, and plug-ins that can easily be added later to scale-up online efforts. This meant it was the best fit for the business.
We started to design and build the site, first adding the majority of Billington’s products. We also added systems for automatically managing and selling tickets for upcoming events. This meant that staff no longer had to do this manually, streamlining the whole process and reducing workload.
Billington's has a superb array of wines, spirits and beers (there are over 100 gins alone). We added the functionality to sell subscription products via the site, with the team developing several drinks boxes that go out monthly to subscribers.
The new features all enhanced and complemented Billington’s everyday operations. But ultimately, old-fashioned physical retail is the lifeblood of their business. With that in mind, the website was designed to showcase their strengths, using attractive (and tasty-looking) images of their products to entice customers into the shop.
The Results
Through working with 8th Row Digital, Billington’s now have:
- a website that is attractive and easy for customers to use
- better, more efficient systems for managing aspects of their business online
- an effective online presence
They benefit from:
- a website ROI over 300% year one
- a 130% increase in users year-on-year
- a 357% increase in page views year-on-year
- new, clean responsive design
- streamlined selling tool and processes
- the establishment of a significant new sales channel
