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By Kolab Digital on
Old Spike Roastery provide some of the finest, freshly roasted coffee and, as a social enterprise, they offer expert training, jobs and housing support to people experiencing homelessness across the UK. They wanted a new website that would reflect their new brand and incorporate their monthly coffee subscription service with an improved overall user journey for their customers.
Why Drupal was chosen:
We believe Drupal is the best option for professional websites and assures high quality, which is what our team wants to provide. Drupal was chosen mainly because of its open-source software, which allows us flexibility to develop custom solutions, graphics and content management. Our goal is to make our clients' lives easier.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
We started by catching up with the team over a great cup of coffee. This allowed us to really get under the skin of the organisation and to understand their set up as a social enterprise, their future goals and aspirations.
One of the main frustrations they had was the overall flexibility of their website. As it was built on a template system, the functionality was fairly limited. The team at Old Spike Roastery wanted to offer their customers a more personalised experience, so we used the Drupal platform to build and create a custom eCommerce solution.
One of the main features of the new site is the custom subscription builder, which allows users to choose what coffee they want to purchase and how often they want it delivered to their door. This has created a much more intuitive and streamlined user experience. We also developed a user dashboard area, which customers can use to edit their coffee choice and they can even pause their subscription, giving them more freedom and flexibility.
We like to make our clients’ everyday lives easier and this was a main focus during this project. We worked with the team to explore how they could improve the customer experience and looked at ways of reducing the admin workload. Originally, the team had to export their orders to a spreadsheet and handle the admin manually, which obviously took up a lot of their time. We automated this process and created a custom roasting schedule in the admin area of the website. This new area stores customer details, gives the team a weekly view of their orders and allows them to mark the process of each order. It also gives them a better overview of their stock levels, so they know how many coffee beans to order and roast.
The payment process on the old website was also fairly fragmented, as users had to input their bank details and create a direct debit for their subscriptions. We’ve integrated the payment gateway with Stripe, which now means debit and credit cards can be used across the site, making it easier to sign up. The website is, of course, optimised for mobile and is fully responsive across all platforms and devices.
The new eCommerce website is now more efficient and intuitive. The next stage of the build will involve collaborating with the team to increase new sign ups to the subscription service and to bring their brand story to life through content and imagery - watch this space!
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
- Commerce: Old Spike is a shop so we use it to create product types with custom attributes, create payment method etc.
- Address book and address filed: client needed something that will allow to manage addresses - which one is shipping address and which one is billing address etc.
- Views: it allows us to customize display of content, you can view content as block, page or RSS feed. It was important for us to have that possibility - website looks more interactive
- Field Collection: by using it we could attach as many numbers of fields as we want in one group
- Entity: we use it in all our Drupal websites because it provides an entity CRUD controller and gives us more flexible approach
- Context: we used it to create specific webiste behaviour, we want our website to act as we designed it e.g. if you go to the homepage block with news will appear etc.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Community
E-Commerce
Retail and Distribution
Small business
