Case Study
Lindt – unique WordPress plugins for an ecommerce website
It’s no secret that COVID-19 changed the face of retail, probably forever. It certainly exponentially increased the rate of adoption for online shopping. Suddenly, everyone was looking to shop online and businesses had to adapt accordingly.
We’d worked with Lindt on a number of their systems over the years, and were excited to help them when they asked for an ecommerce website during the pandemic. People were no longer able to get to the stores, so Lindt wanted to bring their products to the people. Now, this was no ordinary ecommerce experience and the job would require some unique WordPress plugins.
Build up from our ecommerce template
Our starting point was the ecommerce template that we’d created during lockdown to help small businesses start selling online. Lindt had actually seen us advertising the template and that’s what sparked them into calling us for help.
The chocolate company needed an online storefront that had an admin interface. Lindt needed to be able to add and adjust products, as well as upload their product catalogue. Another feature that was needed was the ability to see stock levels at different stores around the country. People would be able to place orders based on available stock at their nearest branch, which would then deliver the order.
The first phase of the project – getting the ecommerce website up and running – took us seven days to complete. This was all done under heavy lockdown restrictions, but we made it work through online collaboration.
Tailor-made plugins for WordPress
We watched along with Lindt as the store and the user base grew. It wasn’t long before the need for advanced features was seen. In order to provide the required features, we needed to create some original and unique WordPress plugins that would extend the ecommerce capabilities through the Woocommerce engine.
The first plugin we developed is called Pick&Mix. It allows customers to create hampers from the Lindt range of products. These hampers are based on weight, meaning the customer selects which weight category they want to buy and then builds the hamper from the available products. Customers can also select which type of wrapping they would like for the hamper.
The next step in the evolution of the Lindt online store was for their B2B customers. We built a plugin that allows Lindt to only show specific pages of their website to their business and corporate customers. Lindt can flag certain profiles and allow them access to the private pages that have the Business-to-Business plugin operating on it. Now, Lindt can deal with the larger orders often made by corporates, as well as give these customers more personalised service.
We’re excited to see where this ecommerce website goes from here and how the unique WordPress plugins we developed grow over time.
