Back in September 2020 we initiated the customer onboarding for DRW Distribution and their brand, HomeDIY.co.uk – this included the full eComm package alongside a “light” support package with project management & e-commerce training for leadership, warehouse and newly hired office staff.

We began by agreeing two phases to the delivery to minimise time-to-market, whilst giving us enough breathing space to work on a more defined user experience. Therefore first phase would be a rapidly deployed store which has less focus on UX, but gets the customer able to sell asap (in this case it was about a month from contract signature to deployment and sign-off on production).

Whilst that was operational the second phase was already in flight – training the warehouse staff on the concepts & process, getting the office team leader trained on project management dashboards & methodologies – all whilst designing and developing the full user experience! Incorporated into Q4 2020 was also some estimation relating to marketing – something crucial to the success of the brand.

We normally recommend that marketing activity and campaigns are done well in advance, but HomeDIY.co.uk were new to e-commerce and collectively we needed more time to help them decide & define those initial campaigns. We helped them shape their initial marketing target, which was eventually fully supported by Boy Blue Media.

Building Blocks

If we divide up the primary user experience into main blocks we can separate out the main areas of customisation.

It’s a standard approach to a store front focusing on elements and user flow common to DIY, gardening and homewares brands well known in the market today. Starting with big-ticket sales items – a tiered Lockdown Specials offer ran from December through to about May – represented by rotating banners across the middle of the content area, and often related offer countdown pods on the left-hand side panel.

These were all custom build components for the customer and tailored to their needs – part of the process is essentially incremental prototyping & requirements management where the clients emerging design requirements are delivered and then tweaked through demo & review. It’s part of a well practised methodology with which our principal consultant has over 25 years experience of successful delivery for major brands such as Aviva, Next, JLP, LaFarge Tarmac (now LafargeHolcim) and Dentsu.

Custom UI Components

As well as the pod layout there’s also screens in the web shop admin portal we built so the customer can schedule the pods – on and off; re-use old pods for a new schedule and set the link targets for each pod.

There were also rotating carousel banners, lists of top brands identified by the customer for promotion – all of which are customisable from the shop admin portal. We designed & built two methods for direct access to brands – one via a brand-centric menu system and the other a custom content pod specifically for top-brands. This top-brands pod allows the customer to add logos and select up to 64 brands to promote to the top of the list.

Stock Management

Most of the stock management comes out-of-the-box but the customer onboarding process highlighted that DRWD wanted to be able to iron out the creases in the manual stock picking process – which involves a number of warehouses and wholesalers.

We built them a stock picking report which not only detailed the distinct order items, but which shelf / stack ID the product lives on in the warehouse. All of this is updated by our own stock updating service every 20 mins across warehouses.

Custom Shipping Calculations

Within the Q2 2021 phase of work (MVP 3) we also refined the shipping calculations so that large or bulky items are charged at a specific rate. Because specialist couriers are required this often incurs a significant uplift in fee – assuming couriers can even deliver the larger items at all.

DRWD had to work on refinements to the shipping rules – and are still tweaking the specifics to match market conditions – but we gave them a custom calculator based on delivery location (even excluding locations they didn’t want to cover the additional cost for in remote locations).

Customisable Bundles

What’s more powerful than doing offer bundles? Letting customers tailer the bundle contents to their own needs of course!

Work Management

We normally use Atlassian JIRA and an associated ticket desk for customers to raise defects, change requests and new requirements with us in an orderly fashion. In this though we felt that this was a more complicated approach and too much to on-board as well as learning how to deliver software! So we chose another Atlassian tool, Trello, to help us maintain the product & delivery backlogs for this particular client.

Not an easy task considering we were training people up on software delivery methodology, kanban and the nuances of e-commerce all in one go. JIRA is a much more powerful tool but is really aimed at practised scrum masters or kanban work leaders; if we were to add that to the customer onboarding process here it would likely require a lot more up-front training, and slow down the overall delivery timescales.

Infrastructure

After our preliminary conversations with the customer we decided to focus on a platform-as-a-service approach underpinned by well-known and supported technologies. As well as standard disaster recovery procedures, we knew that we could build in business continuity for unplanned events – and that’s what we did.

We developed the infrastructure architectures based on a smaller customer load and a slow ramp-up expectation. As we knew the marketing budget would be set at a certain level we had a pretty good idea of the customer footprints involved. For what will hopefully be obvious security reasons, no specific configurations or infrastructure designs will be shared on this open forum.

As part of the service we also provide a penetration test option which is nicely balanced between price and scope – part of the package with the eComm solution and highlighted as a serious cost saving during customer onboarding. Full security tests from well known organisations, such as NCC, cost in the 10’s of thousands of pounds for a single event; and are recommended every quarter at least.

Next Steps

After working with the customer lead to define their business requirements for enhanced stock management & reporting, as well as enabling price checking capablity with well-known market places; we’re supporting DRWD’s selected marketing partner, Boy Blue Media, with social media integrations and analytics data to springboard the next campaigns.

Marketing is a balanced science and very much relies on your budget – BBM do extremely well at making your money go further!

Each customer is different – perhaps you may already have a store and need business support, or need technical delivery and hosting? Maybe you just need someone to come in do a once-over to ensure you have everything set up? Maybe your site is down and you’d like us to try and help you stabilise the situation?

Do get in touch – we can likely help at short notice!