Key Objective: Create an ecommerce site which could promote a constantly changing product range, with challenging delivery costs. Which was highly search engine optimised, and had to be self-managed to keep running costs to a minimum.
“We’ve worked with Quiet Storm on various projects over the years and the technical solutions they provide always deliver value to the business. While the COVID-19 pandemic hit many retailers hard, our sector was one of the ones that benefitted from the spike in demand for DIY and home improvement products for projects that people might have been putting off but suddenly found themselves with the time to do them.
“People finding themselves either on furlough or working remotely had the time to focus on home improvements. This helped us to record an outstanding online sales performance at the start of lockdown, which gave us a good base on which to build our summer sales period.”
Danielle Thorpe, Head of Marketing at Brett Landscaping Ltd
Clearance Paving was created as a brand created to dispose of discontinued product lines for manufacturer Brett Landscaping and Building Products. It supplies discontinued, trial and factory second garden and driveway paving from its manufacturing sites and merchants directly to the customer.
Issues: The greatest challenge was the functional needs of the website. Although the product may have a sale price which was easy to feature, the delivery costs were calculated based upon the volume of product which could be loaded onto a pallet, the weight of a pallet, the number of pallets for the shipment, and the postcode of the final delivery. To complicate things even more, product was spread across several manufacturing sites, so the location of the stock also influenced the delivery costs.
The website needed to accommodate:
• A constantly changing product, which varied in availability, weight and dispatch volume.
• The location of the product – as this was dependent on the specific manufacturing site.
• Calculate delivery costs – the site needed to accurately quote the transport costs based upon a 3PL costs spreadsheet.
• Due to the fast-changing stock profiles, transport costs, it needed to be maintained in-house.
Resolution: The site was built on time and on budget, and proved to be a highly successful channel for disposing excess stock. Since its launch, Clearance Paving has become one of the UK’s leading suppliers of discounted paving products. Clearance Paving was able to benefit from this spike in demand. In the first two months of lockdown, the website recorded its best-ever performance. Visitors to the site increased by 300% and page views went up by 432%. There was also an increase in conversions of 221%, as online transactions went up by a massive 1,182%.