A friend of mine owns a local grocery store and as a traditional bricks & mortar business, Num Lee Long Asian Groceries had avoided turning to online sales channels since the decade they opened their doors.
They had a strong and loyal customer base, and the impetus to go digital just wasn’t there.
Then COVID-19 Hit
And crises can be the best catalyst. With restrictions in place, the volume of customers visiting the store plummeted.
It was devastating. But the case to go digital was now inescapable.
The Pivot
After some research and planning, we blitzed it and delivered a live and fully functioning online store for Asian Pantry in 2 weeks.
Here’s how we made it happen.
Landing on a Solution
Once the big questions were answered via a Lean Canvas, our first step was to understand and prioritise the store’s features using a basic Product Backlog. We then performed a bit of an options analysis and chose to go with Shopify.
The base Shopify platform was very mature and robust. But the most exciting part was the plethora of add-on apps that provide more sophisticated functionality - everything from complex shipping rules and integrations to enticing loyalty & rewards programs.
A 5-Step Process to Build a Shopify Website
Breaking down execution into 5 major steps:
Choose and Customise a Theme: With the brand design locked in, we selected and customised a simple, minimalist theme called Warehouse that relied on the volume of products to speak for themselves.
Prep Products: This is the big one. On launch, we had 888 products (yep, we’re Asian!) available online - no small feat. The business owners had to clean up their data on thousands of products they sold at their physical store and take fairly decent photos on most of them. They’re still adding products to this day.
Import Products: This was also tricky. I had to design and build an import tool in Google Sheets that semi-automates the generation of a CSV file to import into Shopify. As each product had a varying number of product images, it was more complicated than I thought!
Configure the Store: The boring but essential bits of setting up the store’s shipping, tax, payment, contact, etc. details.
Test and Gain Feedback: Shopify is a tried and proven platform, so we only did some light testing for the business owners to have confidence in the website and understood the user experience. They also gained feedback from friends who beta tested it before launch.
Launch
Clicking the button to launch something is always nerve-wracking! Initial traffic and conversions was non-existent (as you’d expect) until the marketing kicked in.
Once live customers started using the website and make purchases, we continued to rapidly implement tweaks. There were some visual tweaks, lots of functional tweaks, and even the business model changed to adapt to customer demand.
And that’s exactly what you want - launch something that’s “good enough” with minimal cost/effort, then gradually improve from there.