Cater For You Launch New Web Site
After almost 23 years of supplying a wide range of Food Packaging, Cater For You has launched a brand new website designed to make ordering our huge range of plastic glasses, catering disposables, cake boxes and takeaway supplies faster, simpler and more convenient than ever before.
Why Make the Change?
Our previous website platform served us incredibly well for more than two decades. However, as customer expectations and technology have evolved, it became clear that we needed a modern platform that would allow us to introduce new payment options, improve the mobile experience and integrate with the latest business systems. At the same time we have also been overhauling our internal stock and finance systems from an outdated traditional ERP to another browser based system and the two work perfectly together.
What Has Stayed The Same?
We still have our great range of over 1500 product lines covering food packaging, plastic glasses, cake boxes and catering disposables as well as a host of other useful accessories. We have also kept our categories largely the same so you can still have the same route around the web site.
What is New?
The new platform is WooCommerce and this has enabled us to make a swathe of changes that will help our customers now and in the future and also make Cater For You operations more efficient. A sample of some of the changes includes:
New Payment System – Stripe
Our old Sellerdeck platform meant we were limited to using ClearAccept and PayPal. This meant for example we were unable to implement Google Pay, something our customers repeatedly asked us for. Using Stripe has also allowed us to create a smoother checkout experience with a wider range of payment options. Purchases can now be made directly from product pages and we now have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe one click card payment as well as other long term financing options using via iwocaPay.
Account Management
The new platform has given us greater scope to provide our clients with account management facilities, so our customers can now access previous orders more easily, helping them quickly re-order products they purchase regularly. Unfortunately we were unable to migrate the account information from our previous platform as the two were so different.
Product Pages
The content has been pulled across from the original site, tidied up for a lot of product, new images photographed and have been made a lot larger so our customers can view the product in much more detail before ordering.
Mobile Friendly
Our last web site was mobile friendly, but we have taken it to another level with usability, two column product listings in categories and much simpler to checkout on a mobile. The addition of Google Pay has been warmly received by customers with the overall mobile experience greatly improved. At the basket stage of both mobile and desktop you can see your delivery options and costs. Free shipping over £100 + VAT remains.
These are four of the biggest changes, but we have made many more including the colour scheme, a relaunch of our European delivery capabilities, completely new home page layout, ease of accessing more pages and our social media channels. Andy Watts, Director at Cater For You led the project and said “the new web site took almost a year to build, migrating and cleaning all of the data we had accumulated since 2003, updating photos and making new payment arrangements. The launch at the end of February went smoothly with only a limited number of issues which we’d expect of any project of this magnitude”.
What Next?
Launching the new website is only the beginning. Over the coming months we will continue to improve product information, expand our range, introduce new features and make it even easier for customers to find and order the products they need.
Andy went on to say “we were delighted to be able to build this whole project ourselves and are very pleased with the results. However, we are not resting on our laurels and now have a platform we can build on for the future. We have received feedback from customers and would love to hear about any other improvements we can make to their customer journey.”
Phil Stears, Managing Director said “the new web site platform has dovetailed perfectly with the replacement of our other internal legacy systems and we are looking forward to a whole raft of future developments for our customers”.
If you have feedback or would like to know more, please contact us.
