Design of a Boutique e-Commerce Website

A boutique business whose products exuce a hand-crafted feel needed a website that would stand out amid a marketplace flooded with cheap, production line products. The website needed to both justify the price point of products and attract buyers interest in heirloom quality goods.

To establish what would resonate with the customer base research on forums selling similar products, other websites, and brands of similar goods was undertaken. Likes, dislikes, pain points, and wording/images were noted to build a portfolio for the website.

Outdoor brands such as Filson and Orvis offered a glimpse at what a similar and more robost product marketing strategy could look like. Buyers and sellers in more personal forum markets that crafted similar gear helped created a user profile and define the overall website style.

The website is designed as an e-commerce site to sell quality goods. The information architecture needed to be based on an ease of viewing products, finding information that highlights the prodcut’s uniqeness, and check-out. Building customer trust of the brand and displaying the products in a way that highlights their heirloom potential is key. A typical Woocommerce design would not be sufficient.

Based on the company logo and what would resonate with Jason, a color scheme of natural colors with a few accent colors was created.

To fit the feel of a classic and stylish brand, the serif font Cormorant Garamond was selected as the primary font for both titles and regular text. It is easy to read while retaining a classic, almost bookish look. Open Sans was also used for a few areas such as buttons.

The owner of the website is a photographer and outdoorsman as well as a crafter. Ample imagery fitting the needed look of the website that would resonate with Jason were available.

The website was built using WordPress and the Divi theme. Woocommerce was selected for the retail end as well as one that would link and display the Etsy store belonging to the brand where one off and limited run items were featured.

With a new website under development, the site was kept under construction while I built it.

With products the center of the website, a product template was created using the Divi Theme Builder to create a custom look to sales pages that is easily applied to new products.

Setup of not only PayPal integration but shipping cost depending on weight were completed in Woocommerce. For simplicity considering the website would not be running a paid plugin that seperated mail rates based on zones, flat rates based on three size/weight tiers were developed.

Variable products were also featured and were setup so that purchasers could be assured they’d recive the product they wanted to buy.

To help promote the website and products, a Facebook stores was created that linked products displayed in the Facebook store to the sales page so that purchasing happened on the website (to keep stock synced).

Woocommerce integration was tested while the website was in construction mode to ensure integration with PayPal and address verification.

The website and store went live at the end of October 2019 in time for sales for the 2019 H0liday season.