New Seasons Market: BigCommerce Ecommerce Site Development 

The Overall Problem

New Seasons Market is a Pacific Northwest grocery store chain focused on bringing local ingredients into community-oriented stores in 20+ locations around the region. For 10 years, they’ve provided customers the ability to order holiday meals — from free-range turkey to green beans to prime rib roast — at select times of year. Through four previous iterations, New Seasons had built a combination of custom solutions to meet their specific business needs. In the end, the business was looking for a solution that met their core functionality requirements, didn’t have the cost/headache associated with custom software, and maintained a high degree of uptime.

Our Solution

1. Brand Definition

At the outset, the New Seasons Market reservations website needed to fit within the larger umbrella of the corporate brand, since this would be a separate website from the main company site. As a result, the GRAYBOX creative team didn’t need to reinvent the New Seasons brand, but rather find ways of extending it to support this initiative. GRAYBOX collaborated with the New Seasons marketing and creative teams to establish areas of opportunities for brand extensions into the ecommerce experience, as well as established keystone elements that needed to be maintained as part fo the reservations site.

2. Iterative UX/UI Design & Development

Once we had definition around the brand, our creative and ecommerce development teams collaborated to break down key functional areas of the site and adapt standard ecommerce paradigms to work effectively for everything from a diversity of product categories, from turkeys to fish to cranberry sauce. A great deal of care was taken to ensure that product categorization and look and feel mirrored as much as possible the in-store experience that New Seasons Market has established in the community. Beyond product-specific content, New Seasons focuses on local ingredients and the GRAYBOX team explored opportunities to pull in farm and purveyor information to add life to the site.

3. Store Selector & Inventory Management

A key challenge of the project was being able to provide customers an experience where they could pickup their reserved products at the store of their choice via a “select your store” dropdown in the site navigation. Behind the scenes, facilitating this required a customization within BigCommerce to tie a specific store selection to a customer group. Leveraging the platform’s robust implementation of customer groups, GRAYBOX was able to tie inventory levels for each customer group to a specific store so that when a customer selected the store down the street, New Seasons would be able to accurately know whether or not that product was in stock and available for purchase.

4. Comprehensive Reporting

The New Seasons reservation site acts as more than an ecommerce experience for customers; it also supports the management of inventory across store locations in the region. With all product categories available for reserving through the site, the New Seasons operations team required the ability to quickly — and accurately — monitor and manage inventory as reservations came in. With 35,000 reservations over less than a 2-month period, the volume of orders was high so information accuracy was paramount. GRAYBOX was able to integrate with a third-party service via the BigCommerce API to extend reporting capabilities of the platform and modernize the business’s entire reporting capabilities.