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New Seasons Market: BigCommerce Ecommerce Site Development 

GRAYBOX worked with New Sea­sons Mar­ket, a Pacif­ic North­west gro­cery store chain, to design and build a high­ly-cus­tomized reser­va­tions Ecom­merce web­site to facil­i­tate the intake of hol­i­day meal orders.

Overall Outcome

New Sea­sons Mar­ket engaged GRAYBOX to take what had been an entire­ly cus­tom soft­ware appli­ca­tion and relaunch the expe­ri­ence as an Ecom­merce website.

The Results

The new Big­Com­merce web­site was rock-sol­id and sup­port­ed the busy Thanks­giv­ing through Christ­mas hol­i­day meal order­ing season.

  • 35,000
    Total number of orders taken over November and December
  • 20%
    Increase in average order value from previous years
  • 0
    Total amount of downtime

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.

We’re excit­ed to have found such a great part­ner­ship with GRAYBOX. We recent­ly launched a pret­ty com­pli­cat­ed new Big­Com­merce web­site. If you know the gro­cery space, you know it can be real­ly com­plex. They were able to get the site to do what we want­ed func­tion­al­ly, kept the teams on track, all while not los­ing sight of user expe­ri­ence, strat­e­gy and design. We con­tin­ue to use GRAYBOX for a vari­ety of web relat­ed projects!

Kelsey Fogle, Digital Marketing Manager, New Seasons Market

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.

New Sea­sons was look­ing for a reboot of their reser­va­tion site that met 80% of what a stan­dard ecom­merce web­site should be able to do. For their bud­get and time­line require­ments, we were able to build them a Big­Com­merce ecom­merce site that met their busi­ness needs and timeline/​budget require­ments. The proof is in the met­rics — they had a rock-sol­id reser­va­tions site that stayed up through the hol­i­day order­ing window!

David Hughes, VP of Strategy at GRAYBOX

Our Services

New Seasons Market engaged GRAYBOX to take what had been an entirely custom software application and relaunch the experience as an ecommerce website.

Our Results

GRAYBOX successfully launched a reservation site for New Seasons in time for the busy holiday season

Beyond a rock-solid site that stayed up through the holidays, the New Seasons Marketing reservation site generated over 35,000 orders in less than two months and saw a 20% increase in average order value from previous years.

  • 35,000
    Total number of orders taken over November and December
  • 20%
    Increase in average order value from previous years
  • 0
    Total amount of downtime