Don’t Worry Be Hoppy
Tidal Studios has helped the Isle of Purbeck Brewery in Dorset cope with the coronavirus restrictions by creating an ecommerce shop to sell beer online.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused problems throughout all industries, not least of all those operating in the hospitality sector. With pubs, bars, restaurants and hotels all either closed for business or running restricted services, the knock-on effect for both business owners and suppliers has been devastating. Many venues have had to continually adapt their procedures to comply with the latest guidelines or look for different ways to keep afloat.
Tidal Studios has endeavoured to support all of its clients during the pandemic, particularly those in the hospitality sector and has continued to provide coronavirus updates to all its clients’ websites for free throughout. We have also enabled several clients to shift their business activity in order to maintain a cashflow and retain staff.
One of our clients, the Isle of Purbeck Brewery, has had its operations dramatically impacted since March. The brewery, based in Studland on Dorset’s Jurassic Coastline, supplies a wide range of draught and bottled beers both locally and nationally to pubs and restaurants as well as events and festivals. With many of these venues and events closed or cancelled, the brewery needed to look at other ways to sell its craft ales. Tidal Studios has been working with the brewery for nearly a decade and they asked us to create an ecommerce shop for their website so that they could sell their beers online.
We built the shop using WooCommerce, a popular Wordpress plugin used on around 30% of ecommerce sites and which accounts for around $10 billion of online sales. The shop is divided into bottled ales (which are sold in single variety and mixed cases of 12 bottles) and Bag-in-Box draught beers. We set up separate national postage rates, including free local delivery to the BH area as well as Click & Collect from the brewery. We also created coupon/voucher discount codes for the customers’ to use at the checkout in order to receive a 20% discount on the Bag-in-Box Beers. Payment processing was via the Stripe portal which is cheaper and easier to test than PayPal.
When the shop was live we then created a a series of Facebook posts for the brewery’s Facebook page to publicise the online shop, the free local delivery and the discount coupon codes. The response was immediate with 20 orders for over £600 in just one weekend. The ecommerce shop will remain open post-pandemic so that the brewery can continue to use its online channels for sales. Take a look at the shop and perhaps buy some beer either for yourself or as the perfect gift for the beer lover in your life; don’t forget to add the discount coupon code when you checkout!
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