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Blue Grass Sod Farm & Nursery

Setting up one of Alberta's largest tree and sod producers for ecommerce success.

Project Brief

Blue Grass is well known across Alberta as a leading provider of yard, garden and landscaping products to residential, commercial, and wholesale customers.

With marketing being managed independently at each Garden Centre, individual websites were developed for each location.

Managing and updating these websites created additional work, and with each website promoting the same products and services, they were effectively cannibalizing their target keywords in search engines, giving their competition the upper hand.

Our Solution

Our main focus revolved around a digital strategy that would allow Blue Grass to showcase their products, services and thought leadership on a single website optimized for keywords and local search in each market they serve.

A big part of that strategy involved considering each location's unique promotions, events, and content that needed to be managed at a local level, while still providing a unified experience for their web users.

A completely redesigned custom WordPress website was then created to not only meet the exact marketing needs of their business but also provide the foundation to begin unlocking new sources of revenue.

What We Delivered

Digital Strategy
User Experience Design
WordPress Website
Custom Theme
WooCommerce Integration
Advanced Shipping Rules
Wholesale Customer Portal
Visit the Website

Our online revenue has grown exponentially thanks to Reaction!

Lisa Silva
Operations Advisor, Blue Grass
Working with Reaction has been a great experience. They helped develop and launch a brand new website and implement the E-Commerce portion of our website.

They not only built us a website but helped show us the importance of building it right. Reaction made sure that they educated us and kept us informed the entire time. Their professionalism, experience and creativity is why we will continue to work with them.

One Website for Multiple Locations

The Blue Grass website was structured around managing web content for all locations from a single admin panel, with the ability to either associate content across all Garden Centres or to a single location. Content like growing instructions, blog posts, and product details only needed to be entered once while product availability, pricing, sales, and events can be managed independently by each location.

With a simple location selector, customers can choose the greenhouse they want to shop from and the website will dynamically update to show the appropriate content.

Clean & Modern Design

Clean & Modern Design

The website was completely redesigned using a clean and modern aesthetic that focused on beautiful and vibrant product photography with contrastingly simple hand-drawn illustrations.

This design and colour palette helps draw the customer into the site, demonstrates the quality of their products, and inspire you to create an amazing outdoor space of your own.

With so much content coming together into one website, navigation had to be a priority, so we organized content and products into simple categories that make it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

A Knowledge base of Expertise

A Knowledge base of Expertise

Caring for plants requires skill and patience that can only come with years of experience growing in a specific area, and Blue Grass had just that.

To share that knowledge with their customers, Blue Grass had an existing blog, but we wanted their new website to feel like a library or resource center that could be browsed, searched, and ultimately linked to products they are associated with.

The Blue Grass blog still exists, but we felt their industry knowledge deserved to be handled differently and made easily available to their customers.

Now staff members can also pull this valuable information on the fly to educate customers in the greenhouse and guide them to a smarter purchase.

Built to Grow

Built to Grow

The day we launched the new Blue Grass website was just the beginning. We had so many ideas and new features in mind, but it was important for both us and the client to get the updated site online as quickly as possible.

This allowed us to give customers a better online experience, give the Blue Grass marketing team the asset they needed to promote their business, and allowed for data collection to analyze pain points and friction in the customer journey.

The primary intent of the initial website was to be a marketing tool for Blue Grass, driving foot traffic to their locations, with a limited focus on e-commerce.

However, with iterative design and open minds, their new site helped opened the door to new sources of revenue and transformed them from a strictly brick-and-mortar company to Alberta’s leading online garden centre.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce

Selling live plants, trees, and sod online is a little tougher than it may seem, so it was important that we work through the technical, logistic, and operational changes that needed to be made to bring the full garden centre online.

Reaction and Blue Grass collaborated to add e-commerce capabilities through a custom WooCommerce integration that allows each Garden Centre to have control over their own pricing and inventory while sharing a single catalogue of products. We also added considerations for products that we wanted to be found online but could only be purchased in-store.

Custom Pricing & Shipping Rules

Custom Pricing & Shipping Rules

With different pricing and shipping rules needed for live and bulk products, we extended pricing and shipping functionality and were able to account for product size, quantity, weight, distance, curbside pickup, container deposits, and even the type of vehicle and equipment required for the delivery.

We also needed each location to be able to customize their own delivery options and rates, all while providing a seamless online shopping experience for their customers.

Landscapers & Wholesale Customers

As a large portion of their business comes from professional landscapers and wholesaling their products to smaller retailers, it was important to also take those customers into account in designing the site.

We set up custom pricing groups and a user dashboard for wholesale e-commerce customers, and by logging into their account, those same wholesale users are able to see pricing and discounts based on their wholesale level. We even included functionality for credit and order financing!

For landscapers, we added an option to create shopping lists to keep track of materials needed for various projects and added an option to have orders delivered directly to the job site. Payment is a breeze, too, as invoices can easily be paid online and accessed on-demand, whenever needed.

Growing Plants & Profits

Since their new website launched back in 2019, Blue Grass has seen its online profits soar!

With every update and new feature that gets added, Reaction has continued to increase the value of their digital storefront, grow their online sales, and ensure their website never feels old or outdated ever again.

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