Transforming Planet Organic's ecommerce platform on Shopify Plus in 90 days

The organic food market in the UK was recently valued at £3.2 billion – a figure that’s more than doubled in the past 15 years. As the UK’s first and largest fully certified organic supermarket, Planet Organic have been driving this change in consumer habits since 1995.

When the 2020 pandemic hit, Planet Organic had to temporarily close their high street retail stores and increased focus was placed on reimagining the ecommerce experience that was easy for their ecommerce and merchandising teams to use and could cope with increased traffic from customers ordering groceries directly to their home.

Challenge

Candyspace were engaged to conduct a Discovery to understand what experiences customers would want from an improved ecommerce experience. Initial customer insights surfaced the need for contactless checkout, loyalty schemes and food-to-go options.

Mid-project, the Coronavirus pandemic hit, various lockdown restrictions were imposed, meaning the customer and business needs of Planet Organic were ever evolving. With the prospect of a second lockdown on the horizon, the decision was made to pivot to delivering an unexpected tactical ecommerce project.

During the first lockdown, the Planet Organic team were forced to temporarily pause online orders as they struggled to keep up with increased demand. This was frustrating to the team who had worked hard to gain market share over the years and their ecommerce experience was unable to keep up with increased traffic spikes while many other supermarkets were flourishing during this time.

To resolve this issue, a new, robust ecommerce infrastructure was required that could handle growing customer demand and allow their ecommerce business to blossom in lieu of in-store trading.

Solution

Planet Organic needed to be fully prepared for a second lockdown, meaning we had just 12 weeks from the beginning of the project to going live.

In the initial stages of the project, Candyspace’s development and user experience teams focused on delivering a technical discovery and creating a proof-of-concept.

Once complete, we adopted an Agile delivery methodology, working in two-week sprints. Our teams of designers, developers and solution architects worked in close collaboration to build the new website on Shopify and create a customer order management system.

Results

The new Planet Organic ecommerce website launched smoothly, meeting an ambitious launch date of 12-weeks from project start to finish.

At the end of the 12-week project, we delivered:

A new ecommerce solution on Shopify Plus with enterprise promotion handling.
An updated suite of marketing and insight tools to help drive growth and retention.
A custom order management system to improve operational efficiency.
Integrations for stock and product data with ERP.

In the first month since launch, Planet Organic processed their highest ever volume of orders.