With a focus on family and community, Sodlawn has proudly served the California area for over 40 years. Today, their main focus as a company is providing the highest quality sod, direct for residential and commercial use. They have an amazing network of professionals that deliver sod curbside directly to your home or project and even install it for you! Online ordering also adds the convenience of sod delivery within weeks.
After trying several eCommerce platforms that failed to meet their unique needs, Sodlawn approached White Rabbit Group in 2018 to start building a custom eCommerce solution to sell and manage all orders through a web portal. Today, they are one of the fastest growing sod companies in California.
Problem
Sodlawn was operating their business using cumbersome, outdated methods. By relying on spreadsheets and paperwork to process and track everything, they were unable to scale and ensure a satisfactory experience. There were too many complexities to consider—coordinating with several farms across the state, offering specific sod types depending on the customer’s location, identifying potential issues with delivery addresses, pricing wholesale orders properly, not to mention providing an online sod purchasing experience which had never been done before.
The Objectives
- Dive head-first into the pain points of the current eCommerce site and get more insight into what all features the client would need in order to streamline the order process and farm onboarding, along with a fully custom pricing algorithm process.
- Create a custom eCommerce app from scratch by defining the workflows that we uncovered during our discovery process, and making sure the app is built on a scalable architecture.
- Make sure that all the pain points are addressed and deliver upon the user-friendly workflows that were previously identified.
Our Solution
In order to solve these issues, we decided to build a custom solution to handle the eCommerce side and a WordPress site for managing the marketing website. Both applications are linked in a way so the user experience is consistent and serves both logged-in and logged-out users.
The marketing WordPress website contains all of the marketing information and provides the user with more insight about Sodlawn as a company. It is built from scratch on top of an underscore theme. This helps avoid the clutter of a paid theme and provides more flexibility and speed. There are built-in templates created for duplication purposes, this way their marketing team can easily create new landing pages. The site also integrates Google Analytics and Hubspot so their marketing team can collect data to improve their conversions/sales.
For the custom built eCommerce site, the entire application is built from scratch and each functionality has been meticulously customized to meet Sodlawn’s needs. The application has two main user views, one being the customer side for making orders online and the other is the admin side for Sodlawn's employee's to manage the application and manage orders from customers. All built on Vue.js as the frontend framework and Laravel as the backend.
This custom solution is packed with 100+ useful features. Below are just a handful:
- Interactive maps: A custom MapBox solution which allows the admin to draw unique areas using a vector tool.
- Custom Email Template Editor: All email template content that goes out to customers can be dynamically managed by admins. Each farm has their own custom content for each stage of order purchase.
- Comprehensive Reporting: All necessary insights into their customer, farm, and contractor data.
- Contractor portal: One location for Sodlawn’s contractors to view and manage their orders.
- Relationship Management: An area within the admin portal where Sodlawn can manage their farm data including inventory, delivery areas, delivery dates, and warranty information.
- Custom Warranty Process: Users may need to claim a warranty so Sodlawn’s platform provides an easy way to process warranty claims.
- Custom Quote Functionality: Some contractors are submitting bids and simply need a quote so Sodlawn’s quoting process can accommodate this.
- Custom shopping experience: A complex purchase was simplified into a 3-step process so users can find sod that’s relevant to their location, select a delivery range, and choose whether to have it installed.
- Knowledge Base: A place where customers can go to easily find all useful information relating to the product and other frequently asked questions.
- Many others!
Technologies Used
Pixel perfection, always.
