Thistle & Fern

GRZZ has been working with Albury Florist Thistle & Fern since its inception 5 years ago when we designed the branding and style guide for the newly formed florist.

Recently we tried using Squarespace Commerce as a solution.

Coming from an Enterprise background and using tools like Magento and Shopify Plus we weren’t sure if Squarespace was up for the job.

To our surprise it was!

There were some limitations, but sometimes limitations create opportunities and we worked within these to deliver an all-in-one solution this is much easier to manage than the previous WordPress/WooCommerce setup.

We had a great brief for this project:

a) create a visually pleasing site using images of our work and business and;

b) create a user-friendly site for both our customers and ourselves.

And the rest was up to us - so we used an iterative approach and just started working with the images. I was waiting for a point where Squarespace could no longer handle our requirements however we never arrived at that point (we got close though.)

We did:

• Image optimisation

• SSL installation by default with Squarespace Ecommerce Plan

• Ecommerce setup and integration with Stripe payment gateway

• Stripe integration with Xero Accounting system

• Inventory setup, SKU creation

• Inventory population with 1 image and 1 thumbnail image per product

• Categories setup - e.g Flowers, Gifts, Chocolates

• Setup Product Variants e.g Small Bunch, Medium, Bunch Large Bunch of Flowers as well as varieties of wines and chocolates

• Set up featured products

• Added relative tags for all products

• Browse by category, order categories and hide custom categories

• Custom Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy using Lawpath

• Copywriting

• Creation of 2 Journal/Blog posts

• Insertion of all custom photography

• Custom Delivery instructions page as delivery options are reasonably complex as there are 2 stores, delivery unavailable on weekends and collection option available

• Highlighted Google Reviews

• Custom Google Reviews Page

• Set custom invoice/order number to pick up where the old site left off and match orders in the Xero accounting system

• Custom Favicon (Browser Icon) creation

• Custom styling of the design using CSS

• Integrated Instagram feed to home page

SEO

• Descriptive file names on all images - e.g thistle-and-fern-delivery-van.jpg

• Descriptive title tags and header tags - H1, H2, H3, H4

• Descriptive Alt tags on all images

• Images optimised and checked with google Pagespeed

• All product pages contain descriptive URLs e.g - https://thistleandfern.com.au/order-flowers/p/bright-and-cheery-flower-bunch

• Custom Social Sharing thumbnail

• Permanent 301 redirections from the old website to the new website to maintain Google PageRank

• Google Analytics setup and integration with Squarespace Analytics and Google Analytics

• Connect and verify the site with Google Search Console

• Submit XML sitemap to Google Search Console

• Checked for any broken links and pages (404) using Google Search Console

E-COMMERCE

• Setup delivery rates

• Design Checkout customer notifications

• Create customer notifications for Pending Orders, Fulfilled Orders, Refunds

• Setup Abandoned Cart Recovery

• Setup Product Status notifications - Out of Stock and Limited Availability

• Setup related products

• Setup Gift Card system

• Setup of the Customer Account/Login section

• Setup Pickup/Collection option

• Setup of Discounts/Voucher Codes

• Setup Low Stock Alerts

• Setup Related Products feature - “You might also like…”

• Setup voucher codes

• Setup email notification with 10% off next order using a voucher code

• Setup all taxes (GST) and Tax Invoice

• Allow Subscribe to Mailing List option on Checkout

• Setup required fields

• Setup Custom Forms on the Checkout page to include delivery instructions, delivery and pickup options and Gift Card Message area

• Created a personal touch with photos of the team and information on the team in customer notification emails e.g. “Our friendly delivery driver Ben will be delivering your order this afternoon.

• Setup a Product Review email template to automatically send to the customer 2 weeks after purchase. The reviews are then automatically added to the website.

• Setup custom blocks on product pages with key information 1. Same day delivery cut-off time 2. Delivery Locations 3. Delivery Price so the key information is available to users that arrive directly from Google Shopping pages and other direct sources.

• Added pop-up on some Add to Cart clicks which required the selection of a certain product e.g Wine Variety, Chocolate Flavour - this avoided creating 100’s of product variations.

• Setup Abandoned Cart Recovery Email which sends 24 hours after a user has left products in their cart without checking out.

• Setup Subscription products to allow the purchase of regular monthly flower deliveries and monthly payments

TESTING

• Testing on Desktop, Tablet and Mobile

• Tested all form notifications

• Tested Gift Card

• Tested Voucher Codes

• Tested integration with Payment Gateway

• Tested Refunds

• Testing using Chrome, Safari and Microsoft Edge

• Testing on mobile Safari and Android

• Set up Hotjar to monitor customer journeys and heatmaps

TRAINING

• Training on how to process orders and update the order status

• Analytics walkthrough

• Setup Squarespace App on iPhone and Tablets to enable updates, view orders and new order notifications

• Training on how to temporarily close down the store over holiday periods without losing Google rankings

MARKETING

• Concentrated on building up Google Reviews - 89 reviews with 4.9 / 5 stars

• Regular Google My Business posts with photos

• Offered 10% Discount Code on Fulfilled Order Notifications and asked for Google Reviews in notification emails

• Have focused and achieved Number 1 Organic Google Rankings for “Florists Wodonga, Flower Deliveries Wodonga”

• Using SEM to focus on problem areas such as “Albury” based keywords and competing with Interflora type competitors such as Bloomex

• Using SEM to focus on a problem where Google MyBusiness shows “Closed” on certain days when delivery is available.

• Setup Google Places / Google My Business

• Added products to Google My Business and ensured the profile is 100% complete including opening hours, delivery hours, and updating content with regular relevant posts

• Setup Google Merchant with products and created ad campaign to show products when users are searching for specific keywords.

• Monitored Google Ads campaigns and constantly added negative keywords to avoid wasted ad spend.

• Setup Google Analytics and integrated with Google Ads and Squarespace to monitor for “absolute to the cent” cost per acquisition (CPA) of each product.

EMAIL MARKETING

• Setup of the Email Campaign system

• Designed and created a template based on the website and style guide

• Imported subscribers from the existing database.

• Cleaned database and fixed all broken emails and formatting of names

• Setup email verification to fix any email notification delivery issues

• Created email newsletter campaign and have sent out 2 newsletters with an amazing 44% open rate

ANALYTICS

• Squarespace analytics are incredible. We can track purchases per user and $$ amount per user. We can also combine analytics with Google Analytics for even more data

• We are able to see where our customers are coming from and the percentage of orders being made on mobile and desktop

• Setup and integrated Hotjar to record user journeys. Made changes based on any of the pain points found.

• Cerated pop-up survey on checkout to ask the customer how their online experience was. A surprising number of users respond to this.

We are now concentrating on Google Ads and Google Shopping

The results have been incredible. Sales have increased. Productivity has increased due to staff being able to access the Orders and on their phones and able to update the status easily. It means fewer calls to the business asking about orders and more time for the staff to keep working on creating beautiful floral bunches.

Squarespace delivered on what was required, we didn’t need any other tools or 3rd party integrations to make it work. There were some tweaks to the cart that would have been nice to make but unfortunately, this page was locked to any changes except adding additional fields. The one problem that was almost a deal-breaker was the word “Shipping.” It couldn’t be changed and it doesn’t make sense. If we could change this word to “Delivery to:” it would make such a difference.

It’s a small price to pay for a system that does not cost a lot, is easy to upgrade, has amazing analytics, has no manual SSL installation, and does not need constant updates, patches and plugin updates like WordPress. There is no need to update PHP, MySQL and little worry about hackers and the downtime that can come with WordPress.

Where Squarespace excels is the design. There is not a lot of tweaking required. Anything that gets added to the site looks good by default without much effort required in styling (although this is possible using custom CSS.)

MARCH 2022 UPDATE:

Using analytics from Google Analytics, Hotjar, Google Search Console and customer feedback and surveys we have continually improved upon and refined the online shopping experience for customers.

Google Shopping is proving to be a very valuable lead generation tool and with regular optimising and removing unwanted keywords by adding them to a “negative keyword” list, we were able to reduce the initial “Cost Per Conversion” or “Cost Per Sale” by almost 90%.

We have introduced some other new features also such as:

• Same Day Delivery Countdown timer which lets you know the amount of time left before the cut-off time for same-day delivery. This uses conditional logic to work out a different message on weekends due to no delivery available at weekends.

• Installed SquareCertify plugin which helps Increase conversions & build trust in your Squarespace store using social proof.

• Added delivery information, delivery locations and all info on each page to allow customers from Google Shopping links direct to the product to proceed to checkout with all the information they need. There’s no need to browse to other parts of the site before they checkout, making the sales process seamless and easy.

Skillset:

Branding / Logo Design and Style Guide
Website Design
Website Development
Squarespace Template Development
Analytics
Ecommerce
Email Marketing