Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods
eCommerce
Digital Strategy, Product Management, UX Design
Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods was a beloved Richmond brand that was looking to breathe new life into its direct-to-consumer sales.
After years without a physical presence, Ukrop’s was set to open the Ukrop’s Market Hall, offering dine-in and carry-out food options as well as event spaces.
To coincide with their return to consumer retail, Ukrop’s needed an eCommerce experience that would better integrate with their in-person dining experience.
Challenge
Although Ukrop’s had an existing eCommerce platform, it was difficult to maintain and offered a poor user experience, resulting in high site abandonment rates.
Ukrop’s products were scattered across several sub-branded sites, each with its own URL, cart, and UX structure. Since Ukrop’s primarily focused on B2B sales, it was challenging to meet the expectations of individual consumers, leading to missed revenue opportunities.
Strategy
The old Ukrop’s eCommerce platform put all of the cognitive load on its users, making order fulfillment easier on the backend rather than streamlining the purchasing process on the front end. To address these issues, the new website needed to:
Consolidate individual brand websites into a single platform
Simplify complexities surrounding shipping, pickup, and holiday orders
Align the visual identity with the new physical location
Significantly improve the content management experience.
Approach
A Single Experience
We created a single unified experience for all of Ukrop’s products to better reflect how their customers interacted with the brand.
Do the Heavy Lifting
We significantly reduced the complexity around, shipping, pickup, and holiday orders through segmented shopping carts and improved content mangement.
Consumer-first Structure
We organized products by how consumers search for them, not how Ukrop’s business divisions were organized.
Consistent Brand
Incorporate elements from the new retail location to create a consistent look and feel.
While behind the scenes the fulfillment process is still complex, that complexity is invisible to users, who now only have to select between a few simple and intuitive categories.
The front-end user experience and back-end content management processes are much more intuitive thanks to an overhauled product tagging and categorization structure
Segmented cart types ensure users can be confident in how they will receive their products.