Love cheese? Then love The Cheese Shed
Devon-based retailer The Cheese Shed has been selling handmade, artisan, West Country cheeses for over 15 years. With a strong ethos for supporting and celebrating the very best of the South West, The Cheese Shed specialise in high quality produce made across the peninsula.
And if that wasn’t wonderful enough, they even offer cheese tiered cakes for weddings and other special occasions!
“Our eCommerce shop is bulletproof, it works well and is very predictable, it does what we wanted it to do and what it says on the tin. When we do have updates, changes and modifications they are dealt with quickly and safely which means I don’t have to think about it. The team at Webselect are all great to deal with, real people and the trust and communications are impeccable, highly recommend.”
Ian Wellens – Founder and Director
The Cheese Shed
Our work with The Cheese Shed started more than 10 years ago. Having begun as an eCommerce business, founder Ian Wellens’s vision was to “sell cheese by mail order only”.
At the time, this was a revolutionary concept. Achieving year-after-year steady growth, the company expanded their retail offering, opening their first high street bricks and mortar shop in Bovey Tracey, near Exeter, in 2019. The shop has been a hit with cheese-lovers.
Yet 80 percent of sales still come from online mail order. The need for a strong and functional website, with a reliable and efficient eCommerce platform, has been essential to the business.
After opening a physical store, founder Ian was keen to work with a new, local agency who were experienced, responsive and could be trusted to take care of the business’ website so that he and his team could focus on selling cheese, their supply chain and customers.
Webselect worked with The Cheese Shed to build a full eCommerce solution on our Select Commerce platform, creating a front end site supported by a full CMS and management system. We have since integrated a number of API’s including Sage Pay/Opayo, Google Analytics, APC Net Dispatch, and a custom product scanner.
The look and style of the homepage has been enhanced, making the structure and layout more mainstream and in-keeping with other retailers, making it easy for new and regular customers to browse and buy.
The end result is a clean, bright authentic style with templated web pages, appropriate to the brand’s target market and audience and ideal for an independent food retailer with customised eCommerce functionality.
Our team also developed a unique and interactive online tool for the cheese retailer, so customers could create their own cheese wedding cakes! For the true cheese lover, the feature involves a drag and drop function, giving the user the ability to build their own unique ‘cake’ according to their own requirements, budget and guest list size.
Results
The Cheese Shed eCommerce site has seen over 150% increase in revenue.