Ethical Gift Box

Ethical Gift Box commissioned Absolute’s Shopify team to build a Shopify B2B site which focuses on their new corporate offerings. The site was to include modern and easy to use features, featuring a simple navigation that enables the user to access the site's unique features - an example being a custom “Build A Pack” functionality so customers can create a unique pack with personalisation and have a tailored estimate automatically generated.

Ethical Gift Box were already familiar with Shopify, having already launched a site for their previous offering, but wanted Absolute’s Shopify developers to take their design and functionality ideas and bring them to fruition in a way which is intuitive for their customer and without having to compromise on UX and/or the order process.

The site wasn’t going to be a typical Shopify eCommerce site - with such large orders being placed incorporating product personalisation, plus dates specified when the order would be required by, the ideal process was to allow the customer to build a customised pack of items with packaging options, and then give them an estimated price. Ethical Gift Box would then contact the customer and agree the full specification and final price. We felt that Shopify was still the ideal platform in terms of the ease of management of the products and visual layout, but the transactional route would need bespoke Shopify development.

For projects like this, with a high level of bespoke requirements, we always start with an agreed Technical Specification document. This explains how the site will work in detail and helps ensure that what is delivered is exactly what is required, with no assumptions that might be costly to re-work.

Design and UX

Being a less-typical purchasing flow meant we wanted to make sure that it was clear at each step and the customer knew how to move through the process quickly and easily. This was especially important to consider on smaller mobile devices where what could be displayed at any one time is at a premium. Our Shopify developers and our design team worked closely to ensure that the UX and the overall design quality was maintained throughout the course of the project.

Bespoke Shopify Development

The bespoke Build a Pack page lists all of the products and packaging options (nicely categorised and filterable), and customers can add these to their pack. They determine how many of these packs they’d like and a running total estimate is generated for them. Some products also needed a minimum order quantity, so we added that functionality in and the pack builder checks for those requirements.

Once the customer has built their pack, they then enter their contact details, a bit more detail about the order and then this is all packaged up and sent to Ethical Gift Box for them to make contact with all of the information available. The customer can also upload a logo or image that they’d like to personalise their items with.

This process suited a corporate client who wanted to create a unique promotional pack for a specific event for example, but some customers would want much larger orders and so we added a second way of creating an order with features that would better suit these customers. This bulk ordering process would allow faster multiple quantities of items, and especially for products such as clothing, the customer can order different quantities for each size in one go. Any reduction in friction in the process will lead to a higher chance of conversion so this was well worth undertaking.

As you’d expect with a more B2B-based approach, the site needed some additional features to be competitive and we added functionality like tiered pricing to incentivise larger quantities of items being ordered.

At the core of the site, the ethical values were hugely important, and communicating those was an important part of the brief. We developed a system where Ethical Gift Box can create graphical icons and assign them to individual products to highlight features such as it being sustainably made, or being free of plastic for example. These features also feed into the filtering system, making it easy for customers to support particular aspects in their ethical requirements.

One issue with their previous Shopify site was that it was very slow to load. The site used a lot of third party apps which were each taking their toll on the site’s performance. We wanted to make sure the new site was as fast as it could be and so all of the new features were developed by extending the theme code and not relying on third party apps.