The coronavirus crisis has forced many small business to look at how they trade – especially online. Gracie Roo’s Preloved is opened its doors in 2017 in the small village of Tollesbury, and like all shops in the retail sector, had to close due to the lockdown restrictions in March 2020.
Selling online was something Becky – the Gracie Roo’s owner – had always done either via Facebook or Instagram, taking payments via PayPal and manually updating stock and posting new items. A full blown online store had always been on the list of ‘things to do’, but the covid-19 emergency brought that to the top of the list!
WooCommerce & WordPress
In the past when tackling eCommerce, I have generally pointed clients towards Shopify. This time however, we needed to keep ongoing costs to a minimum, so a fully customised WooCommerce set up was the solution!
All the items in the Gracie Roos store are individual - i.e. there's not 50 of the same t-shirts to buy - each item is unique. Whilst this is an option when uploading new products in Woo, it is a setting you usually have to check for each individual post. To set each new product as an 'individual item' by default, I had to delve into some custom php to override the default Woo settings.
Each product is categorised into three main areas: Women's, Girls & Boys. Each of these has further sub-categories, enabling the items to be filtered in the shop. Being a clothing store, the products also needed a custom attribute set up - size.
On desktop, the shop archives also feature a 'quick view' option, showing product description and the option to add to basket without having to click through to the product page.
Overall, I'm really happy with how this has come together, the look and feel of the website really goes hand in hand with the physical shop. Just before launch, Becky had uploaded over 2000 individual products into the web shop!
The next step is connecting the web shop to Facebook / Instagram using WooCommerce's own API - which will automatically populate all of the products on to the Gracie Roo's social pages. Very useful!