A fantastic case study of a WooThemes/WooCommerce installation for a very large and respected South African brand.
My name is Hilton Moore and I am a developer at kri8it; a South African web development and design agency based in George and Cape Town.
Recently one of our longstanding clients wanted to update and redesign their site and the attached online store to create one sleek and smart package. A while back we developed a large ecommerce solution built on WooCommerce; which we did our first case study on. We have implemented WooCommerce for a wide variety of sites and businesses. For us, it is an ideal online store solution.
Vital Health Foods
Vital Health Foods is one of South Africa’s oldest and most well respected brands in the health and wellness category. They still predominantly rely on traditional retail sales in stores but they have been interested in increasing sales online. The previous online store was based on a Magento platform. We wanted to integrate everything into a unified site that clearly conveyed the corporate identity and products. It was also important for it to be easy for users to navigate and purchase items.
We needed to export all of the products and user details from the old Magento system and import them into a new WooCommerce enabled WordPress site. We also needed to revamp their online identity and encourage customers to purchase memberships to the Vital Club.
Customers who had Vital Club memberships would be entitled to product discounts for an entire year. This had to be applied throughout the store and was achieved with the use of the WooCommerce Groups plugin, WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing plugin and bit of custom coding. It also had to be future proof so that new items could be added to the store without a problem.
The site was built on a custom child theme for Canvas. For sheer customisability you cannot beat the power of Canvas. We used some custom hooks and filters to manipulate both WooCommerce and Canvas until we got the result we wanted.
Dynamic Pricing Plugin
The plugin works primarily on User Roles or Categories. To get our discount working correctly we needed to:
- Set up a User Role for customers who had bought memberships.
- Set up a product that adds users to a group for one calendar year when it is purchased (accomplished with the Groups Plugin).
- Setup the discount on particular categories for particular User Roles using the Advanced Category settings in the Dynamic Pricing plugin.
- Hook into the Groups plugin to assign or un-assign our new User Role to users either entering or leaving the group.
Q&A
Vital tries to help people improve their lives and overall health by providing health foods and encouraging good lifestyle choices. They have several health and diet experts available to answer any health-related questions. This helps to promote the Vital brand overall and building their image as an authority on health and wellbeing.
We implemented a very nice question and answer system on the site whereby users could ask a question on the front end without needing to register as a member. After the question has been entered it creates a post in the admin area where a Vital Expert can enter their answer. The user who asked the question will be notified via email that their question has been answered.
We are also very happy with how the site menu turned out. We combined multiple WordPress Menus with the help of Ubermenu.
WooCommerce Plugins
We made use of the following plugins for the online store:
- WooCommerce
- WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing
- WooCommerce PayGate Gateway
- WooCommerce Smart Coupons
Working with Woo
We really enjoy using Canvas for the amount of work it saves when you have to develop a theme. The guys at Woo who built the framework have really done a fantastic job at providing a flexible and scalable base to build on. We think we used it to achieve a great result here.
It was great to have this opportunity to tell you about our experiences with WooCommerce. If you have any questions I am happy to answer them in the comments section below. You can see more of kri8it’s work and portfolio on our website.