Are you a Small business owner? If the answer is yes, read on!

It may have never crossed your mind to start up an e-commerce website. However, due to the current climate, there has been an increased demand by customers to buy products / produce online.

Recently, this has become a much safer avenue for shoppers, as they can still purchase your goods. Only from the safety of their own homes.

JTS Freshbox is one of our more recent completed BigCommerce start-up clients. They sell a variety of Fruits and Vegetable boxes ready to be delivered to your doorstep. We know that popping down your local grocery store or even market was once an easy thing to do. However, recent events have made this more and more difficult to do so safely. Therefore, JTS Freshbox have made the leap to sell online. Delivering their produce locally.

However, as a traditional local business there were a few challenges that needed to be overcome:

JTS don’t use external delivery companies, all of their deliveries are delivered in house by their own delivery driver and van. They only deliver to addresses in Norfolk and surrounding areas. To make matters more complicated they could only deliver to certain postcodes on certain days.

In order to cover the cost of delivery they also had a requirement to have a minimum order value of £15.

At the start of the crisis, JTS turned to Facebook to take orders via messenger, each conversation had to explain the same caveats about delivery days and minimum orders. To make things easier they created set boxes at the price point. However, this reduced a customer’s choice and also jeopardised potential up-sells.

Then JTS spoke with Frooition, we helped setup their BigCommerce store, attached payment gateways so they could take payments online and helped them get their products onto their shiny new website.

We then built in a custom minimum order module as well as creating shipping rules based on postcode. This allowed customers to pick the exact day their produce would arrive based off their postcode.

The addition of the minimum order allows JTS to sell individual items giving customers more choice and allowing for additional up-sells per customer.

We offer a low-cost alternative to getting setup online with our new BigCommerce Start-up packages (starting from only a few hundred pounds). Not only that, in Partnership with BigCommerce your first 3 months subscriptions are currently free.

So why not adapt and offer your customers an online alternative, just like JTS Freshbox and stay open?