Client
Cocoa Dolce
Year
2023 – Ongoing
Resources
- Shopify
- Adobe CC
Reshaping the Luxury Chocolate Online Shopping Experience
Cocoa Dolce is a community of creative and passionate people who love making life a little sweeter.
Founded in Wichita, Kansas in 2005, Cocoa Dolce quickly established a reputation for serving beautiful chocolates and confections. Their collaborative approach and taste for adventure shines through in our artisanal chocolates, pastries, macarons, and gelato, thoughtfully paired with espresso, wine and spirits.
Problem
With the launch of a new storefront in Las Vegas, a complete overhaul of their branding was done to elevate from hometown to luxury aesthetics. The existing website no longer adhered to the new brand standards.
Solution
My objective was to not only update branding, but also improve the over UX of the e-commerce website to increase conversion.
My Role
Finding Shopify more complex that their internal team could handle, I was brought in at the final hour to get the new website ready for launch to coincide with the Las Vegas Grand Opening. My role was Lead UX/UI Design as well as development on the project. During the aggressive timeline, I was able to update the branding throughout, make initial round of adjustments and testing before launch.
Amber Travis (the Marketing Manager) and I work closely together to identify strategies for continuous improvements based on business goals and client feedback.
Understanding the Product
It was important to understand more about Cocoa Dolce’s products so I could help craft a user experience that would speak to their users. The company offers a wide range of products that could be organized in various ways. We conducted a card sort that get to the root of this issue, which helped us to narrow in on our approach. The navigation was then customized based on this research and optimized for mobile.
An important part of the branding of Cocoa Dolce has always been exceptional photography. The website was designed with a minimal approach, letting the product photos and functionality take the lead. Product pages where simplified, while still allowing the user to find additional information when needed with collapsible tabs on content such as ingredients and allergens.
Updating the Product Pages
We knew that the Build a Box category was by far their top selling category. Special attention was given to the page’s layout/functionality. The bundle plugin was customized so that the products where front and center, while easily disclosing what is in the box.
A new feature was added to macaron, chocolate and cookie boxes where customers can easily see what is in the box in a more visual and creative way than in the product description.
The luxury dessert market is a competitive market. It was important to add key product benefits such as “Handmade in Small Batches” and “Preservative Free”. Since the products are preservative free, it was also important to include a Shelf Life when needed.
Bridging In Store and Storefront Sales
We knew that there had been a disconnect between in store shopping and online sales. In stores products were flying off the shelves, but online sales were less than ideal. Bringing the two worlds together, a pick-up scheduling tool was incorporated where local customer could easily buy online, but avoid the shipping.
Internal Considerations
One of the key objectives was not only eliminate pain points for customers, but also for the Cocoa Dolce staff. Reusable metafields were used to attach to each product where the website could be updated as easily and consistently as possible. Bundles were reconfigured where individual products could attach to inventory. Packing slips were customized to organize products in each bundle for straight forward fulfillment.
Facing Challenges
Being brought into an existing website with a previously chosen theme and a huge slew of plugins / content — definitely provided its challenges. Thorough testing and evaluation was conducted internally and with customers. After the initial quick turn around launch, I was given approval to rebuild the entire site on a new theme. This removed a multitude of conflicts, limitations, complex back-end editing, and bugs.
Out of the box, Shopify has serious limitations. Working around these limitations was a constant exercise in problem solving. For example, the bundle feature caused a less than ideal format in the customer’s cart was well as on the fulfillment side. Some bundles contained 50 products. It is not uncommon for a customer to order multiple bundles in the same order. Custom code was implemented on the cart page to organize what each bundle contained.
The Shopify back-end order for fulfillment was an even more complex mess. Since that part of Shopify could not be customized, the solution was to customize the packing slip which could be organized and have everything Cocoa Dolce needed to fulfill the customer order.
Looking Towards the Future
There are so many more good things to come! I am currently working with the client to add new features such as subscriptions, gift subscriptions, muti-address shipping, and workflow automatons along with user testing for each rich feature. One of my favorite parts of working with Cocoa Dolce is telling my family that I am off to a meeting at the chocolate factory.
