A typical happy customer will consider their trip to a garden centre, an experience in shopping as opposed to a shopping experience, where they can enjoy a nice cup of tea with a scone before heading back to the car.
Notcutts’ centres are full of helpful gardening experts who “go the extra mile” for their customers. As a front-runner in the bricks and mortar garden centre space, Notcutts were looking to bring their unique selling points and high standards to their website.
In collaboration with Notcutts’ network of suppliers and service providers, Pivotal was tasked with migrating their ever-growing database of customers, privilege members, categories, products and product attributes to a fresh Magento 2 website. With complex and undocumented source schemas, we had to become detectives to really pull apart the pieces and understand how to put them back together in their new form. We developed bespoke migration scripts which we optimised for speed in order to minimise downtime when launching the Notcutts e-commerce website on Magento 2.
“Worked with Pivotal on an enterprise level ecommerce build. This complex project was handled exceptionally well.
Hameed Alkhersan Digital Marketing Manager – Notcutts
The subsequent support and maintenance added much value in terms of UX and conversion.”
Responsive Magento website
A growing segment of the Notcutts demographic is using mobile devices to shop whilst in the garden and in the home. Many Notcutts customers live in rural areas where mobile signal and broadband internet speeds are not as fast, which meant the website has to have a light enough footprint to remain accessible to all.
Across a multi-team workflow, Pivotal developed lightweight code in agile sprints to deliver a responsive Magento 2 website, which can update its design according to the size of the screen viewing it.
Privilege Club membership, savings and a cuppa
Known to its customers as a reliable, high-end garden centre chain, Notcutts has developed a loyalty program over the years called Privilege. Privilege, in-store allows for a 10% discount on everything they sell as well as two free hot drinks per month and exclusive shopping events, talks and demonstrations. Pivotal has developed a bespoke Magento extension for a club membership sign-up and renewal experience for the Notcutts website, this synchronises with the system that powers the bricks and mortar garden centres. This online loyalty club promotes return custom, increases data offered by those customers and improves the end-to-end user experience. Customers can become a Privilege member on the website and then head straight into a garden centre and receive a unified service.
Fast ecommerce hosting
During periods of growth, yearly marketing events such as Black Friday, as well as season-specific promotions can cause huge spikes in traffic on the Notcutts website. With gardening being more popular than ever, Notcutts’ objective is to ensure their website is stable, secure and PCI compliant for their acquiring needs.
Pivotal provides enterprise hosting services to Notcutts, which looks after both their hardware needs and their development cycle requirements. With speed and security on the top of the priority list, we ensure servers are optimised, patched and ever-ready for stampedes of online customers.