Asia Market

With both their supermarkets and cash and carry businesses in Drury Street, Dublin 2 and Ballymount, Dublin 12 running successfully and with a delivery network already in place throughout Ireland, it was time to take their business online to service all 26 counties in the ROI. Their aim was to begin with a core group of the 1,000 most popular products and to grow the range over time.

Their existing website was non-transactional and was somewhat dated, neither representing the size and scale of their company nor generating income. The main challenge was to ensure that the Irish customer was introduced to a range of Asian products in a format that was understandable, without alienating the existing Asian customer.

We worked closely with the team to ensure that there were no cultural upsets, whilst also targeting the Irish customer, who expect certain functionality and paths to product. Site-mapping and wire-framing helped us to organise their product range into intuitive categories and sub-categories. We chose Magento2 as the content management system as it is the best e-commerce product on the market, offering multiple promotional features and is a feature-rich, professional platform solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the user experience.

We recommended the introduction of recipes from the varying Asian regions to show users how to cook Asian dishes, and enabled a 'Order the Ingredients' option with each to simplify the process. We have also encouraged clear descriptions on all products and a How to Use guide so that users can try things out. We believe is is very important to ensure that the site was inclusive, targeting both Asian and Irish communities.

The completed fully-responsive, Magento2 website instantly conveys the scale of the Asian Market company, celebrating their historical brand, whilst also modernising the perception of the company. Elements of a stylised illustrative style bring a nod and wink to the Asian background without being cliched. The styling draws heavily on the yellow, black and white colour scheme of their branding, in a progressive and modern manner.

The product description manages to communicate quite detailed information in an extremely user-friendly format. A powerful and intuitive search functionality easily finds specific product(s), whilst the Recipes section is informative, useful and leads to specific ingredients.

An active community has been developed through social media, blogging, events and an integrated loyalty programme. We have also included features for registered members such as a Re-order facility, My Favourites and full account features.

The site traffic has grown phenomenally, with average online value (AOV) increasing at a similar rate. It seems Ireland's love affair with Asian cuisine continues!