Pine and Oak Furniture is a Berkshire based furniture specialist with over 17 years experience in wood manufacturing, sales and finishing. The company trades from their four extensive showrooms offering customers excellent quality furniture, at a fair price, coupled with great service.

Pine and Oak recently decided to grow their business further by harnessing the power of the internet and launching a new ecommerce website. As a company, the operational structure was already in place to support an ecommerce site with good stock holding – offering customers immediate product availability, and a dedicated team of delivery staff and vehicles.

The challenge with the new site was to provide a system that was both customer friendly yet simple for Pine and Oak to administer. From a customer point of view, the site needed to have a design that was engaging, displayed the products clearly and offered a zoom facility. The ordering method needed to be swift, without a lengthily account sign-up procedure, ensuring that the whole process was as simple as possible.

And, for the Pine and Oak team, it was important to provide a system that was easy for non-technical staff to update the product catalogue, allow for seasonal promotions and track the order process.

The Generate Shopping Cart was the perfect solution to meet the needs of both the customer and Pine and Oak. The menu navigation and page structure are simple to use and the powerful search function allows customer to find exactly the product match they are looking for.

The website delivers advanced order and checkout features including single-page checkout, guest checkout and support for multiply payment types. The web-based control panel allows Pine and Oak to easily manage their product catalogue from any PC and allows the team to react quickly to market changes and promotions. The back-end features also provide all the tools necessary for the team to manage the website, delivering a professional ecommerce site.

The results are clear: a well designed and thought-out ecommerce website that allows customers to shop with complete confidence from the comfort of their own homes.

What Pine & Oak Furniture had to say; Daniel Hulett, Managing Director stated “The new site was an important way to grow my business particularly with lots of people now shopping online. We were also finding that customers visiting our showrooms were asking for our website details so they could browse our products at home.

Generate UK were immediately very friendly and approachable. Their relaxed attitude was in contrast to other agencies I had considered – they made conversations about technical aspects of the site easy to understand. I am extremely happy with the site design and the ecommerce system - Generate UK have delivered painlessly exactly what I needed!”

Please click here to visit the Pine and Oak Furniture Website.

If you would like to discuss how an ecommerce website could help your business please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431. If you’re already selling products via the Internet, why not let Generate UK provide a free of charge Website Health Check.

As a typical male, I have never really seen the appeal of fighting with the rest of the world to get to the shops on a Saturday morning. The parking is always a nightmare, the shopping centres are crowded and by the time I actually find the men’s section, the last thing I want to do is rummage through rails and rails of clothing… This is the point at which I usually decide to hit the closest ‘watering hole’, feeling far less inclined to part with my shopping money.

Thank goodness for Internet shopping. It has changed all this for me. I can now shop from the comfort of my own home, choosing from thousands of retailers who are all trying to get me to spend my money on their site. The complete experience is one of ease and convenience (assuming the retailer has a decent ecommerce website!) and allows me to shop with speed, sitting back to await my delivery.

The growth of the online shopping sector has been impressive; in 2007 total sales grew by 35 per cent, and in 2008 growth was 25 per cent. Despite the current trading climate, this year we will see estimated web sales grow by 13 per cent exceeding the £20bn mark for the first time. Internet shopping will substantially outperform the high street, with an estimated sales decline of 0.6 per cent for 2009.

I’m sure not everyone suffers from my dislike of the ‘bricks and mortar’ shopping experience, so why else is internet shopping so popular?

The most commonly cited factor is that the Internet offers better value for money. The opportunity to buy low priced products from a huge choice of retailers is obviously appealing. Add to this the option to use comparison websites, cash back sites, discount codes and you can bring the item cost down to well below the price on the high street.

The shopping experience is also getting better and better. Ecommerce websites are advancing every day with new ideas and technologies. We’ve seen the introduction of 3D imagery, video content and even software that uses a series of interactive reality animations to provide realistic sensations for touch – one of the biggest limitations to buying on the internet.

The issue of trust has always been an interesting debate with concerns over personal security topping the list. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) recently reported that for 2009 among those people who shop online, 54 per cent now feel it is as safe as shopping in store compared to 26 per cent in 2006. This improvement in trust will only grow, as more and more consumers improve their knowledge of the security in place and the protection that is available when shopping online.

So what next for the online retailer? The new challenge will be how to differentiate your business from the rest of the online market place as ecommerce sites become more and more prevalent. A well designed site, with an easy to use order and trusted checkout system may not be enough to keep your site outperforming your competitors!

Can Generate UK deliver your strategy? If you would like to talk about our services and how we can help your business, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431. Please feel free to post your comments.

Hi. My name is Kim, and I have just completed my first week at Generate UK. Before this week, I had no idea what ‘online marketing’ was, and now, with the help of my new colleagues I can give you a very short and brief explanation of what I have discovered (as my knowledge is still limited, but I’m working on that). 

‘Online marketing’ doesn’t mean an awful lot to someone like me, who had never given it much thought. From what I have realised, a company’s website is crucial to advertising their products or services and to help raise awareness of their brand. This is done by building and designing an aesthetically pleasing site, which has all the different functions a company may require, for example, purchasing goods online. Although, once a website has been created it needs to be marketed effectively, otherwise it is completely useless as nobody would know that it existed, and it would go to waste. It can be marketed using: 

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - This increases visibility in search engines escalating the venue’s profile, by improving search engine listings.
• Email marketing campaigns - sending highly targeted emails to a selection of people to promote a client.
• Pay per click - advertising via the internet using search engines.
• Content management systems are used to manage a business’s site.
• And a few more that I haven’t grasped yet, but I’m in the process of familiarizing myself with them.

Once I managed to come to terms with SEO and all that jazz, it was time to start making the phone calls and to book meetings with potential clients. In preparation, I did some ghost calls, where he would pretend to be a potential client, and I would attempt to sell Generate UK’s services. This was very entertaining, as my colleague got into different characters to make it more authentic, but as a result, I couldn’t stop laughing! Nonetheless, they proved to be very useful, and prepared me for the different reactions I received. The rest of the team helped me feel really relaxed, were very encouraging, and great at explaining all the technical terms I struggled with, and they all managed with my excessive amount of questions fired at them.

The biggest challenge I came across this week was; the term ‘search engine optimisation’ (which still sounds a bit alien). The challenge lies with learning about what Generate UK actually does and then attempting to sell their services… What a challenge that was. But, now I’ve got the basic knowledge I need, and my confidence is slowly growing, I’ll look forward to achieving even more next week and having fun along the way.

I’ll look forward to continuing my journey next week, and sharing it with you.