E-commerce Shop and Product Blog
Belle & Blaire is an online retail shop that sells handmade bath & body, skincare, haircare, and personal care products. Understanding the benefit of selling on another platform as an alternative to Etsy, a decision was made to set up a custom domain (belleandblaire.com) on Big Cartel. In a course of a year, as the number of product listings outgrew the Diamond plan (100 products), financially it was no longer feasible to upgrade to the Platinum plan (300 products).
After considering several popular hosted e-commerce solutions, the owner chose to self-host a shopping cart on WordPress. The website relaunch in November 2014 (archive retrieval) featured a self-hosted e-commerce shop powered by WooCommerce. Overall, a self-hosted website allows for flexibility to have unlimited products, blogging capability, content control, and customization that would be more cost-effective than a hosted e-commerce solution.
Services
- A full transition from a fully hosted solution to a self-hosted website to allow for flexibility while having complete control of the e-commerce shop without additional costs to scale the product line.
- Implement a new responsive website design, plugin configuration, and on-page search engine optimization.
- Configure WooCommerce settings to adhere to the product, tax, checkout, shipping, accounts, and email requirements.
- Creation of multiple pages for doing business and content creation.
- Set up Google Analytics and Site Kit to access data on the WordPress dashboard.
- Set up a Mailchimp email list, signup forms, and an email template.
- Basic WordPress training (add new listings, create pages & blog posts, and core website maintenance).
- Ongoing support and maintenance.
Website: belleandblaire.com
Update: Relaunch on WooCommerce (via Internet Archive, November 2014)
Redesign
In 2021, did a complete redesign with a new custom theme to work seamlessly with the new WordPress editor Gutenberg blocks. The redesign improves site performance and minimizes the number of plugins required to run the site with full functionality.
Reorganized the blog into a full product blog by product type to feature product benefits, tips & tricks, and other helpful tips for the reader. Also, arranged customer feedback on a single page for convenience.
Finally, implemented Google Analytics giving the owner of Belle & Blaire access to evaluate and measure how marketing, content, and products are performing on the website. This tool can help determine which products should be discontinued or promoted based on the data. In addition, it tests for website performance. A low-performing website will result in a lower ranking on Google.
