An Island Web Design website and e-commerce solution for Hellerslea Fabrics

About the company

Hellerslea Fabrics is the largest and most likely the oldest fabrics and haberdashery shop on the Isle of Wight. Set up in a back bedroom 2 generations and 50 years ago, the shop on Lugley Street has been a fixture on the Island for as long as most of us can remember.

The first lock-down in a pandemic plagued 2020 saw Hellerslea taking to Facebook messenger to try and keep their customers supplied, and their astute business decision to provide free Island delivery for relatively small orders, was a stroke of genius during a time when we were all forced to stay at home.

The method of taking orders and requesting payment over Facebook soon became too time-consuming to manage so, despite having had a bad experience with a website and online shop with a previous agency, they reached out to Island Web Design and the rest, as they say, is history.

From the very beginning we made the owners aware that launching a website and online shop was not going to explode online sales overnight. The greatest benefit of having the online shop would be that, in time, local customers looking for related products online would be more likely to find the Hellerslea website and discover their stock and products, rather than just automatically go to a large online retailer for a courier delivery. There are some very large online specialist fabrics and haberdashery retailers and competing against them in a digital world will always be very hard.

However, on-going in-store marketing (everyone who visits gets a card with the new website details) as well as traditional forms of marketing and inspired, consistent use of social media, brought customers old and new to the website and while online sales are reasonable, the amount of foot traffic into the shop (as soon as lock-down as eased) increased significantly with people saying: "I saw this on your website, can I buy a few meters..."

Also, it helped immeasurably during lockdown by being able to point people to the website and allowing them complete their purchase and payment online, prior to delivery.

After publication, it was a mammoth task to get that many products on the online store and we had to figure out some bespoke solutions to control stock. Island Web Design gave them access to the mobile app that is dedicated to their online shop and that makes adding and editing products, as well as controlling stock and prices, very easy while in the shop.

The website is light on other content and is purely a vehicle for the online shop. If, sometime in the future, the owners want to make a greater effort in the form of SEO and online visibility, a lot more can be done to help that along.

Overall, the project was completed with several visits before, during and after and these included training and configuring the payment processors, shipping methods and workflow.

Other services provided: Domain name registration, Email hosting