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How “The Fish Society” raised its online turnover by 30 percent with Shopware

With more than 200 types and 100 species of frozen seafood in their product assortment, The Fish Society has the widest range of seafood available in one place online. Customers can purchase anything from snapper from New Zealand to lobster from Canada and king crab from Russia – all in one order, delivered to their house to cook. With quality as their utmost priority, the fishmonger doesn’t try to compete with other retailers on price – they are fully committed to offering superior grades of seafood, in an online shop to match.

Key Facts

Shopware Edition

  • Shopware Professional Plus Edition with Silver Subscription

Company

  • The Fish Society is based in Wormley, England

Industry

  • Food retailing, fish trade

Characteristics

  • B2C (since 2000)
  • Expansion to B2B for catering customers

Technical features

  • Customisation of blog content for recipes
  • Custom built saver packs functionality
  • Utilisation of GPMD’s LIM product to integrate into their bespoke ERP
  • Use of the personalisation solution Nosto
  • Use of Klaviyo as a newsletter marketing tool and Google Analytics for monitoring
  • Use of the Premium Plugins Bonus System and Advanced Cart

Implementation

  • Realised by Shopware Enterprise Partner GPMD Ltd
  • Implementation period: 10 months

Relaunch Success

  • 30% increase in sales
  • +16% overall conversion rate
  • +32% mobile conversion rate

Shopware: The ideal basis for a successful online project

When evaluating platforms for the project, the online fishmonger was attracted to Shopware for a number of reasons. “We very much liked the way the multi-buy functionality worked, the quality of the stock management system, and how Shopping Worlds could serve our marketing goals.

The ability to create custom seasonal content worlds without needing any external development was a tremendous relief.With Shopping Worlds, we are now able to build content-rich landing pages that are informational and useful for SEO”, says Jeremy Grieve, Operations Director of The Fish Society.

Special demands on the shop software

The company boasts an impressive catalogue: 530 products with 11,000 total SKUs are sold in 34 primary categories – not to mention the 100 total available categories. With such a broad assortment, the ability to filter products was a crucial requirement. Now customers can easily filter through properties to find the product they are looking for, be it organic salmon fillet steaks or a specific cut of sashimi.

Behind the scenes, special functions were implemented in the shop, including a connection with their custom-built ‘Einstein’ERP system. The company also made a number of changes to the software to facilitate the process of taking telephone orders. “This is especially fast when we have the customer’s card saved on Stripe. The customer simply has to call us, identify themselves, tell us what they would like to order and say when they would like the order delivered”, says Jeremy Grieve.

Ability to change seasonal content

Using Shopware Storytelling, the company combines content with commerce during seasonal periods. Whether Christmas or Easter, customers can find inspirational story boards with informational themes, where they can get ideas for popular festive seafood combined with popular beverage pairings.

Increase in sales and conversion rate

Shopware was able to help the company increase their overall sales by 14% within one year. But the company is optimistic that this is likely to grow as customers become more accustomed with the functionality of the new online shop; for example in February 2019 alone, they saw sales increase by 30% when compared with February 2018. Even the overall conversion rate increased by 16% and the mobile conversion rate by 32% within one year.

Simplified work load

Since launching their Shopware shop, it has become much easier to manage content and create new products, thereby vastly simplifying routine tasks. Moreover, stock management is much easier to navigate and even creating promotions and tracking their success is faster.

Another positive development is seen in the telephone ordering process, the Stripe integration has facilitated a smoother checkout and the ability to retain customer card details.

“The whole project made us re-think how we manage our stock and the product attributes we associate with them. We overhauled the filtering of products and formalised them. This was a lot of work, but it was beneficial to improve the user experience”, Jeremy says.

Model project cooperation

According to Jeremy, Shopware offered a great deal of support during the project implementation and the transitional period after the launch. They were inspired by the capabilities of Shopware after attending the Shopware Community Day, which makes them want to push their site to perform more in line with industry trends. The process of re-platforming has ignited a desire to continue their digital transformation and now they are working on a number of internal ERP upgrades to compliment the website.

“It has been a great experience for The Fish Society team internally. We had to overcome new challenges that made us more agile and adaptable in approaching issues with the website. It was a great sense of achievement for the team to see the project through from design, build and launch. The team grew closer and more productive as a result of this project”, summarises Jeremy Grieve.

Looking into the future

Among the goals are expanding the B2B functionality and focusing on offering better user experience in terms of navigating the website to filter and find products.

Future plans also include completing their Fishopedia project, which is a content section on each fish that delves into the history, preparation, and cuisine of a specific fish species – a project which they envision will become the bestinformation source on common species of fish on the internet. This is a major content marketing project, therefore they expect to be working on this for the next 12 months.

Although no fixed plans are in place, the company sees potential to grow with Shopware in the future, recognising the business possibilities of combining Shopware with the ERP to expand with regional sites and partner with EU distribution partners to sell their fish from mainland Europe.

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