Sellerdeck Desktop Developments, Hosting & Maintenance
Introduction to CATER4YOU
Cater For You is an Ecommerce wholesale distributor of disposable catering supplies at competitive prices. Since they began trading in 2003, the business has been steadily growing and currently turns over around £4 million from their 17,000 sq ft warehouse in High Wycombe. The aim of their website is to be simple to place an order providing them with a broad selection of products, including plastic glasses, disposable catering supplies, food packaging and cake/baking disposables with quick delivery.
Background
Cater For You have used Sellerdeck since the business was first established in 2003.
Over the years, Cater for You has experienced a steady increase in year-on-year growth with continual development of the website. Cater For You had looked around at alternative Ecommerce platforms, including starting a Magento project, however, that hit a number of snags, primarily with integration issues with their main ERP / stock management system. Over this time, the existing SellerDeck website had not received as much development as required to achieve optimum performance and integrate up-to-date web functionality.
Progress
Cater For You decided to re-invest in the existing SellerDeck site to increase its functionality, revenue, and profitability. The team approached Sellerdeck for support and guidance on updates required to improve usability and bolster sales. Much of the functionality that was proposed with Magento was implemented into SellerDeck.
Following the initial project briefing sessions, Sellerdeck worked closely with Cater For You and handled all the developments to ensure the website remained at the forefront of the online packaging industry. SellerDeck has now delivered a website that is fast to load and feature-rich for existing customers to use on a repeat basis and new customers to place an order quickly.
“We first used SellerDeck (then known as Actinic) as our platform to build our business from Zero to the multi-million pound business it is today. We are delighted to have had such a close working relationship for over 20 years with them and look forward to many more in the future using Sellerdeck Enterprise.”
– Andy Watts, co-owner of Cater For You Ltd
Specific Features
We implemented our in-house image compression extension. This required modification of image elements in layouts to call our code which automatically generates appropriately sized images in various formats. It also creates a new HTML tag to load the image which suits the device, e.g. smaller for mobiles, a placeholder for lazy load and fallback jpg for older browsers.
This changes normal search, adding filter options so the customer can further refine results.
We looked at various areas of page load time and optimised them. For example, there was a large set of images used in a carousel on the home page. As the image took a little while to download, it caused a significant layout shift. We optimised the image to webp (making it smaller), preloaded it in the header, and reserved the space for the carousel.
We added a popup modal when adding to cart, rather than showing the full cart content page. It’s less disruptive when navigating around the site. It’s available as a widget.
We’ve made a number of improvements around the site. For example, various marketing lists of products now use static links to the products rather than script calls. In filtering, we show multiple prices for any products that have individual and pack pricing.
Cater For You have a lot of customers who regularly buy the same products for their busy takeaways. They use customer accounts, so their previous orders are available online. We implemented a “buy from previous order” function which added an Add to Cart button when viewing older orders. If a product was no longer available it enabled a search function to find the products.
We created an integration with Cater 4 You’s ERP system. This required discussions with the supplier regarding appropriate API calls, then writing a connector that updates stock levels through to the website within minutes. There was also work within the design of pages to enable and disable products for ordering depending on stock level, as previously all products were marked as available.