background

Freight and distribution logistics company

www.easypallets.co.uk

The project

EasyPallets Ltd are a freight and distribution logistics company dedicated to transporting palletised goods – big or small. Their services enable business owners and the general public to send pallets from one place to another as quickly and cost effectively as possible.

EasyPallets came to BarkWeb with a bespoke requirement for a website application that could quote and book online pallet collections and deliveries, targeted to the UK market.

As EasyPallets is a start-up business, we really began from the chalk board – concepting the brand, sketching the layout of pages and firming up the booking process itself. We wanted to create an impactful brand that showcased everything that EasyPallets was about, creating an elegant, easy to use website that put user experience at the forefront of design.

Web development

The site architecture was built with UX design techniques to better direct the user into the funnel using visual aids like graphical, banner calls to action (CTA) and locked-in, minimal design for the booking process and checkout.

The service pages themselves use a mixture of engaging content features such as cartoon image sliders and interactive content to provide their audience with an engaging and memorable experience.

The challenges in delivering this project included:

Booking process

The booking process is the core functionality of the Easy Pallets website that required the most planning and project management. We created a workflow for the booking process and separately identified all the requirements for each step of the process.

Address lookup

We decided to use Google Maps API to find address information for both collection and delivery addresses during the Quote and Booking process. This allows users to quickly find an address using Google’s predictive places search to find a location and auto-fill in the collection and delivery address data, as well as optionally the billing address details at the final step of the booking process.

Pricing matrices and surcharges

EasyPallets required a bespoke collection and delivery matrices to allow for economy or premium deliveries based on date and time customisation of an order, for example, a same day collection for a delivery tomorrow afternoon would be a premium order with timed delivery surcharges.

All deliveries have a bespoke postcode pricing matrices to cover the whole of the UK mainland and non-mainland areas at varying pricing controlled by EasyPallets.

Volume discounts

On UK consignments, we allowed for tiered discounts based on pallet quantity per order.

Ecommerce

The site allows for Paypal and Worldpay payment gateways.

Phase 2

EasyPallets have scheduled in subsequent phases to the project to evolve the website as business grows. The next phase involves adding Pallet Tracking into the design and functionality of the website so that users can track the status nd location of their pallet collection or delivery. This will be using an ID using alpha-numeric code, containing some special characters or symbols.

Phase 3

We identified a third phase where we integrate the Easy Pallets site with the parent companies pallet network system, currently Solitaire but launching Nexus mid-2018. This would be an API integration allowing two-way communication between the EasyPallets website and the parent company pallet delivery network.

Quality assurance and sign off

We like to deliver the first iteration of any website on a known device size, so we chose desktop for concepting and testing. Content started to be populated. Bugs were fixed and the final few nips and tucks made.

During this process we also started our internal quality control sign off which includes testing on multiple device types (Android and Apple smartphones, tablets and desktops) and browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.), mapping any old URLs, W3C checks, Page Speed optimisation and pre-launch SEO.

Once all testing had been completed the website was moved to a production server and DNS changed. The launch of the site was ‘soft’ so we didn’t get out the bunting and shout about it immediately.

Web Launch

We consider launching a website the start of ‘the next phase’, once the baby is born it needs constant attention, an occasional tweak and change. We continue to monitor Google Analytics and the site performance in Google and Bing organic search result pages, as well as Google Search Console to make sure any indexing issues are fixed quickly and efficiently.

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If you're interested in our bespoke website development, have an internal system third part integration that you want to take online or wish to discuss how we can help then please get in touch.


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