Baldwin and BE O Market entered into a partnership in different domains: design, UX, marketing, SEO, front-end & back-end. Years ago, Henri – founder of BE O Markt – decided it was time to introduce a new way of grocery shopping to Belgium. Dreams became a reality when he founded an organic grocery store, paying extra attention to packaging and locally produced products. Today, BE O Markt has grown into a successful business with four stores across Belgium. They are 100% ready to start a digital adventure. Read here how Baldwin helped them with this adventure.
About BE O Markt
BE O Markt sells organic, local products in four stores across Belgium – in Ghent, Nevele, Brussels, and Antwerp. Thanks to the color pallet of the displayed vegetables and fruits, wooden boxes and baskets, helpful staff and delicious smells of fresh herbs and veggies, the stores have a pleasant old-school farmer’s market feeling.
However, BE O Markt is not just an organic grocery store, it’s also a broader concept. BE O Markt wants to offer affordable organic and seasonal groceries and avoid unnecessary packaging. This is only possible thanks to their partnerships with local farmers. Henri – the business owner – dreams of making affordable organic groceries available to everyone & of offering better food with less impact on the climate and on our health. BE O Markt asked Baldwin to translate this concept and atmosphere into a future-proofed website.
Preparation
Before starting the design of the new website, we wanted to make sure we would build a relevant and resourceful food website. So we started with extensive research on the competition and market (national as well as international). The marketing team worked together with the team of BE O Markt to create buyer personas and user stories to decide what the website needs. A focus group was organized to test these theories and to learn about what actual customers expect from a grocery website. Only when we were one hundred percent sure about the concept of the website, we started the design process.
Project phases
We know that we want to shape the future of food websites. But we can’t do it all in one step as there are so many parameters we need to keep in the account.
Currently, we are in phase one of the website. The website is launched and all products on the website are currently in stock in the stores.
BE O Markt works mostly with local producers the products are seasonal. In this way your vegetables don’t need to travel from the other side of the world, keeping the carbon footprint of your food as low as possible. So now you can check if that specific product you are looking for is still in stock.
We are already ready for the launch of phase two. But we have to wait a little bit until all logistic hurdles are solved before we can go live with this exciting new chapter of the BE O website.
What will this update bring? We can’t say much yet, but we can already promise it will make the life of consumers a lot easier.
UX and design
BE O Markt is not the first food website created by Baldwin, but it is the most extensive one. This was a challenge for the design team.
Integrating the story of BE O Markt into the design
The total design of the website – with all its aspects and features – had to breathe the same atmosphere as the stores. The website should not only be vibrant and effortless to use. The USP’s of BE O Markt should also be present on the website. So how did we implement these USPs into the website?
BE O Markt stands for ‘Be Organic’. In order to bring this message to the website visitors, we created a page dedicated to this matter and displayed it in the header. Another important characteristic of the stores is its delicious & fresh products. Thanks to the pick-up service, this freshness is also accessible for the online shoppers. BE O Markt is also proud of its helpful staff. How did the design team integrate this feature into the website? By making the recipes easily shoppable, by adding information about allergies and creating space for extra information about seasonal products and how-tos.
Development
The BE O Markt website is developed in Magento 2. The great thing about Magento is that it’s open-sourced, this means we don’t need to stick to standard templates and can customize without any restrictions. Because the developers of Baldwin are Magento experts, Baldwin already built a lot of modules for the Magento platform that came in handy for this project. The Baldwin blog module made it possible to add recipes and blog articles. The articles can also be shared on social media.
Tracking & SEO
Before go-live, the marketing and BE O Markt team worked together on optimizing the website for SEO. We created great metadata and worked together with the development team on increasing the page speed. The marketing team configured the Baldwin SEO Module to track reliable data and useful events and optimize the URL paths. After a lot of testing by the Baldwin and BE O Markt team, the website was launched. Once the project was live, the marketing team made sure the website got indexed correctly by search engines.
BE O Markt was a challenging project which required expertise on different domains – design, UX, marketing, SEO, front-end & back-end. Thanks to the great cooperation between the teams and to the enthusiasm with which we face every challenge with an open mind and a nose for innovation – we can say out loud that we are proud of this project!
Design showcase
