15-Oct-2013

Fresh and Healthy Box

A new website to sell fresh and healthy food direct to your door, a great idea for busy families.

I got this job through One Flare. The client's business was already up and running with customers referring to a printed brochure for the products and then calling in their orders in via phone.

The basic design idea and many of the graphics and images came from the client, who were very well organised and timely compared to most. I guess they wanted to get on with selling online.

Colour Sells

Colourful images reflecting the colour of the food was used to make the site appealing to customers. They also sold roses and other flowers but could never supply a good image of them or for their food either come to think of it. Images sell products and they need to be good. Mobile phone images usually aren't good enough.

Ecommerce with WooCommerce

The time consuming weekly menu.

Woocommerce was set up to sell the products. Because the "boxes" had new fruit and vegetable contents each week it was a time consuming process to update the weekly menu page.

This was supposed to be done by the client but they couldn't manage to do it. They never asked to be shown how; had they done it themselves it would have saved them money.

Fresh and Healthy Website History

The website was up and running by the 15th October 2013.

Around 2015 the client went with Stuart Lee of esitedesign.net (offline October-2016) and with new hosting. It seems the client couldn't handle WordPress and went with the harder to learn OpenCart (from my experience at least) using the Journal theme.

There it sat for about six months until it went off line for a time.

After months of being offline it emerged around June 2015 as http://www.natureshealthyboxes.com.au/ using a .NET (aspx) solution.

On the 6th December 2015 the business and site had been shut down due to illness of the wholesaler getting motor neurone disease. I suspect competition from Coles etc also made it too hard to make money.

Finale

Given that the major home delivery services Aussie Farmers Direct went out of business the chances of success for a much smaller business like Fresh and Healthy Box is very remote. I think even without illness the business would struggle to last much longer than three or four years.

It pays to check out your competition before shelling out capital to set up or buy a business.

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