Chateaux Helps Top Dog Food & Supply Launch Brand New Website

When Chateaux began working with Top Dog Food & Supply, they were a brand-new small business, created as the New England distributor of Top Quality Dog Food. This meant that although they were just starting out, they were inheriting an existing client base for whom they needed to create a seamless transition for ordering products online.

Over 150 products and over 250 product SKUs needed to be imported to the new ecommerce site, as well as multiple options for product collection and delivery. This includes an option for customers to collect their order at a chosen collection point and pay a charge based upon the weight of their order. The goal was to create an attractive and user-friendly ecommerce website, where products were categorized clearly and easy to find for both front and back-end users. Additionally, the site needed to be easily scalable for future business growth and equipped with an easy-to-use CMS that the Top Dog team could maintain on their own.

Top Dog’s website allows customers to order with ease, with many existing Top Quality customers commenting on how attractive and user friendly they find the new site. The Top Dog sales and marketing team are able to easily maintain and update the site themselves, adding new products, writing new blogs, and keeping the look and feel fresh.

Top Dog needed to create their brand from scratch but weren’t sure where to start. Chateaux collaborated with them to review ecommerce options and together they identified Shopify as the most suitable platform to host the site. Next, Chateaux spent time with the Top Dog team to select the best template for their needs. This template was then implemented and customized to reflect Top Dog’s brand look and feel. Due to the nature of the product, the Top Dog team decided they wanted to brand the products without using actual product imagery. They chose to go with icons to represent each product, using color and additional symbols to differentiate product lines. This took time to get right and ensure that the images were clear and uncluttered while also giving a good representation of what the customer would be buying.

One of the key technical challenges in this project was the number of products and different variations that needed to be added to the site, as well as the variety of delivery and pick up options with different price points and fuel charges. Migrating the products and variations data from WooCommerce to Shopify required some manipulation of the files to ensure the data sources matched.

As previously mentioned, one of the challenges we encountered was the sheer volume of products and SKUs we needed to import to the site. To tackle this, we took an export of the products and variants from the WooCommerce source system and then put our data management expertise to work. We massaged the data to fit Shopify so that we could import the data in bulk. Without doing this step, it would have been an extremely time intensive, manual process.

When we initially launched the site, we had started on ‘Shopify Advanced’ plan however because of the complexity of the four checkout options, we quickly realized it was necessary to upgrade to ‘Shopify Plus’ plan. This allowed more customization of the checkout pages themselves so that we were able to create a more seamless and clearer checkout experience than the out-of-the-box Shopify checkout process.

The Top Dog Food & Supply site was successfully launched in March 2021. Orders were able to be taken from the offset and no issues or downtime were encountered. The initial launch saw traffic in top 6% of stores that launched on Shopify within the same week, which was a great achievement for the team. The transition for existing customers was seamless, with many of them commenting on how much they like the new site’s usability as well as look and feel—a UI/UX win! The use of icons instead of product imagery was also very well received by existing and new customers alike.

After some minimal initial training, the Top Dog team run their own site independently. This is down to both the suitability and ease of use of the Shopify platform. However, while the Top Dog team is able to run the site autonomously with ease, they elected to take advantage of Chateaux’s support services. This provides Top Dog with the security of allocated assistance each month, as needed, which is particularly helpful as the new business gets off the ground. This includes adding new features and responding to any queries they may have regarding the back end use of the site, and fixing any issues that may arise in the future.

Established in 2020, Top Dog Food & Supply are the exclusive distributor of Top Quality Dog Food for New England. Top Dog Food & Supply’s mission is to provide pet owners with the highest quality raw food that’s both affordable, and accessible. Based in Stratford CT, they provide USA manufactured raw dog food and natural treats that can be collected directly, mailed via UPS, or collected on one of their Saturday delivery runs throughout New England.