The solution

The new website has helped to position Thomas Ridley as a food service provider with a passion for food, showcasing their authority in the marketplace with superior product knowledge and expertise. It has provided customers with the ability to place orders (including repeat orders and shopping list uploads) at their convenience across a myriad of devices.

The user experience has been improved by an intuitive site-wide search facility and product comparison along with enhanced product descriptions with valuable nutritional information and allergen filtering by exclusion. The site also provides valuable promotional real estate for brands Thomas Ridley distribute.

Thomas Ridley have achieved incredible results in a short space of time (stats included are from 6 months post go-live), and on the basis of this performance were awarded ‘Best Exploitation of technology - sales over £25m - B2B.’ and ‘Best Brand by Speciality - Hotel, catering and facilities management’ at the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards, and won gold at the 2018 Digital Impact Awards for ‘Best use of digital by sector – food and beverage’. They also won the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce 'ecommerce business of the year 2019' and were shortlisted in the same category for the British Chamber of Commerce annual business awards 2019.

Summary of features and benefits

• Sophisticated product search covering the catalogue of 5,500 stock lines with augmented attributes such as brand and allergens.
• The ability for users to search for, create a list, specify a quantity and add a number of different products to their order from a single page.
• Inclusion of a tabulated system for managing information text for Product Description, Ingredients, Preparation, Storage Instructions, Directions for use, Allergens, Nutrition, Attributes and Product Data Documents.
• The provision of a product comparison facility and integrated reviews and social media sharing capabilities.
• The ability to create and manage wish lists for ease of placing commonly recurring orders.
• Provision of a customised experience for account holders presenting customer-specific pricing from over a million variants held in the CRM.
• The integrated system has reduced dependency on manual processes providing transformational efficiencies to the business.
• The business has been able to extend its reach into the B2C market through guest checkout, home deliveries and click and collect services.