Turning a local cider site into a real shopping experience

A brochure site outgrown by a growing brand

We have worked with Purbeck Cider for a long time, on their brand, their packaging, and their bottle labelling. The website was the next part of that relationship. Their old site was a WooCommerce build on WordPress that we had made for them years earlier. It was fit for purpose at the time and it worked within their budget then, but the brand had grown and the cider had become more popular, and the site was no longer keeping up.

The problem was that the old site was built like a brochure. The shop was not front and centre, even though selling cider online had become a bigger part of the business. Purbeck now had a wide range to manage: still and sparkling ciders, different flavours, 0% ciders, plus soft drinks and apple juices. They needed customers to be able to find the right product, and they needed a system they could actually run day to day, for inventory, marketing, and managing the operational side of the business.

The brief was a better shopping experience, a more robust system, and something the Purbeck team could manage themselves. The creative direction was to bring the site in line with the brand and make it look and feel much more like a shop.

A lean Shopify build with room to grow into

We had long flagged that moving to Shopify would help Purbeck across the board: managing products, running operations, and marketing. Shopify's features and CMS fit how they needed to work, so the platform decision came first and the rest followed from it.

We designed the site on a customisable Shopify theme. Working from a base theme kept the build lean and sped up production, and it left room to layer in the content, storytelling, and asset creation each product needed. We showed Purbeck early what the site would look like and feel like, including the structure and how products would be organised so customers could navigate the range and find what they wanted. The designs reflected the brand as it had developed since the previous site.

There was a lot of emphasis on better visuals. We added more video, improved the product images, and did new photography and art working for the new products. That made the whole site more consistent and gave customers a better experience as they shopped. On the store side we built in standard e-commerce features that customers now expect: sticky add-to-cart, quick buy, and a checkout that works better than the old one did.

We also built with the future in mind. Some things on Purbeck's roadmap, like subscriptions, are not in the current setup, but Shopify gives them room to add them. The same goes for remarketing and email campaigns, which can plug into Shopify directly. Choosing Shopify was about giving Purbeck a better tool to grow into, not just a better-looking site.

Sales up through summer, on a site built to last

The store moved Purbeck from a brochure site to a proper shop. The architecture of the store is much better: clearer categories, better product descriptions, and related products that help customers discover the range. Customers can now see and manage their orders and review what they have bought, and the checkout experience is stronger on Shopify.

The site also connects more cleanly to the rest of how Purbeck works. They can link Shopify to other systems for their operational and product management, and their team finds the content management easier to use. Product information now feeds through to Google Shopping, which has helped the store's exposure.

The site went live during what the cider industry considers a quiet time of year, so a clean read on results has been hard to take. Through the summer months, sales increased and the store's visibility improved. The clearest outcome so far is the one the brief asked for: a more consistent, better-looking store that is easier for both customers and the Purbeck team to use.