Harrison

Before 5874 Commerce began the discovery process, the scope was an eCommerce renewal, but this quickly broadened to include a strong brand experience and retail service focus.

The Harrison online store needed replatforming, with a new site that would tell the brand story, promote retail services, and provide a full modern eCommerce experience which can operate in an efficient manner for store administrators, marketeers and operations teams. It was clear from the start that BigCommerce would be the ideal solution given that it is scalable and extremely low maintenance. 

The Build

Harrison’s existing eCommerce implementation had no integration with the ERP system Orderwise. A completely bespoke solution was required, written by 5874. This was integrated with BigCommerce, but also their newly adopted Zoho CRM.

BigCommerce Opensource checkout was used to restrict payment methods by customer group, editing billing details and conditional form fields for EU orders (for tax liability acceptance purposes).

BigCommerce Opensource checkout was also used to Include Google Address look-up for the UK and force EORI numbers that are then based on Orderwise where applicable.

An integration with Searchspring was added to improve site speed and search and merch features, unifying BigCommerce and WordPress into a single customer experience.

Harrison Retail & Harrison Products Split

Harrison presented their ‘Retail’ and ‘Products’ brands in a combined web experience that enabled them to tell the brand story, promote retail services, and provide a full eCommerce experience under one domain. From a technical point of view, this was provided by serving a BigCommerce store for ‘Products’ and a non-transactional WordPress website on a subdirectory, “/services”.

With a growing ‘Retail’ brand, Harrison took the decision to separate the sites, allowing them to provide more relevant information for targeted segments of the corporate customer base. This required reworking BigCommerce and WordPress, to provide focused experiences on dedicated domains.

The project mainly focussed on the homepage, as on the combined site, it was served from WordPress. So a new homepage needed to be created for the BigCommerce store. Smaller updates were also required on the WordPress homepage and Retail product page.

The project began with a design phase, where wireframes and visual designs were produced in the Harrison aesthetic to guide production. After the designs had been signed off by the client, development work was undertaken to build out the BigCommerce homepage using page builder widgets, which allow store merchandisers to edit all content on the page. 

The two sites represent what Harrison has to offer without confusion and over-complication. The decoupling provides Harrison with the tools and base to grow its business and target audience.