Gee Tee Bulb Company is a family-owned business that has been supplying a wide range of flower bulbs since 1961. With more than half a century of trading behind them, Gee Tee has become the supplier of choice for both professional and amateur gardeners.
They are one of Realnet’s longest-standing clients, having been with us for over 15 years, with their website and digital marketing having evolved into a full ecommerce website with Sage integration to manage inventory and orders.
Challenge
Gee Tee has two clear seasons each year – one for selling Spring Flowering bulbs and another for Summer Flowering bulbs. The impact of these two seasons is that they need a website that can quickly adjust stock and focus to promote the correct products to customers at the right time, with a switch over that can take place each January and May.
Additionally, Gee Tee’s customers often pre-order bulbs with a future dispatch date, so the client needed functionality to accommodate this.
Solution
Gee Tee’s latest ecommerce website is WordPress and WooCommerce based, specifically set up to accommodate the challenges of a seasonal switch over, multiple products and categories, flexible ordering systems and integrated order management.
The website homepage makes best use of image-based promotional areas in prominent positions, accommodating both the seasonal switch over and regular promotions to highlight relevant products at the top of the page.
Our first task was to build a user-friendly website structure by understanding the product catalogue, seasonal requirements and order process. Based on our research, we restructured the product catalogue so that categorisation by species and variety was intuitive, supported with relevant filters so that bulbs could be found by type of plant (colour, height, flowering month etc.). In addition, a catalogue-wide search system allows specific species and genii to be shopped. We also implemented a consistent naming convention for products and categories to ensure that on-page content as well as meta titles and descriptions were set up to include genus, species or variety names and variations as well as product types like bulb, corm or plant. This helped to cover a range of potential search engine search terms and improve general SEO.
The website allows pre-ordering of products with a future dispatch date and WooCommerce has been set up to allow different products to notify the customer of the expected dispatch dates.
The website employs price breaks so that discounts are applied to higher volume purchases using a WooCommerce plugin installed for this purpose.
Result
The website is well optimised, so Gee Tee enjoys premium rankings for a range of their products, all of which contributes to improved brand reputation and throughput in sales and enquiries.
Gee Tee continues to enjoy a growth in online sales both with a new customer base as well as their regular repeat customers. Sales volume increases are matched by a growth in website traffic, with customers able to make use of easy search tools, pre-ordering tools and overall purchase process to get their spring and summer bulbs each year.
Visit the Gee Tee Bulb Company website >