Hearthworks approached me to develop a custom Woocommerce store that would allow their team to both sell and hire their structures in multiple scenarios.

Background

Hearthworks existing site used a very out of date Magento CMS that was buggy, slow and had not been well maintained. Adding new structures and configuring them for both sale and hire was not straight forwards and delivered a challenging frontend user experience. Shopping cart abandonment rates were very high and their SEO was in a very poor state. As a consequence their SERP’s and online sales had severely declined over several years.

The Challenge

The new build presented a number of nuanced challenges but the overarching requirements were clear:

1. Provide support for x4 different hire scenarios.
2. Add capability to set and receive deposits from customers.
3. Add capability to create a diverse range hire and buy options on any structure.
4. Automate distance calculations for delivery and collection on private hire structures.
5. Make inventory management and categorisation simple for a non-technical team.

The new custom Woocommerce solution needed to be easy to manage and cater for x4 different hire scenarios as this was their primary revenue stream. Hearthworks also requested the capability to set and receive deposits from customers for both the hire and purchase of individual structures. This would be key to the success of their business as many of their Tipis and Yurts were high ticket items and customers were much more likely to complete a purchase with an initial part payment.

Furthermore, their inventory was very unique, with a diverse range of both hire and buy options for each product that did not follow a regular pattern. It was clear from the beginning that the built-in Woocommerce Product Variations would simply not cut it here.

They also had limited brand collateral for the new site’s visual presentation, a logo, some colours and a primary font. I would need to develop and extend these brand assets for different contexts, where required.

The Four Different Hire Scenarios

Alongside the sale of their structures, by far the biggest challenge was making it simple for the Hearthworks team to manage x4 different types of hire:

1. Internal festival hire: Where a structure or bed in a shared structure could be hired at a major UK festival and all booking and payment processing was handled by Hearthworks.
2. External festival hire: Where a structure could be hired at a major UK festival but the booking and payment processing was handled by the external festival provider.
3. Private hire: Where a structure or structures could be hired by an individual for a private function or event at a bespoke location.
4. Wedding hire: Where pre-arranged structures could be hired at a wedding event, behind a password protected page.

The Solution

There were three broad components of the build. Custom theme development for the general WordPress functionality, site layout, and frontend components. Custom Woocommerce development to deliver the hire and buy management capability. And finally, the migration of their existing inventory from the old Magento CMS.

Custom Theme Development

Understrap was used as the boilerplate for custom theme development. It has basic out-of-the-box support for Woocommerce and incorporates Bootstrap 5.2, which offers a solid foundation for the site’s overall layout.

Automated Image Sizing

Hearthworks has no in-house design knowledge or capability so the automated sizing, orientation and compression of uploaded images for presentation in different scenarios was key.

Bespoke Home Landing Page

A bespoke home landing page was developed that funnelled users to their primary services quickly, where they could also prioritise (feature) key products. Festival hire would dominate this page as it represented 70% of the companies annual turnover.

Custom Woocommerce Development

To consistently present the Hearthworks brand and deliver bespoke functionality a number of Woocommerce templates and functions were customised following their developer docs.

Extending Woocommerce Product Categories

To enable Hearthworks to easily manage the x4 different types of structure hire, I looked for a solution that extended existing Woocommerce functionality. Effectively, the x4 hire types were taxonomies (parent categories) that could be used to group the primary types of structure hire. Child categories would provide a further level of grouping required for both festival and wedding hire.

I wrote a function to deliver a multi-level radio and checkbox category management system, available on all product admin pages. To keep inline with Hearthworks back office inventory management, this had some strict controls to prevent structures from being listed in multiple categories.

Product Custom Fields

To allow Hearthworks to deliver a diverse range hire and buy options for any structure, I used custom fields. Giving them the ability to add their own select, radio, and checkbox items with descriptions and prices for each structure, solved the problem. These fields were then hooked into Woocommerce to display the data in all the key areas on both the front and backend.

Distance Calculations for Private Hire using the Google Matrix API

For many years Hearthworks would manually calculate the milage costs for ‘Delivery, Setup and Collection’ on private hire structures. This would also involve an email to the customer, to inform them of the additional cost, based on their location. Hearthworks also only offer private hire within a 150 mile distance from their location in Glastonbury.

Using the Google Matrix API I have automated this process. Now, when the customer adds their delivery address at checkout the distance to their location is automatically calculated (based on a supplied milage formula from Hearthworks) and displayed as an additional cost. This provides immediate transparency to the customer and saves Hearthworks a significant amount of order processing time.

Customer Deposits

Although I could likely code a solution, given the Hearthworks budget, I elected to use a premium plugin. I tested a number of them before settling on WooCommerce Deposits & Partial Payments which fitted the requirement nicely at a very reasonable price. Although I am an advocate for the limited reliance on plugins for functionality, sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Post Launch Impact

Hearthworks have seen a 28% uplift in online sales in the year ending 2024. Their Google ranking is gradually rising after many years in the doldrums and needless to say this is still a work in progress.