Vesey’s Seeds Ltd., Canada’s largest mail order gardening company, is growing its online precence with a new website and online ordering system.
The Prince Edward Island company was one of the first gardening businesses in the North American gardening industry to have an online presence in 1996 and launched its fully automated online ordering tool in 1999.
Known in the business community for its innovative approach to ecommerce, Vesey’s representatives have participated as keynote and forum speakers at international conferences throughout the mail order industry on their site.
“Our firm has increasingly become dependent on the Internet as our primary revenue stream. While printed catalogue still drive the demand, online ordering now represents over 65 per cent of the company revenue,” said John Barrett, Vesey’s director of sales, marketing and development. “Having enjoyed an industry-leading site for so many years we felt compelled to once again invest in maintaining our position at the forefront of this now widely used revenue channel.”
Vesey’s began its web redevelopment plans 18 months ago by issuing a request For proposals to several of Canada’s top web development firms, finally hiring Toronto-based North Cloud.
While the visual appearance and feel of the website will have a new and cleaner look, the true benefit of the site’s redevelopment will be improved and faster services for the end user. Those include quantity price breaks, harmonized shipping charges and improved navigation.
Barrett noted many factors come into play when redeveloping such a complicated and large web platform, and there were many strategic partners involved in the process.
“This project required the co-operation of our operating system developer (Thinking Big of Charlottetown) as well as our SEO and online marketing firm Cornerstone (a division of Deloitte),” he sad.
These partners and Vesey’s own web development team, consisting of Emi Abu Wafia, Gary Ogle, Tracey Corrigan and newly appointed IT manager Jason White, have been busy working to meet a launch date prior to the busy ordering season.
The website is found at www.veseys.com.