Claborn Farms Case Study

Challenges

I worked closely with the owner of Claborn Farms to address several website-related challenges related to:

• Shipping and Packaging
• Inventory Management
• Delivery Tracking
• Government-Mandated Reports
• Simplifying and  Streamlining the Website

1. Shipping and Packaging

One of these challenges has to do with shipping. The U.S. Postal Service is the only nationwide shipping provider who will transport live poultry, and only under specific requirements and for premium rates.

Shipping is central to Claborn Farms' business and a big portion of their customers' cost.

Complicating matters more, the Postal Service recently switched to the use of a "Dimensional Shipping" model for larger packages. So if you ship a package larger than some threshold dimension, the price for shipping becomes based on the size of the package instead of the weight that it carries. For juvenile chickens, this affects the cost of most orders.

Packaging chickens, as you can image, is also time-consuming. Unlike dry goods, the appropriate birds must be gathered from each pen, and different breeds and ages are housed separately across a 10-acre farm.

2. Inventory Management

Another challenge has to do with inventory.

Each week, as the chickens grow, they obviously become a week older. Joe sells chickens at different age brackets for multiple reasons. As his "inventory" ages, a percentage move from one age bracket another, each week. Inventory is also changed by wholesale orders.

To avoid headaches, inventory on the website needs to be updated weekly, if not more frequently. This was cumbersome and tedious to do on the current website.

3. Delivery Tracking

Delivery is another challenge. Customers need to know when their chickens were shipped and be able to track them so they can pick them up promptly at the post office. The chickens are shipped with cucumbers or melon slices so they will remain well-hydrated during shipment, but it's essential that customers know where the birds are and when they will arrive so they can pick them up, unbox them and get them into the chicken coops as soon as possible.

4. NPIP Reporting Requirements

The U.S. government also manages shipping and sales of live poultry more closely than they would dry goods or other merchandise. In recent years, they put into effect the National Poultry Improvement Program (NPIP), which places certain testing and reporting requirements on providers of live poultry.

One consequence of the NPIP program is that reports must be filed regularly that show where poultry was shipped to, what breeds were shipped and what quantity. Compiling these reports by hand was time-consuming.

5. Website and Marketing

Not surprisingly, given these and other challenges, there's more complexity to the website than at first meets the eye. And the backend, or administrative part of the website, where Joe can manage orders, upload tracking information, download NPIP reports and manage inventory is significant and needs to be as efficient as possible for him to use.

In additional Joe needed to market the new direction and offerings he was now taking with his poultry farm. From previous projects, he already had a website in place, with lots of relevant content related to chickens. It was bringing him customers, but it was clearly not optimized for this new direction.

His website was also built on multiple platforms, both WordPress and a separately-hosted third-party eCommerce solution. This made SEO and content marketing more difficult and had much more limited flexibility in regard to some of the solutions needed for his order fulfillment and delivery challenges.

To facilitate content marketing efforts that I'll discuss more below, he needed a website that we could easily and speedily update. He also needed a way to keep certain duplicated pieces of information consistent across his website.

Solutions and Results

As you can imagine, Joe and I had quite a few phone calls and strategy sessions over the course of the year in which we worked together first to understand the nuances of these challenges then to identify how best to overcome them and implement solutions.

1. Shipping and Packaging

One key to keeping shipping costs (and ultimately total cost to the customer) as low as possible was to use a box size that was no larger than necessary to safely ship the live poultry. Joe had already partially solved this by coming up with clear guidelines on how many chickens of which ages could go into a single box. He had several box sizes to work with and had also custom-developed a shipping box that worked for certain sizes and ages.

Working together, we came up with a new set of age brackets for his poultry that would allow him to price both the chickens and their shipping costs optimally. Joe has a lot of experience shipping chickens and making shipping cost calculations, so he put together a database of shipping and handling costs based on age, destination shipping zone and quantity that matched the boxing/packing rules that he had developed.

I implemented a custom shipping module for him that takes into account these and other factors and integrates seamlessly with his existing WordPress / WooCommerce platform. Whenever postal rates change, Joe can easily update the database and introduce the new rates immediately or on a targeted date in the future.

The results have been lower total costs for Joe's customers and better sales than he would have had if we had not optimized shipping costs as tightly.

I also developed a custom "pick list" module that integrates with his website, allowing Joe to export a list of all the chickens across all the orders that he's shipping that week, grouped by breed and age. He is able to combine this with his pick list for wholesale orders and then make a single trip to each chicken pen to bring in exactly the right number of fowl of each type for that day's shipment.

2. Inventory Management

We simplified inventory management, making it much faster and less tedious, and as a result, less error-prone by installing a third-party module that allows all inventory numbers to be seen and edited on a single screen. The module also provides a history of changes, making it easy to see what changes have been made.

3. Delivery Tracking

Delivery is another challenge. Customers need to know when their chickens were shipped and be able to track them so they can pick them up promptly at the post office. The chickens are shipped with cucumbers or melon slices so they will remain well-hydrated during shipment, but it's essential that customers know where the birds are and when they will arrive so they can pick them up, unbox them and get them into the chicken coops as soon as possible.

4. NPIP Reporting Requirements

Joe supplied me with an example NPIP report, and I wrote a custom module that integrated directly into his website. The plugin module pulled data directly from all of the orders that he was selecting for shipment. It then organized that information and delivered it to Joe as a report that he could deliver directly to his NPIP coordinator. With a few seconds of time, Joe was then able to produce reports that otherwise would have taken him hours of additional work each week.

5. Website and Marketing

I built a Joe a new eCommerce system based on WooCommerce and migrated his products into the new system. Since he was changing and adding to his offerings, I also provided copywriting and copyediting for many of his products and other content on his website. Bringing all of the content and the store together on the same platform gave us a solid footing for making all of the other customizations I described above.

I went through Joe's website and updated content, removed content that was no longer relevant and setup appropriate 301 redirects so that he would not lose equity in his search rankings any more than necessary.

I also did a full content audit of his website. The audit brought together page-level data from multiple sources so that I could see how much each page was being visited, how much time people were spending on each page, how well the pages were ranking in search, and how many organic search visits were coming to each page.

After consolidating this information, I grouped the content into several categories, including the following list and implemented an action plan to make these recommended changes over the course of several months.

• Essential content that would not be changed
• Content that needed to be improved
• Content that could be merged together to improve performance
• Content that was not performing well and not essential that could be removed

In addition, I began performing keyword research and on-page optimization for SEO. As a result, I fixed a number of on-page technical SEO issues, and I also added content strategically to increase the keyword spread of key pages on the Claborn Farms website.

The result of these content marketing efforts was that relevant, qualified traffic to Joe's website began to grow significantly, giving him strong sales during the springtime peak with traffic approximately doubling over the previous years' numbers.

In addition, I used heat maps and split testing while performing other changes on his website, both to streamline and simplify it for customers and to optimize it for conversions. As a result, the conversion rates approximately doubled prior to the introduction of the shipping rate increases that I mentioned earlier.