Written: 06/09/2021
Six Improvements to the Glenkrag Website
It’s said that progress is impossible without change, which is why in recent months our website has undergone a number of changes which we hope will have brought our website on in leaps and bounds of progress. Most of these changes have been quite subtle but all with the emphasis on improving functionality.

Here is a breakdown of some of the recent changes we’ve made

We’ve changed the relationship between accounts and their documents
Up until we made this change if you posted an order or discrepancy through the website then it would only be seen by you. Most of our customers only have one account for the store and that isn’t a big issue, but some have multiple accounts, maybe one for the person who orders dry goods, one for the person who looks after the fish and another for someone who does the accounts. If the person who ordered dry goods posted an order then the person who looked after the account couldn’t see it, nor could they see the discrepancy posted by the person who looks after the fish side of the business. We realised that wasn’t ideal, so we’ve now tied the orders and discrepancies you can see to the trading account and not to the individual user. Now when you look at previous orders you’ll see all the previous orders that have been placed online for the store and not just the user. This also allows our Reps to go in and place an order on behalf of the account which will also show up in your previous orders online and they can view and post discrepancies too. You may already have seen our reps using their phones or tablets more to place orders on the road. It should be noted that the shopping basket still remains unique to each user, one user cannot add or remove items to another person’s basket.

We’re importing web orders directly into our Sales Processing system
We’ve recently switched to using an automated tool to produce orders and pass them straight into our Sales Processing system. This might not sound like it has huge benefits for you the customer but actually it does. We previously printed web orders out, manually noted down the discounts and then they were typed back into our Sales Processing system. By importing orders directly we have taken out the manual human processes, reducing the risks of wrong discounts being given or input errors on those orders as well as being better for the environment not to be printing a lot of web orders out only to reprint them.

See your nett basket value
It has always been a bugbear of our website that the basket showed trade price and not the nett price after any discounts or deals had been applied, so the price you seen on the screen was in some cases higher than the price you’d actually pay. It wasn’t ideal for anyone who was trying to place an order to meet a budget. We’ve now changed that, as of the 1st of September all the values in the basket will show any discount that will be applied to the line as well as the nett line value and order totals, this will also filter through to any orders you look up in your order history that are placed after 1st of September.

Mobile View on More devices
For some years now our website has had a dynamic presentation to it, where it checks the screen resolution it’s being viewed on and presents the best fit of three options that we call mobile, tablet and desktop view. Since we first set that up screen resolutions on phones and tablets have got higher and higher which led to the dynamic element of the website often presenting the desktop version of the site where the phone or tablet version would be much easier to use. We’ve now altered how the website chooses which version is displayed and it now shows the mobile version when it’s viewed portrait regardless of the screen resolution. We hope this will now present the best possible user experience for using the website on your phone or tablet and if you want to switch back then simply turn the device and view it landscape, or a lot of phone browsers have an option in them to display the desktop site.

Speeding Up Handling Discrepancies
It’s just over 2 years since we added a discrepancy form to the website and in that time more and more customers have switched to reporting their discrepancies through the website rather than by e-mail and by phone, have you? It’s quick and easy to log a discrepancy on the website and it gives you a log of what you have reported while at our end it makes it easier to have a digital trail to resolve any issues rather than a paper trail which can sometimes go missing. To try and improve efficiencies when resolving discrepancies we’ve now split it into two forms, one for dry goods and one for live goods, or in most cases goods that should have been live. By dividing discrepancies they can now be delivered directly to the correct department to start investigating them and it makes it a much cleaner process to resolve each discrepancy by the department it relates to rather than have a discrepancy which needs passed through two departments to get a resolution.

We’ve blocked ordering discontinued lines
We’ve always altered the descriptions on the website to show when an item had been discontinued, and customers continued to order them and then they get out of stocked when an alternative item may have been available. We didn’t want to instantly remove items that have been discontinued from the website because they makes you think you’ve gone mad that the item was there last week and gone now, so we have taken away the order box on lines that are discontinued. This means they can no longer be ordered and it allows you the opportunity to look for an alternative product so you have something to put on your shelves.