12 Months of Sales in 4 Weeks - How Notcutts Are Beating COVID
If you live in the UK and you’ve ever considered yourself ‘green-fingered’, then you’ve likely heard of horticultural superstars Notcutts. A high-end garden centre chain, Notcutts offer their customers more than just a sale. They offer a day out, events and a wide range of meals and snacks from their onsite restaurants.
Notcutts provide their customers an experience which transcends mere shopping.
You can browse for a couple of evergreens, enjoy their gardens, and stop off for a pot of tea and a scone while you’re at it. Successfully helping home gardeners since 1897, it’s no surprise that they are the best at what they do, and have created a genuinely authentic experience in shopping.
Hurricane COVID, inbound
In March 2020, a pandemic hit not just the UK, but the world. By now, we’re all familiar with the term “lockdown”, and what it means for physical and digital businesses across the country. Shops closed. Offices closed. Small businesses, devastated.
And, naturally, garden centre gates were also closed.
When this all began, it was easy for business owners to despair. But Notcutts and Pivotal have had a strong relationship for years now - so we did what we would for any client. We made it work, and we made sure that Notcutts continued to win.
It’s tragic to see how many incredible businesses have suffered through this pandemic, and we wish we could help them all. At Pivotal, we are an extension of our client's team. And with Notcutts, we felt an almost familial responsibility to get it right.
No-one could have predicted the pandemic, but we saw clearly what was coming for the UK’s famed garden centre. And what we saw was a silver lining and opportunity to strengthen the business.
A Whole New World
By now, we’re all long past hopes and dreams of closing our eyes tight and praying for a swift return to ‘normal’. COVID has changed the world irrevocably, but rather than focus on the bad and the sad that we all know is there, we’re here to talk about evolution.
It was clear that more people working from home or furloughed will inevitably always lead to an uptick in website traffic. And it was also fairly easy to predict the significant lift in people finding new ways to entertain themselves – and what better path than at-home horticulture?
Despite their doors closing, Notcutts were primed for a huge season, and we knew exactly how to help them realise it.
It took timing, teamwork, expertise, and a little bit of luck, but as Notcutts pushed through the pandemic, things were not only looking up in their digital landscape, they were better than ever.
So how did we do it? What are the steps to success? Dedication, technical know-how and attention to detail.
“To be honest, it was always a reactive situation,” says Nate, Pivotal's Digital Development Manager. “We didn’t plan for a marketing push and anticipate extra traffic of a certain level. It was all unprecedented. We just ensured that the traffic levels we were seeing didn’t exhaust the server resources and we were an extension of Notcutts team 24/7.”
How We Helped Notcutts Thrive
To handle the already flourishing website we’d created for Notcutts, we implemented well-developed and tested upgrades and vital hosting changes with meticulous timing. Of course, this was all part of the Pivotal digital strategy roadmap - it just came a little sooner than expected.
Thanks to the strong, collaborative relationship we’ve cultivated with Notcutts though, speeding up the plan was simple.
At Pivotal, we make sure clients always receive the very best services. Prior to the pandemic, we had already implemented a shift for Notcutts onto a virtual Cloud Infrastructure, using Google Cloud Services (which we manage for the company). However, once we reached the second and third week of lockdown, we saw the anticipated dramatic shift in online traffic.
People across the country were being furloughed and asked to work from home, and that meant more people in the garden. More customers looking to fill their time and develop their gardening hobbies. Which meant rapidly rising traffic to the Notcutts website.
Handling huge traffic
When Notcutts first engaged Pivotal, their website was on a physical server box. This meant there was no simple way to increase their resources to deal with the kind of traffic surge the pandemic presented. Thankfully, rectifying this was one of the first steps Pivotal took with Notcutts, even before COVID hit. Considering the significant increase in traffic their website received, it's a move we're grateful to have embedded into our standard early-stage processes.
Even so, in those early-lockdown days, Notcutts experienced around eight times the usual volume of traffic to their site - more than anyone could have predicted.
To help handle this, Pivotal upgraded their site to run on Magento's latest and greatest, which also enabled gifting. This meant that customers could buy gifts online, wrapped and ready to go. But even as this traffic spike slowed a little and lockdown continued, we knew that the Notcutts server needed more resources.
Server Upgrade
This kind of trend in traffic meant that to continue to run smoothly, the Notcutts site needed an improved server, so we actively took steps to ensure uptime and operations. Since we’d already shifted the site to a cloud server, we could easily implement an upscale, and then reduce this again as traffic levels returned to something closer to normal.
User Experience
All the while, we worked to make sure the user experience on the Notcutts site remained effortless and trouble-free. In collaboration with UX agency, The User Story, we quickly developed and deployed a new checkout that refined the way customers experienced the page.
By shortening forms, changing the colours and improving the use of labels and layout of buttons, we simplified the user interface for Notcutts customers. Which, overall, made the checkout much easier to navigate and complete a transaction.
The Result – Notcutts in Bloom
The COVID pandemic presented a situation that no one could have predicted. The ripple effect of lockdown was unprecedented, and whilst detrimental for some, has been surprisingly beneficial for others.
Notcutts, as a prestigious household garden centre, was (of course) likely to fare fairly well. But through close collaboration, we’re proud to say they’ve done more than just survive - despite significant challenges, they have overcome and had a truly amazing, profitable year.
Notcutts may have had to close 30 of their garden centres and restaurants across the country. They may have had to re-evaluate their staffing needs because of the pandemic (like so many others). But in these highly challenging times, they have more than endured. They have consistently weathered the pandemic storm, and proven themselves an exemplary business capable of adapting smoothly to turbulent, dynamic changes.
They have proven it is possible for businesses to beat COVID, with the right team and digital strategy in place.
In fact, thanks to the combined efforts of Notcutts and Pivotal, Notcutts could successfully handle the huge influx of customers that lockdown encouraged. A sizable uptick that translates to the company clearing a phenomenal 12 months' worth of online sales in just four weeks. If that isn’t a serious accomplishment, then we don’t know what is!
We worked hard at Pivotal to make sure Notcutts never saw a blip of trouble with their site as traffic grew. Because every client is as important as the team we work with every day.
Always growing and striving for more, for better - for the best - we worked fast, and we put in the effort to ensure that Notcutts had everything they needed. And now, we’re eager to get back at it again, with our planned optimisation program in 2021.