Bee By The Sea
Bestselling body cream made with sea buckthorn and 🐝 honey
Background
Bee by The Sea Natural Products was founded in 2008 by Andrew Wingrove with the chance discovery of the sea buckthorn berry while travelling abroad. After extensive research and development, Bee launched a cream unlike anything else on the market. Fast forward 12 years and they are still producing that same bestselling body cream. They’ve expanded their offerings to include a whole assortment of healthy products. Best of all, everything is produced and packaged in Ontario.
Project
Bee needed a new website. Well actually, they needed two-in-one. Their business has two major segments: end consumers, and wholesale users. To better serve both segments, Bee was looking for a way to have their website look and feel different based on what user was logged in. Or to put it another way, they needed a way for their wholesale customers to have a different experience from end consumers.
This meant we needed to build two websites disguised as one! The goal was to give Bee the flexibility of using one platform to better serve their customers and also make their own lives a tad easier.
Reducing the number of clicks required
Bee stressed the importance of reducing the number of clicks it takes for a viewer to get to where they want to go. To do this, we focused on the navigation. When on a computer, the viewer can mouse over any of the dropdowns along the top to be greeted with a very unique drop down effect. On mobile, we implemented the ability to view the dropdown information with the use of tabs. See the video and picture below to see this in action.
Before the new website, users did not have the ability to filter through products within the navigation. This filter greatly reduces the number of pages they need to go through to find the product they want.
Grid-style promotional blocks
Promoting your products on your own website is a huge key to success for any ecommerce business. We decided to create two types of promotional blocks that Bee can place anywhere on their site. The first is a single, full page promotion, the second is a 3 card block promoting 3 different options. Check this out in action below.
Full page search
If the user cannot find what they are looking for using the extensive drop down navigation, they can use the site wide search option instead. This search menu is a full page option, as can be seen in the video below.
Rewards
Bee wanted to include the rewards program information in a manner that was easier to digest. To do so, we fixed a button to the bottom left of every page which opens up a rewards panel with customizable information. Viewers can now easily see how many reward points they have, along with how to earn more.
Contact options
Bee recently opened a physical store, and as such, needed a way for viewers to easily get directions to this new location. We implemented an option for viewers to click the map that will automatically open Google Maps.
We also made the contact information stick on the left side of the screen to always remain in view. This small effect adds to the overall polish of the design and greatly improves user experience.
Ecommerce Solution
Creating a minimal store, packed full of features
When browsing products, a viewer is greeted with a traditional grid of options. From here, the viewer can mouse over any of the links and quickly view the product.
A bold product page.
When viewing a single product page, the viewer is greeted with a very unique design. Typically, the product images are along the left or the right, however, we decided to go a different route. We put the photo front and center, and then pinned the ability to add the product to cart to the top right corner of the screen.
Final Comments
More features
This project is packed full of features and we barely even touched the surface. If you like what you see and you want us to help with your next website let us know and we can discuss even more of the features we built into this project.
Could you be next?
We are always looking for more forward thinking clients. Bee allowed us the creative freedom necessary to make all of the features that they wanted possible. We had a blast working with them and developing this website. If you want your business to have a website that stands out, let us know! We would love to see how we can help.