We helped Ahmad Tea design an e-commerce website for their UK customers and Trade buyers.

The Challenge

Ahmad Tea approached us back in June with an e-commerce website design to sell their products online within the UK. The internal print/packaging design team had spent some time designing what the UK version of the website would look like. However, management at Ahmad Tea weren’t happy with the direction that the design was going.

Ahmad Tea approached us because they wanted to work closely with a local creative, digital agency to help fix what the internal design team had put together. The project had a tight turn around and so we offered to work onsite with the team to produce a design solution.

The Solution

This e-commerce website had to act as a hub for customers to purchase teas and gifts sets, whilst also handle Trade users to place bulk stock orders.

Trade Order Feature

Until now, Trade users have had to place orders through an offline, laborious manual process. They would fill out an order form and then call up the Ahmad Tea team to place the order. We needed to create a place where Trade customers could fill out an interactive form to bulk buy their products more quickly and efficiently. There were a few requirements for this feature:

• Trade users can only access the form if they have an account and are logged in
• Create a search feature to make the process quicker for users
• Breakdown products into two categories: groceries and gifts
• Present users with a running total of the products being placed into their basket

Below you can see how we’ve created this interactive form for Trade user

Home Page

The home page that was designed internally didn’t have a modern look and feel about it. The site would have looked outdated on launch and didn’t reflect the Ahmad Tea brand in the right light. When redesigning this page and the rest of the site there where some constraints we had to work with because of their existing e-commerce platform:

• Logo sitting centrally in the navigation
• Keeping the building architecture
• Sticking with the page layout

We made a number of changes to help improve the look and feel of the home page. These changes have also been reflected throughout the entire site design as we were trying to make everything as reusable as possible. 

• We’ve removed and reduced the amount of beige colours used throughout the site as it made it feel dated. There needed to be more white space to make it feel modern and clean.
• Reduced the amount of architecture used around all the content blocks and restricted it to sit on the edge of the pages. This definitely helps to make it feel less crowded.
• Increase the width of the grid.
• Reduced the usage of the brand green as a background colour on content blocks.
• Improved the navigation structure to make it feel more balanced.

Categories & Filtering

Undeniably the categories and products pages are an integral part of an e-commerce website, helping guide customers to the products they’re interested in more quickly. The way products are presented and how filtering works is really important and can affect sales rates. We’ve improved the filtering by reducing and renaming the filters to sit inline with the filters used on the other global e-commerce sites. Users can now filter by:

• Price
• Occasion
• Refine
• Loose Tea Range Options

You can also change the number of products viewed per page and how products are sorted.

The design work that we have done for Ahmad Tea is currently in development with an external team. Keep up to date with this project on our Twitter and Instagram.