As a fabric distributor that deals nationwide, the online store experience is important for 1502 Fabrics. Much of their sales had come from local buyers and contacts with furniture companies, previously. While that made for a solid core business for many years, in 2015 1502 Fabrics decided to make their website a bigger part of the process.

They were interested in SEO services to improve their online presence and drive more traffic to the store, but first they knew they needed an updated design. After all, new traffic would only be useful if those visitors were interested in buying.

When we began planning their design, we decided that large imagery would need to be a focus in such a product-driven site. More than anything else, visitors needed to be pulled in by the fabric designs right away. Images aside, the store would need to be easily accessible and equally easy to filter.

The main page provides several ways to engage. Alongside a brief intro users can sort by category, color, manufacturer, and even price range. On mobile this capability is directly beneath the intro text, and in a few clicks a user can be right upon the fabrics they are looking for.

Any current special is aptly displayed next, followed by the store's newest fabric arrivals. Once on a product page, information is clearly laid out and related products are suggested below. If users find a product they like, it encourages other shopping. If that particular item isn't what they were looking for, the odds that they'll find something else are greater.

To handle more than 600 products, the owners of 1502 Fabrics needed to be able to quickly add and edit fabric varieties. We employed the widely used WooCommerce plugin, which integrated well with their payment gateways and gave a lot of organization options for the products. On top of being secure and heavily supported, WooCommerce is also easy to use especially with large databases of products.

Launch and Success

Within a month of the site's launch in early 2016, 1502 Fabrics went on to have more sales than they ever had previously through the website. The most total orders, but also the largest order they'd ever sold online.