Ecommerce Fulfillment:
Shipping Conditionally Perishable Products
See how we helped an artisanal chocolate company protect their product, simplify logistics management and deliver an even sweeter customer experience.
The Client
Lake Champlain Chocolates (LCC), makes some of the world’s finest artisanal chocolates and ships them to consumers and wholesale customers nationwide from their headquarters in Burlington, VT.
LCC fulfills these B2B and B2C orders year-round with an especially high sales volume during peak seasons like Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Christmas.
The Challenge
Unfortunately, shipping perishable chocolates over great distances and across various climate zones isn’t as simple (or delicious) as eating them.
Ensuring every delivery arrives at its destination with freshness, flavor, and appearance intact is essential to the LCC customer experience. Without the right shipping and logistics foundation, their products (and brand) could suffer.
Before engaging with MoJo Active, LCC used a mix of manual and automated processes that required in-depth knowledge of UPS shipping systems, average transit times, holiday schedules, package contents, and seasonal destination temperatures.
Our primary objectives for this project included:
- Lower the cost of sales by automating manual processes
- Achieve greater control over seasonal shipping, delivery, and logistics
- Improve customer experience through design and purchase flow enhancements
- Erin Douglas, Digital and Direct Marketing, Lake Champlain ChocolatesMoJo Active was genuinely interested in our company, the website, and our concerns. The team really listened.
The Solution
We learned early in our conversations with Lake Champlain Chocolates that their unique challenges needed a set of specialized solutions. “Off-the-shelf” was not going to work.
MoJo Active met the client’s challenges and objectives head-on within the replatforming and site redesign process. We developed and implemented a series of backend integrations to ensure customer delight from the moment an order is placed until it’s unboxed and enjoyed.
The new automated system streamlines LCC’s fulfillment process. It calculates and shares essential shipping information directly with their shipping department, eliminating time-consuming manual tasks and reducing errors. Additionally, customers can only select shipping options that ensure products arrive safely, improving the customer experience and minimizing product damage. This solution successfully replicates the efficiency of LCC’s previous custom system within the BigCommerce environment.
To accomplish that goal, we leveraged MoJo Active’s Integration Platform and brought multiple solutions together into one unified, engaging customer experience that includes:
- Gifting mechanisms to accommodate personalized messages
- Delivery selection options that allow customers to choose arrival dates
- Streamlined shipping choices to ensure product quality and customer convenience
- Jim Carpenter, Co-Owner, MoJo ActiveMoJo Active always puts the clients first. We don't measure success by the number of apps integrated or the clout of the tools used. We measure success by developing the right solutions to do the right job for our clients.
The Movement
With the help of careful project planning and strategic execution every step of the way, the new LCC site launched just in time to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.
Our expertise in ecommerce replatforming, specifically with BigCommerce, allowed us to bring fulfillment possibilities to life that other firms couldn’t offer. As a result, LCC can now ensure that every order reaches its destination intact, delighting customers across many geographic locations and climate zones.
Some additional outcomes that helped LCC move their market:
- Reduced shipping-related refunds and returns
- Reduced staff equipment and training time
- Empowered customer service representatives to resolve issues, manage complex orders, and provide top-notch support from within the BigCommerce backend
- Enabled a seamless B2B buying process for corporate gifting
