Red Horse Vale

Red Horse Vale are a traditional family-run business, based in the heart of Warwickshire. Their country supplies store offers a wide range of products. Their core business is domestic and agricultural fuels, logs, coal and gas as well as alternative heat sources. They also sell building, farm, garden and equestrian and pet supplies.

Since its foundation in 1965 Red Horse Vale have become a valuable part of their local community. Ever since, they have steadily grown and expanded their offering, but their ethos remains unchanged: to provide superior personal service to their many original and loyal customers.

During the first COVID lockdown Red Horse Vale experienced a big increase in demand for ordering online. This highlighted a number of issues with their current website which needed to be addressed.

Slow page speed, difficult navigation, a poor search function, an unreliable checkout process and complicated shipping costs created a disjointed user experience, which resulted in a high percentage of abandoned carts.

The online heating oil cost calculator was created using a different platform and embedded on the website. This created difficulties updating it, and as it often didn’t work, forced people to place phone orders.

Red Horse Vale approached us to create a new ecommerce website that provides an efficient, fast and reliable user experience and frees up valuable resources within the company.

We developed a website strategy that takes into account Red Horse Vale’s operational needs, their customers’ needs, their best-selling items and seasonal trends. This allowed us to create a clear navigation, an intuitive product category hierarchy, sufficient filter options and a focused content structure that helps users to quickly find what they are looking for.

The new website also reflects the Red Horse Vale in store brand experience. As a family run business, they pride themselves in providing a superior personal service to their many customers. We used warm colours, engaging images & copy and provided supportive messages to guide customers through the shopping process.

The new website has a fully integrated heating oil form which calculates the cost of delivering oil based on the user’s specifications, including postcode, quantity, tanker type and additives. This has been built so that Red Horse Vale can quickly and easily update heating oil prices, delivery zones and lead times.

We streamlined the shipping and delivery options and integrated a postcode checker in crucial sections throughout the site.

Since the launch of the new site Red Horse Vale have already seen an increase in sales by 85%.