Description
Thrifty Foods is a BC-based grocery store committed to providing quality food products and friendly, helpful service in clean, well-stocked stores. It is this commitment to its customers that prompted Thrifty Foods to undertake a massive web redesign in 2003. Additionally, in a constant effort to keep their team happy and satisfied, they wanted an in-depth "Our Team" section designed.
For their customers, Thrifty Foods wanted their new website to be not only informative but actually useful - they wanted to provide their customers with helpful and unique services, chief among those being a virtual shopping list. Atomic Crayon, in tandem with Mercurial Communications, cooked up several innovative utilities with these services in mind.
We devised a clever system wherein customers can create their own virtual shopping list. This is done by clicking on product checkboxes on a perfect online replica of Thrifty Foods weekly flyer. Once checked, these products will be added to the customer's virtual shopping list. This list not only categorizes the product by store department but also allows the customer to re-organize their shopping list according to the Thrifty Foods location they intend to visit. The shopping list system has also been integrated into Thrifty Foods' colossal recipe database, allowing the customer to add some or all of a recipe's ingredients in a matter of seconds. A customer's favourite recipes can be stored in a private recipe box and all recipes and shopping lists can be viewed for as long as the customer wishes.
Thrifty Foods also wanted to find new, more efficient methods to provide information such as memos and mail-outs to their employees. And at the same time, they wanted to give the employees an opportunity to speak their minds about their jobs, their stores, and to give them a forum to communicate with each other. With this conversational two-way street in mind, we created the "Our Team" section for them. This area of the site includes an online forum, "Beefs & Bouquets", and provides effective methods to supply intra-company communications.
The launch of both the new website and the "Our Team" section has seen Thrifty's website visits increase dramatically. For many users the shopping list functionality has become a key component of their visits to the Thrifty Foods stores.
