Harvest to Home united their network of family farmers to bring fresh produce to New Jersey in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. When other supermarkets were out of stock with most of these products, Harvest To Home seeked to bridge the gap by providing next day, no-contact delivery direct to its consumers doors. Their desire was to support their network of farmer's unexpected influx in inventory and reduce waste from produce meant for restaurants who had unfortunately closed due to the pandemic. By offering the ability to buy these products from the comfort and safety of their home, this only added another advantage for consumers to utilize their website versus risking infection by leaving their houses to go to a store only to find that the items they needed were not even available.

User Interface

When it came to the initial user interface and experience for Harvest To Home, the goal was to create a one page ecommerce site that listed their starting inventory of 2 dozen products which included fresh fruits and vegetables. This quickly scaled into a robust ecommerce website that housed nearly 200+ products and spanned multiple pages all while offering "virtual aisles" that allowed users to find the products they were looking for seamlessly and easily.

 

 

User Experience

Pickup/Delivery

The initial request for Harvest to Home was to have the ability to offer two options to their target audience: the ability to choose whether they would like to pickup their order or the ability to have it delivered. Requirements of this request also had to meet specific delivery locations so we needed to implement a solution that also allowed the ability to verify if the consumer was in the zip code that was eligible for local delivery.

The company scaled quickly and within a matter of 1 week they were maxing out their order threshold which required a new feature request to be implemented within the original one: the ability to allow users to select their delivery date all while creating order time cutoffs to alleviate some of the burden on the logistical aspects of the warehouse team. By implementing a date and time picker across Delivery and Pickup, Harvest to Home was able to regain their footing and customers felt more in control of when they wanted their order to arrive.

 

 

Filter/Sort

As Harvest to Home's inventory expanded from a couple dozen products to over 200, we needed to incorporate a way to narrow down ones search even further when browsing a digital aisle. By adding filtering by product type, brand and price, users were able to find what they were looking for faster when information overload presented itself upon their first page of results.

 

Waitlist Lead Generation

Since Harvest to Home was only available in a few select New Jersey counties, we took this opportunity to capture some customer data by seeing what the demand would be like to open up our delivery service to counties outside of the initial Northern NJ marketplace. By placing this CTA on the hero area of the homepage, we gained over 4000 submissions all the while gaining customer insight and contact information that would remain influential for further followup and ultimately leading to the expansion of our delivery service to areas across Central and Southern New Jersey.

 

 

Backend Reporting

With the implementation of allowing consumers to choose their delivery and/or pickup day, the admins handling the orders on the backend of the website needed an easy way to sort through orders by date while also being able to easily monitor what days were close to meeting or exceeding their daily threshold. By creating custom tabs with customized filters designed to obtain that level of organization, these admin users then had the ability to fine tune their search with a seamless export and fulfillment of orders in one fell swoop. This in combination with custom reporting integrations, which allowed fulfillment centers to order inventory from local hot spots, turned hours of manual labor into data driven solutions in a matter of minutes.

 

Driver Tip

For customers who chose delivery at checkout, we began to see a surge of requests involving ways to tip drivers while adhereing to our no-contact delivery promise. Since Shopify didn't have an option to support this feature, we created a hack-around by creating a "Driver Tip" product and placed a CTA button at the top of the cart page to encourrage users to add one. This was especially prime real estate on mobile and tablet devices because it was the first thing users would see before scrolling down to the bottom of the page to continue to checkout. It was an immediate success with over 194 orders utilizing the feature in its first day and over 8,000 orders in total utilizing it as of July 2020.

 

The Results

Harvest to Home launched on March 25, 2020. In less than 2 weeks, sales grew over 1MM% and daily order averages grew from just a few thousand to nearly $50,000 daily at its peak. By the end of its first month, Harvest to Home reached $1MM in sales and as of July 2020 has achieved over $2MM in revenue. The success of this launch, and the owners ability to adapt in such an influential time period, opened up an entirely new line of business revenue that they can scale now and into the future.