Building an award-winning food e-commerce platform
The Fridge: Episode 9
We often get asked why we decided to be an online food platform and how we managed to power through for as many years as we have now.
When we first decided to go online, our goal was to see if anyone would come to our website and order. We wanted to test out our Squarespace template website (that I made in one night like a geek) very simply: no fancy animations, no crazy designs, and no tracking whatsoever.
Back then, there was basically no UX (User experience). Ordering was a hassle as you would have a dropdown list with 25 zip codes to select delivery and phone usability was a disaster. Yet, people still ordered.
After that, we had to develop our digital game a little further, so we moved to Shopify, one of the top e-commerce champions, and started building something more sophisticated.
It took us three stressful, mentally draining yet rewarding months of development with developers that “speak different languages” to finally have something worthy of going live for.
The actual launch happened while I was on holiday (in hindsight, that’s the worst time to go live), which meant I had to fix problems on my phone with a poor internet connection.
We started investing in social and search ads early on (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Google…) as it was the fastest way to gain traction and attract as many people as possible to Madame Sum. It was a bit of a gamble at first, allocating the right budget to the right campaign and audience, but we soon understood that investing more and smarter would allow us to reap the fruits of our labor.
That’s when we met Niels (#ThankYouAnthony ). Niels joined Madame Sum full-time with two missions: To improve our Digital marketing and ads “game” and bring our e-commerce to the next level.
He went on to build us an award-winning e-commerce platform (5 awards in 2022, from 3 Digital Commerce Awards to 2 Best of Swiss Web Awards) and will share how he did it in
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When I started working full-time for Madame Sum with the mission of leading the creation of a brand new website, there were things I wanted to strongly focus on from not only my own experience but also what I saw was lacking from the previous website.
First, think mobile-first.
We already saw a huge shift from desktop to mobile, which would only increase in the future, so we had to develop our site to be the most compatible.
Second, with a new website came new wishes, especially from a design and branding perspective. This can be challenging because, from a digital perspective, usability and conversion optimization is a top priority. However, we needed to keep our essence, so we had to find common ground and manage expectations while not sacrificing performance when adding branding and cool animations.
We had already had our loyalty program, “The Dumpling Addict Club,” in place. Still, we knew we had to take it to a whole new level through the gamification of adding a tier system, rewards, and a referral program, birthing a highly engaged, close-knit community to present.
As Tobia mentioned previously, we had basically no UX, so how could we make it more engaging and straightforward to navigate for existing and new customers?
Well, during one of my courses in my digital education I came across the book “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug, which I strongly recommend to anyone that plans on making or is managing an e-commerce website. The main takeaway is precisely as the title suggests, don’t make your customers think; make things as easy as possible because down the line, it is as simple as that.
What we got was something I was incredibly proud of. However, you should never stop optimising your platform once you go live. With creative inputs such as animations and videos, you sacrifice speed, so this was one of the first things we took care of as it impacted the user experience. Combined with constant testing and tracking, collecting and analysing customer feedback, we implemented some great additional features over time.
You might think this end of the story, a new website, some awards, and that’s that, but no. That is just the start. The online world changes constantly and rapidly. You can already buy our dumplings with Bitcoin, which at the time of writing would not be the best choice (depending on when you acquired them, of course), but did you ever think of buying dumplings in the metaverse? Me neither, but who knows? That’s the future.
Stay cool, stay steamy
Love,
Tobia and Niels