Specialty foods cataloger/manufacturer Stonewall Kitchen will relaunch its e-commerce Web site on Oct. 1.
During a tour of the company’s York, ME headquarters for New England Mail Order Association members on Friday, Mark Marquis, e-commerce manager, said one of the goals of the redesign will be to increase conversion rates. StonewallKitchen.com receives about 35,000 unique visitors per week, but he estimated that about 55% to 60% of all Web orders are from people ordering out of the current print catalog.
The site, built with the help of Colchester, VT-based C2, is the first to use Microsoft’s new Commerce Server platform, noted company co-founder Jim Stott.
Stonewall Kitchen got its start in 1991 when Stott and co-founder Jonathan King began selling homemade preserves and plants in a local farmers’ market.
The company will mail 1.3 million copies of its 56-page print catalog this holiday season. The catalog first launched in the fourth quarter of 1999, with a 150,000-piece mailing of a 28-page book. All catalog design is done in-house; the company drops 12 different catalogs each year with four different major creative efforts, said King.
Inbound call center operations were outsourced in August to Call Tech, Columbus, OH. Andrea M. Hall, sales operations manager, noted that while Stonewall was nervous about outsourcing, it was the most feasible option since the company forecast it would need 60 to 70 customer service reps manning the phones this holiday season, a drastic leap compared to last year’s peak of 35 and the four who did the job when the catalog launched in 1999. Call volume is up 26% overall this year.
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