Website: http://www.carodanfarm.com/
Description: Carodan Farm started its wool business back in 1980, and has since expanded to offer a full range of natural fiber yarns, blends of these yarns, and knitting supplies. Classes are also taught on the farm as well as workshops for SoXperience, which is hosted there every June. Due to its location in rural Virginia, the farm shop did not receive much drop in traffic, so they decided to launch an online store. Carodan Farm’s website was designed to offer its customers an easy way to shop for the best in knitting supplies while maintaining a friendly farm-like look and feel, incorporating photos of animals, farm life and family. The website has allowed them to open their doors for business worldwide, while still offering the prompt, friendly service that the business was founded on.
Technologies used: “We use the ShopSite shopping cart software and have found it extremely user friendly from both a merchant and customer perspective”, states Caroline Hershey of Carodan Farm. She went on to state, “from our perspective, the inventory tracking portion of the software has offered the advantage of automatically updating the number of units available for purchase. This is especially important during a sale when you definitely don’t want to have to follow up with customers notifying them their sale item is out of stock. From the customer’s perspective, the Order Status Module is of great benefit. They can check their order online to find messages pertaining to it, shipping information, etc. From our viewpoint, one more part of customer service (such as shipping notification) has been taken care of quickly. Our recent site redesign has led to a 50% increase in sales as well. We also use a GeoTrust QuickSSL secure certificate, giving our online customers peace of mind knowing that a higher level of security has been provided for all communications.”
