Milly's Kitchen

Milly's Kitchen began supplying Auckland's serious cooks with quality, stylish kitchenware from their ornate Ponsonby store in 1983. From one retail outlet Milly's has evolved into a veritable cooking institution with the establishment of a cooking school. The Auckland Cooking Academy, a second retail store in the Strand Parnell, the growth of a substantial catalogue based mail order business, and the development of key new product categories including their wedding gift registry.

At a Glance

Challenge

In 2000 Milly's determined they needed an online presence. The core objective was for the new site to function as an online store. A store that would showcase Milly's extensive product range and empower Milly's staff to manage the site themselves. Ancillary objectives included creating synergies with their mail order business which had an existing membership database of 14,000 users. Bolstering growth categories such as Milly’s wedding registry was also of central importance.

Solution

The implementation of Shado CMS e-commerce and Content Management solution. This included the following development features:

• A database driven shopping site
• Products available by category and category themes
• Multiple functionality, product linked content
• Content Management System
• Seamless integration with existing accounting package and system
• Real-time payment with two-stage authentication

Online Store. Straker utilized the Shado CMS eStore to build the store element. It works on the basis of a "product" and "product instance" relationship whereby the product holds the core general data and a general image, and the “product instance” holds the pricing, specific image and any additional details such as stock-on-hand.

Milly's staff load the products through a browser based interface. An integrated stock update list is exported from their internal stock system. Once run this views actual stock levels and then matches these levels with products on the site. Any products that do not show stock are set inactive on the site.

The store also incorporates a membership registry system so that common details such as address and delivery details prepopulate. This facilitates targeted promotions to clients.

Wedding Registry. A key part of Milly's business is wedding sales. Therefore in 2001 the decision was made to create an online wedding registry. This enables customers to register online and create their own tailored register from products available on the site. Customers can also request that special products be added to their register and Milly’s have the ability to place these products on the site but set them as “wedding only” items if they do not want them to be generally available.

A couple can decide to make their register public or private. If public, then they provide their guests with a username and password and they can order the gifts online. If private, then guests make their purchases at one of Milly's store locations.

Auckland Cooking Academy. In 2003 Milly's launched The Auckland Cooking Academy which is housed in a purpose built facility. The Academy offers a range of 'theatre style' or 'hands on' courses. To promote this new feature of the site Straker chose the Rich Internet option utilizing Flash remoting and ColdFusion to deliver a more stimulating user experience.

Each cooking instructor has their own site listing with their courses referenced against them. A user can select courses either by cook, course type or date. This module was separate and simply involved the addition of a new product category in the store 'Cooking School'. This allows Milly's to manage the Cooking School classes through the same interface and with the same base information as they do a physical product. The Academy cart links to the standard store cart so users can purchase either products or cooking school classes as desired.

Results

At the start of the project Milly's could see the ability to reduce the number of print catalogues they produced by utilizing the web to run more of the specials and new products available. They expected users of the site would be their existing customers, in particular their mail-order customers. However it soon became apparent that a full 30% of site transactions came from completely new customers. Another unexpected outcome was the number of orders from expatriate New Zealander's using Milly's to buy gifts for family and friends back home.

The most significant part of Milly's online business today is their Wedding Registry.

“The Shado CMS has allowed us the freedom to manage the general content of our site as well as change daily specials whenever we want. Custom built templates enable us to create a unique experience for our customers providing a mix of products and general information on seasonal or topic specific promotions.”
Geoff Muir, Milly’s CEO.