What is Cuculo?
Cuculo Deli is one of our favourite places to be in Heathfield High Street. With Cinzia’s Italian roots, it was actually given it’s name from the Italian translation of cuckoo! A really fabulous delicatessen.
With the strange times we find ourselves in this year, as with all high street businesses, Cuculo have been looking to diversify a little – to make it easier for their customers to buy from them. They came to Sokada to chat about having a nice new website. But with the addition of an online shop; to showcase some of their products as well as giving customers the option to either have them delivered, or to collect from the shop.
A bit of history…
We have known James and Cinzia for many years now and what we can guarantee is the warm welcome you receive on entering their deli. The wonderful products that you can buy, but also the exceptional product knowledge they have of everything they sell.
Cinzia is from the Cervinia region of Italy so her cooking and baking skills are second to none! She is knowledgable about everything in the shop and will cook and bake bespoke food if you place an order.
James is the wine connoisseur – and once you tell him what sort of wine you like, a bottle will most probably be opened to taste as well as offering something a little different that you may like to try. They are excellent at upselling that’s for sure!
The Deli
In this amazing little High Street shop, you can buy cheeses, cured meats, wine, handmade chocolates as well as other artisan groceries. There is also a deli counter where you can find homemade sausage rolls, olives, antipasti, sun-dried tomatoes and much more. It really is filled with so many wonderful treats; for a dinner party, family get together or just to have a wonderful meal on a Friday night!
The Pizzas
Pizza is always such a great choice for all. And there is nothing better than homemade pizza. It makes those nasty supermarket pizzas taste of nothing but cardboard!! Cuculo Deli offer an amazing choice of some quite unusual flavours for their pizzas, which makes them so popular. For that as well as the amazing pizza dough, made by Michele Macaro in his converted horse box outside Cuculo! And you can now order your take-away pizza online, to be enjoyed on either a Thursday or Friday evening. Just fabulous…
The Cuculo Online Shop
Whether you want a cheeseboard or some special meats, then you really should have a browse on the website (designed and developed by our team at Sokada!). Then to enjoy these with a special bottle of wine also ordered online, then you really can’t go wrong!
The Project Brief
James and Cinzia approached us at the beginning of the first lockdown back in March. They asked if we could help them to provide their customers with their fantastic products online. At this point in the pandemic, many small businesses like Cuculo were having to adapt in a similar way. To put it simply, if your business didn’t have an online presence, then now was the time to have one. That’s why we worked with many local businesses to provide them with online ordering solutions that helped them continue throughout the lockdown period.
Cuculo wanted to offer a click and collect service for all their products, as well as a delivery option. This meant that they could not only continue to serve their customers in the local community but also new customers who might be a little further afield.
Cuculo were keen to convey their warmth and welcoming nature on their website. Therefore, we knew that the design of their new online shop needed to be just as inviting as their bricks and mortar shop. We spent a lot of time working with James & Cinzia making sure that the style of this website was perfect.
Bespoke Feature Requirements
Because there were so many sides to the Cuculo products, a lot of thought needed to go into how all of the products and events would work together within the same shop. One of the main things that required a lot of thought was the different delivery options.
Delivery Calculator
The delivery options for a variety of different products they sell relied on a number of conditional criteria. Different delivery options needed to be available based on what products you were ordering as well as how much you were ordering.
Just as an example, one of the delivery offers available is local delivery for pizzas. This offer is available for people within a 5-mile radius, only when you order a bottle of wine. In order to achieve this, we needed to make sure that if a customer had pizza and wine together in a basket, then the option for local delivery must appear. Additionally, pizzas were not available for courier delivery; options for nationwide delivery, therefore, needed to be disabled when a pizza was put in the basket.
For all the products excluding pizzas, Cuculo also wanted to provide free local delivery for people living within a 5-mile radius of the store, if they spent over £30. This delivery option needed to be excluded if you were buying pizzas; but included if you were buying wine, cheese, or charcuterie. The postcode also needed to fall within a 5-mile radius of the store. We achieved this by using a number of different shipping zones which showed the right shipping options based on where you were, what you were ordering as well as how much you were ordering.
The WooCommerce shipping zones needed a lot of thought and planning. We had to test every possible combination to make sure that wherever you were in the country the right delivery options would appear for you.
Cuculo Events
Before the pandemic, Cuculo hosted a number of wine & cheese tasting events throughout the year. These events were well-loved by the community. So when they were forced to temporarily close to customers back in March; they wanted to have an easy way for customers to still attend these sessions online.
This meant that the online shop would need to be able to sell tickets to their wine tasting events. These would essentially be ‘downloadable products’. Once tickets had been purchased, they would be sent a link to connect them to a Zoom call specifically for that event.
Of course, in order to hold these events – the wine and cheese for each event would also need to be delivered to the customer. As these are in reusable glass bottles, you need to pick these up from the shop and return them, and pay a deposit for the bottles.
The Finished Website
We hope you’ll agree that the finished website really helps to show that Cuculo is a friendly, family-run business.
Cuculo are really happy with the end product and are really pleased to have this online ordering capability to serve their customers. Their new online shop will certainly help them through whatever 2021 has in store.
How can we help you? If you are looking to upgrade your online presence, either in the form of a new website, an online shop or perhaps some online marketing, then please get in touch with Sokada Ltd; either by calling us on 01435 817226 or filling in our contact form.