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Magento Open Source for Huge Seasonal Inventory and Content Archive

Broken Arrow Nursery is a well-established nursery with a large retail store located in Hamden, CT. It’s a destination shopping experience for people far and near, with a catalog division for mail orders to customers throughout the U.S. The print catalog evolved to selling plants online via their standard website. The success of this led the owners to invest in a true ecommerce website  to substantially expand and increase online selling possibilities.

Scalability to accommodate the huge existing and ever-increasing inventory was crucial. Broken Arrow sells many native, common, unique, hard-to-find, and specially-cultivated plants (example here). Their arborists and plant specialists are respected thought-leaders in this niche industry. Goals for the website also included solidifying BrokenArrowNursery.com as the go-to source for plant expertise and information on thousands of species.

Magento Website for Building Online Business

To accomplish these goals, Harris Web Works  created a custom, responsive design built in the Magento ecommerce platform. The custom-coded site uses the popular Bootstrap framework, and makes browsing and buying easy for customers viewing on any device. Harris Web Works adapted Broken Arrow’s extensive library of content for easy online viewing and search-ability. Development challenges included:

• Showcasing thousands of unique products throughout the year and highlighting their extensive Christmas selection during the holiday season
• Showing what’s available for sale at the retail store, what’s for sale online, and seasonal stock changes; making it easy for administrators at Broken Arrow to quickly update shopping options as product availability changes
• Making flexible shopping functionality to accommodate unique shipping and inventory requirements – seasonality, weather, state-by-state shipping regulations, timed shipping so plants don’t stay in delivery trucks too long
• Structuring the site and landing pages  to use the extensive database of plant info to attract people who are searching on specific trees and shrubs, regardless of whether those items are currently for sale or not

The Harris Web Works team had strong content to work with in order to optimize the site for search results, primarily in the form of Broken Arrow’s large index of plants. The original, quality content (detailed plant descriptions) creates long-term inbound traffic as pages become indexed by the search engines and visited by users. High quality images of Broken Arrow’s extensive inventory of beautiful plants also enhance the browsing and shopping experience. Broken Arrow Nursery’s retail site is an attractive destination for people to visit and explore, and now the website is a magnet for customers too!