GloryBee recognized that their website was outdated and wasn’t serving their customers well. Their primary customer group, their wholesale customers, made up the majority of the company’s revenue source, but the main website was built for their retail customers and really focused on niche beekeeping and craft products rather than GloryBee’s core product offerings.
The on-site experience was so bad that most of their wholesale customers weren’t using the site at all, leaving the customer service team bogged down by calls, emails, and requests that should have easily been handled by a functional B2B ecommerce site.
In addition to the poor functionality of the wholesale site, it was also difficult to get to. The wholesale subdomain was barely ranking in search and confusing to navigate to once on the retail site. GloyBee’s vision to create several microsites solved for the goal to create a tailored experience for specific customer groups but didn’t take into account the scope of work it would take to build dozens of unique sites or the fact that there would be no simple way to cross-sell to a customer that needed both honey and coconut products, for example, if they existed on separate domains with separate carts.