Greencity Wholefoods is a wholesaler of food and drink, based in Glasgow, and celebrating our 40th birthday later this year - I’m sure many of you will have heard of us!
We’re no stranger to eCommerce - we already have a website (www.greencity.coop) but we’re at the early stages of planning a major revamp. We’ve graduated from a self-hosted Zencart site (we still use it, in fact) to the BigCommerce site linked above. Neither approach is completely ideal, and we’d like to solicit advice from other co-ops and - hopefully - build our next website at least in part in partnership with other co-ops.
We’re wholesalers, not technologists. We have an IT department of 2-3 people, but in general we’d like to focus on selling wholefoods. That’s why we moved from self-hosting Zencart to an out-sourced BigCommerce site. But that brought disadvantages, too - BigCommerce might well be ideal for retailers, but it doesn’t fully meet our needs as a wholesaler.
Internally, we’ve talked about commissioning a local developer to build us a new eCommerce site using an industry-standard eCommerce package - much like we did with BigCommerce, but more tailored to wholesale. I’d like to discuss whether that’s the right approach, whether there are co-ops that could do better, seek advice on co-op hosting, etc. Cost is a major factor for us, obviously, but there’s possibly scope for an element of barter!
So, over to you good people - any suggestions on how best to approach this, how to divide the work, would your co-op be willing to tender for part or all of the task?! Any and all advice appreciated!