Stephen Jose

This was a small project to stand up a basic shopfront quickly, and with a customized checkout process built around a sales quotation business model. Green River Gate is a fabrication shop that makes cattle handling fences and gates to measure for farming.

Green River Gate operates on a sales quotation basis for each order, and so their online store needed a modified checkout. All of Green River Gate’s products are made to order, and sized to the customers specifications. The products on the webstore are not actually for sale as is. The website would be small and basic, but needed a strong design, and a bespoke checkout process.

The Quotation Business Model
When shopping in a conventional webstore, a customer will identify the products they want, and then purchase those products near the end of the checkout process. The business would then jump into fulfillment mode, packing a product, and shipping it to the customer.

Green River Gate operates on a slightly different process where the customer requests a quote for the products they would like to have built. The webstore needed to reflect that, and so it’s checkout process needed to modified:

1. Customer adds the products and their rough dimensions to the cart.
2. At checkout, the customer provides their contact information, and requests a quote.
3. The website sends an email to the Green River Gate sales team.
4. A Green River Gate sales rep contacts the customer to get exact details of the products needed.

In this way, the website essentially serves as a highly qualified lead generation tool for Green River Gate’s sales teams.

Tarter USA is a farm equipment manufacturer based in the US. They produce a wide variety of large tools, many of which are designed to be pulled by a tractor, and serve a very specific function in farming. Tarter Parts is a business line of Tarter USA through which they sell the individual parts that make up their products.

I got involved when I was asked to consult on Tarter’s efforts to make their extensive parts inventory available for sale to the public through the TarterParts.com website. After looking closely into several turnkey options without finding a good match, it became apparent that Tarter didn’t need a full fledged, third-party solution, and really just needed a smarter shopfront with some good logic behind it.

Providing Tarter with a solution meant creating new product pages in Shopify that react to a particular arrangement of product metadata. All of the products that TarterParts.com sells are parts of a finished product sold by TarterUSA. Three aspects of this solution were key to understanding and accounting for programmatically:

1. Nesting products inside unsellable products.
2. Associating a part to a number on a diagram.
3. Handling sub-assemblies of parts.

Worm Wrangler came to us in 2023 seeking a new design for their website and online store wormwrangler.org. They already had a small WordPress site, and had previously invested in some SEO fundamentals. The problem was the generic design did nothing to promote the character of the business to the audience they needed to reach. There was also no consistency in page layout, which made adding content to the site difficult for the client.

While this project had some specific design goals to meet, there was also the future use of the site to account for. Budget was a concern for this client, but they also understood the need to invest in a robust digital presence. To this end the site needed to be inexpensive to run, while also being flexible enough to enable the client to explore new opportunities without further spend.