Central Market, H-E-B's gourmet grocery chain based in San Antonio, is known for a one of a kind in store experience. The goal was to carry that feeling online. It ranks among the largest eCommerce builds of Brian's career.
Central Market specializes in high quality, hard to find gourmet foods. Most locations also have a full service kitchen, cooking and wine classes in a culinary school, and premium catering.
Central Market: the grocery eCommerce brief
Nine stores, each with roughly 26,000 products whose prices, stock and promotions change daily. Online prices had to match the shelf, the cooking school needed online registration and the editorial team publishes a deep library of food content.
WooCommerce build for nine stores
- WooCommerce on WordPress for the catalog and every content need.
- Scheduled sync with the inventory system so online data mirrors each store.
- Cooking school booking and payment for one or many guests, with emailed barcodes scanned at a kiosk for attendance.
- Recipes with shoppable ingredients, plus shopping lists built from products or recipes.
- A personal dashboard for lists, saved content and class history.
- Images managed in Adobe Scene7 flow through, so product photos update on the site as soon as the team changes them.
Keeping online prices in step with the shelf
Grocery data changes every day: prices, inventory, availability, sales and coupons. Our team built a data migration and product data sync script that runs on a predetermined schedule and integrates with Central Market's product inventory system, so the price customers see online is the same price they see in the store.
Cooking School online
All nine locations run a Cooking School onsite. Visitors browse a catalog of classes, register themselves or several people at once and pay online. Each registered student gets an email with a unique barcode to print, bring to class and scan at a kiosk to record attendance. Central Market manages its events, attendees and reports from the same platform.
Recipes, lists and a personal dashboard
The blog covers Tips & Tricks, Entertaining Ideas, Foodie Finds and Recipes. Because WooCommerce powers the catalog, editors place products into recipe ingredient lists so visitors can shop a recipe. Logged in users build shopping lists from the catalog or from a recipe and then Shop The List. Their dashboard shows those lists, favorited content and the cooking classes they have attended or are scheduled to attend.
Why it mattered for online grocery
After a two year build, the partnership kept going, with users' ideas regularly turned into new features.
WooCommerce and WordPress stack
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Inventory sync
- Adobe Scene7
- Event registration
Project leadership by Brian Messenlehner, AlphaWeb founder.
Related: Building WooCommerce for Large Catalogs and Real Retail Operations, WooCommerce Development: Stores, Bookings and Memberships on WordPress, Campbell Soup Company: Corporate Site and Recipe Importer and Starbucks: A Barista Learning Platform on WordPress.
