Retail and Ecommerce
Selling food and drink direct is more profitable than going through a retailer or marketplace. Your website is how you build the customer relationship that makes direct sales work.
£0.23
average cost per order through your own website vs £2.40+ through a marketplace
68%
of artisan food and drink customers prefer buying direct from the producer
3.2x
average lifetime value of a direct customer vs a marketplace customer
Surrey has a strong artisan food and drink scene: independent breweries, local food producers, farm shops, specialty coffee roasters and small-batch makers of all kinds. Most of them sell through farmers markets, local retailers and food marketplaces.
The ones that build a direct-to-consumer website alongside those channels find that direct orders are more profitable, the customer relationship is stronger and repeat purchases happen more naturally.
We work with food and drink producers across Surrey to build online shops that support direct sales, build brand recognition and reduce dependence on marketplaces that take a significant cut of every transaction.
Common problems
An artisan food or drink product has a story: who made it, where the ingredients came from, why the recipe exists and what makes it different. That story is the reason someone buys a jar of Surrey honey from a website rather than from a supermarket shelf. A website that lists SKUs without context misses the point of selling direct.
For consumable food and drink products, the subscription model is enormously valuable. A customer who sets up a monthly delivery of their favourite coffee or hot sauce is worth ten times a one-off buyer. Most food brand websites make subscription an afterthought rather than a primary offer.
Most impulse food and drink purchases online happen on a mobile phone, often after seeing something on social media. A website that takes five seconds to load on a phone loses that customer immediately.
What you get
Why it matters
“A customer who buys your sauce, loves it and subscribes is worth more than a hundred one-off marketplace buyers. Direct sales make that relationship possible.”
“We were selling at markets and through Farmdrop but the margins were brutal. Building our own website and putting some effort into direct orders changed the economics of the business completely. We now do more revenue through the website than through all other channels combined.”
Tom Hale, founder, Hale's Preserves, Godalming · Website, 2024
FAQ
The questions food and drink founders and ecommerce leads ask us most often, before they brief a project.
Clean product photography that does the food or drink justice, full ingredient and allergen information on every product, clear delivery information including any temperature-controlled or Saturday-only constraints, customer accounts with subscription management if you sell on subscription, a brand story page that gives the why, and a way to find stockists if you sell wholesale alongside DTC.
Most projects launch within 5 to 7 weeks of kick-off. Subscription products or B2B-plus-DTC setups take longer because of the subscription billing logic and trade portal work. Photography is the most common bottleneck for the same reason as fashion: stock images of food sell nothing.
We build subscriptions properly using Shopify's native subscription tools or the established apps (Recharge, Loop, Bold). Customers get a proper subscription portal where they can pause, swap, change frequency and cancel without emailing you. Clunky subscriptions kill churn rates in this category.
Often yes. We build a trade portal layer behind a login that shows wholesale prices, MOQs and trade-only products, while the main DTC store stays clean for retail customers. This keeps your stockists happy without splitting your domain authority across two sites. For very different audiences (consumer vs catering wholesale) two sites can sometimes make more sense.
Brand search is about getting the basics right (clean schema, fast site, consistent details). Product-category search ('award-winning London gin', 'organic granola') is built through proper category pages, recipe and use-case content, correct product schema, and product copy that uses real buyer language. Realistic timeline for movement is 3 to 6 months in less competitive sub-categories.
Areas we cover
We work with food and drink producers across Surrey. The county has a thriving artisan food and drink community, from independent breweries and distilleries in Guildford and Farnham to farm shops and food producers across the Surrey Hills.
More in retail and ecommerce
Other industries we work in across retail and ecommerce. Each page covers the specifics of how we approach websites for that sector.
Start a project
Tell us what you produce, how you currently sell it and what direct sales would mean for your business. We will come back with a clear plan and a cost.
Tell us about your project and we will get back to you within one working day.