Agriculture, eCommerce
Vogler Agrar
A Swiss farm selling hay, alfalfa, straw and bedding direct to the people who feed animals. The customers range from one rabbit to a full stable, there are two equally sensible ways to shop the catalogue, and the thing that makes the product better cannot be photographed.
- Client
- Vogler Erntegut GmbH
- Sector
- Agriculture, animal feed
- Scope
- eCommerce UX, UI, build
- Role
- Nibin Nelson
01 The problem
Hay looks like hay
The reason to buy from this farm rather than the cheaper supplier is dust. That is also the one thing a photograph cannot show.
Their bedding is de-dusted nine times over. For a horse, dust is a respiratory issue, so owners who have dealt with a coughing animal will pay a real premium for it. Everyone else sees two bales that look identical and one that costs more. The entire commercial argument rests on a property invisible in every product image.
The catalogue has a second problem. Customers naturally shop along two different axes: some think by animal, wanting whatever is right for horses or for rodents, and some think by product, arriving for alfalfa or straw specifically. Both are correct. Pick one and structure the shop around it and you lose the other half.
Then there is scale. The same catalogue serves someone buying a single small bag for a rabbit and a stable ordering by the pallet. Identical products, quantities that differ by orders of magnitude, and completely different expectations about delivery, price per unit and how much of it will fit anywhere.
All of it in German, priced in Swiss francs, for buyers who mostly know exactly what they want and have no patience for a shop that makes them hunt.
02 The approach
Two doors, one catalogue
Rather than pick a winner between the two ways of shopping, both became entry points into the same product set. Horses and rodents lead the customer in by animal; hay, alfalfa and bedding lead them in by product. The same items sit behind both, so nobody is asked to translate what they came for into someone else's filing system.
The invisible quality was made into a visible specification. Dust treatment is a stated, comparable product attribute sitting alongside weight and format, not a line of marketing prose further down the page. When the difference between two products is a number, the more expensive one stops looking arbitrary.
Format and quantity moved to the front of every product card. Bale size, weight and pallet options are visible before the click, so the rabbit owner and the stable manager can both tell in a glance whether an item is meant for them. It is the cheapest way to serve two very different order sizes out of one catalogue.
Provenance does the work that testimonials do elsewhere. This is a farm selling its own harvest directly, which is the whole trust argument, so the operation itself gets real space and real photography rather than the stock imagery every agricultural supplier uses.
The shop was kept deliberately plain. Buyers here usually know what they want, so the design optimises for a fast repeat purchase: short paths, obvious quantities, delivery expectations stated before checkout rather than discovered inside it.
- Dual-axis catalogue architecture
- Product attribute and comparison model
- Product card and detail templates
- Cart, account and checkout flow
- Bulk and pallet ordering paths
- Farm and provenance storytelling
- German-language interface copy
- Responsive front-end build
03 The outcome
The premium, explained
A price difference stops being a price difference once you can see what it buys.
Dust treatment now reads as a specification rather than a claim, which is the argument the farm was already making in person and could not make on a shelf. Customers who care about it can find it; customers who did not know to care are told plainly why one product costs more.
The two entry paths mean nobody has to learn the catalogue before they can use it, and the format details on every card let a single shop serve one rabbit and a full stable without either customer wading through the other's products.
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