Fresh cake ordered online and delivered within 3 hours

Meet Delicia

Handmade cakes from Oslo City and Bekkestua

Delicia is a pastry shop, creperie and cafe, with shops in Oslo City and at Bekkestua in Bærum. The cakes, macarons and chocolate are made by hand, and the range runs from cookies and cupcakes to wedding cakes and chocolate sculptures.

Fresh baking has to go out by car the same day. The rules for delivery, pickup and deadlines already existed in production. What Delicia needed was an online store that knew the same rules, so the customer gets answers online instead of calling.

The challenge

An ordinary checkout doesn't suit fresh goods

An ordinary online store asks for the address at the end and sends the parcel when it is ready. Delicia had to turn that around. Here the address and the time of day decide whether the order can be accepted at all.

A mousse cake can't survive five days in the postal system. The checkout has to know where the customer lives before it promises anything.

Oslo City and Bekkestua have different opening hours, and Oslo City is closed on Sundays. A shared pickup calendar would send people to a locked door.

Big cakes aren't made on the hour. A cake for twenty people with text and decoration is a production job, and the deadline has to be in the checkout, not in an email afterwards.

The solution

The rules from production sit in the checkout itself

We built the online store in WooCommerce, and everything the customer needs to know is in the checkout and not in an email afterwards.

An answer on delivery before the cart

The postal code check sits in the top bar on every page. Enter four digits and you get an answer straight away, before you have put anything in the cart. The zone covers 1,788 postal codes in Eastern Norway. If you live outside it, you get a phone number and an email instead of a dead end.

The time slot decides the shipping

The customer chooses how precise the delivery should be. Standard courier has six three hour windows, express has eleven one hour windows, and pickup in store is free. Shipping is calculated from the postal code while the customer chooses. A standard window costs NOK 249 to central Oslo, NOK 709 to Bærum and NOK 1,429 to Drammen, and express to central Oslo costs NOK 449.

A separate pickup calendar for each shop

Pickup times are built from the opening hours of the shop the customer chooses, with two hours to get the order ready. Bekkestua is open on Sundays, so Sunday can be chosen there. Oslo City is closed, and Sunday is blocked there. If the customer switches shop, the date and time are reset, and windows that have passed are grayed out.

Deadlines follow the size of the cake

Up to 10 slices have two hours of handling time during opening hours. Over 10 slices must be ordered by noon the day before for weekday delivery, and three days before for pickup. Over 15 slices the customer can choose the color of the glaze, and over 20 slices need at least three days. The deadline is shown on the product page while the customer chooses the size, so nobody is disappointed at the checkout.

The result

The customer gets the answer online instead of calling

The checkout has four steps that open one at a time: log in or continue as a guest, fill in the details, choose pickup or delivery, and write a comment on the order, for example what should be written on the cake. Mobile payments, invoice and card are in the same checkout.

Before the order is sent, the customer knows whether Delicia delivers there, what the shipping costs and when the cake can be ready. The rules from production apply online too.

• 72municipalities in Eastern Norway in the delivery zone
• 2shops, each with its own pickup calendar
• 4steps from cart to confirmed order