Ethical Consumer
Over the last 20 years Ethical Consumer have developed the world’s most sophisticated rating system to help consumers make informed, ethical choices about their purchases; choices that reflect their personal interests and concerns across a range of environmental, social, animal welfare and health issues.
Technical discovery
Prior to engaging Agile Collective, Ethical Consumer had conducted their own internal discovery and design process and they came to us with a clear direction for information architecture, visual design and UX.
We became their technical partner to implement this new design and build a robust and scalable platform that delivered:
- Integration with Corporate Critic, their custom Ratings database via an API
- The ability for subscribers to customise the ratings based on preferences
- Integration with Myriad, their CRM and subscriptions management system
- Ecommerce capabilities, including subscriptions and renewals, with orders and user accounts synced to the CRM
- Payment options for PayPal and Fidelipay, with Direct Debits to come in a future phase of work
- A more flexible content creation system giving greater power to content editors
Moving to Drupal 8
Joining the project as technical partner, we modified our standard base theme for Drupal 8 to accommodate their Bootstrap-based HTML/CSS design prototypes and developed, built the new site in Drupal across eight sprints, and advised on the development of a new, flexible API for the ratings database.
Using Drupal Commerce, we created custom checkout flows for subscriptions, renewals and gifts, while using Commerce License to manage subscriptions. We also developed a custom Drupal module to provide integration with Fidelipay payment gateway. With our custom Drupal install profile, we leveraged the power of Paragraphs to enable content editors to create varied, content-rich pages.
Improving the user experience of logged-in subscribers was also a priority; one that we addressed by overriding Drupal defaults to present a clean interface that highlights subscriber discounts and time-to-renewal, with a clear call-to-action for the checkout process, and easier subscriber profile management.
A successful re-launch
The new Ethical Consumer website offers subscribers the opportunity to view more than 200 product guides and company profiles and a wealth of in-depth content. Since launch, the new site has seen a significant uptick in traffic and new subscriber conversions. Having a performant, reliable site has provided Ethical Consumer with the confidence to increase their site promotion and marketing activities.
We are now supporting Ethical Consumer for the long-term, and looking forward to helping them grow their impact, providing a growing number of people with the information they need to change the world through their wallets.
Main image (top): 'athriftymrs.com' – Fair Trade ALDI (Creative Commons)