Smith Brothers Farms
Meal Delivery Subscription
Client Overview
Smith Brothers Farms, established in 1920 in Washington state, serves a loyal weekly delivery customer base of over 52,000 active members. They provide dairy products, baked goods, and home-delivery service.
To keep pace with growth and customer expectations, they needed an eCommerce platform capable of high transaction volume, mobile accessibility, and streamlined recurring-order workflows.
Challenge
The existing site had become outdated and was not mobile-friendly, yet many of Smith Brothers Farms’ customers placed orders via smartphones. Key requirements included:
- A membership-based store where customers register once and set up their desired products for recurring delivery.
- Geolocation-based eligibility (only certain areas qualify for service).
- Ability for customers to skip future deliveries when needed.
- Recurring payment processing integration (USAePay).
- Massive daily order volume: approximately 10-12,000 orders per day needing to be generated and processed between 6 PM and 9 PM on weekdays. Performance was critical.
Working in partnership with Smith Brothers Farms, we leveraged nopCommerce and custom development to deliver a high-performance, scalable solution tuned for recurring orders and heavy daily throughput.
Solution
- Utilized out-of-the-box nopCommerce features: ACL, product & category management, customer registration, caching.
- Standing Order Functionality: We extended “wish list” logic so that customers could build a list of items to be delivered weekly/bi-weekly.
- Extended Caching: Enhanced caching layer to boost performance under heavy load.
- Email Processing Offload: Email volume exceeded 10,000 per day; we extracted email handling out of the main app into a console application so high-volume emails would not degrade performance.
- Order Processing Optimization: Standard nopCommerce order processing was too slow (~1–2 seconds per order) for 10,000 orders in the timeframe. We created a DLL using CLR and SQL stored-procedures scheduled nightly at 6 PM to process large batches of orders in minutes.
- Mobile Responsive Design: Recognizing the mobile usage, we built a responsive storefront optimized for smartphone ordering and adapted UI/UX accordingly.
Results
- Smith Brothers Farms’ newly rebuilt store now processes around 10,000 daily orders within minutes, reliably meeting the daily service window.
- The mobile-friendly platform improved customer experience — the business now acquires 30-40 new members each day.
- Performance bottlenecks were removed; the site now supports high volume and growth without jeopardizing speed or reliability.
- Enhanced operational efficiency freed Smith Brothers Farms’ staff to focus more on growth, customer service, and product innovation.