Eteaket's Digital Tea Empire
About the Project
Eteaket is a Scottish speciality tea company selling loose-leaf teas, teabags, matcha, teaware, and gift sets, both retail and wholesale. Their e-commerce site was buckling under its own weight — slow, glitchy, and getting worse for the logged-in wholesale customers who mattered most.
Fast loading
better experience &
higher conversion rate
Wholesale Included
Single Site - Retail
& Wholesale In One
Preformance database
quick access, For
staff & visitors
Key problems:
Eteaket's business had evolved significantly, but the website hadn't kept up:
- The site had accumulated features and plugins over years of growth, causing slow load times — particularly problematic for wholesale customers who often work on mobile or from cafés with patchy connections.
- Years of order history and customer data had built up in the database, slowing page loads and making the admin area sluggish during peak trading periods.
- The wholesale system needed refining — pricing didn't always display correctly for logged-in trade customers, and the checkout experience mixed retail and wholesale features in confusing ways.
- Payment processing occasionally failed at checkout, causing customers to abandon completed orders through no fault of their own.
- The underlying code and infrastructure, built years earlier when the business was smaller, needed modernising to handle Eteaket's current scale and complexity.
Our Solution
We rebuilt Eteaket's e-commerce infrastructure to match where the business is now:
- Streamlined the homepage and core pages by removing unnecessary elements, optimising images, and replacing older page-builder code with clean, efficient templates.
- Migrated to modern hosting with an archived database for older orders, keeping the live database lean and fast-responding even during seasonal peaks.
- Built a proper wholesale portal with role-based pricing that displays correctly across the site, checkout configured specifically for trade buyers, and a bulk ordering form that handles minimum quantities smoothly.
- Updated the payment integration to handle both retail and wholesale orders reliably, fixing checkout issues that had occasionally caused abandoned baskets.
- Rebuilt product filtering using custom taxonomies (Type, Format, Origin, Taste) so customers can find specific teas quickly, whether they're browsing gift sets or ordering wholesale.
- Connected and tested integrations with Xero accounting, warehouse management, GoCardless payments, and social media shop features so all systems work together seamlessly.
The result is a site that handles thousands of products, subscriptions, wholesale orders, and integrations without breaking a sweat — and loads fast enough that customers actually stick around.
The Results (First 6 Months)
The Results
(First 6 Months)
- Site loads in under 3 seconds now: wholesale customers can browse, log in, and place orders smoothly whether they're in the office or checking stock on a phone.
- Database performance improved significantly: page loads stay quick even during seasonal peaks when traffic and order volume spike.
- Wholesale system works seamlessly end-to-end: pricing displays correctly for logged-in trade customers, bulk orders process smoothly, and Eteaket can manage wholesale orders efficiently from the backend.
- Payment processing became reliable: customers complete their orders confidently, and abandoned baskets at checkout dropped dramatically.
Final Thoughts
This wasn't just about updating a website — it was about building infrastructure that could grow with Eteaket's ambitions. When you're selling hundreds of different teas to both retail customers browsing gift sets and wholesale buyers ordering in bulk for cafés and shops, your platform needs to handle real complexity: subscriptions, trade pricing, warehouse integration, and accounting systems, all working together seamlessly. Eteaket's success had outgrown its original setup, which is the best kind of problem to have. Now they've got a platform built for where they're headed, not just where they've been. That's infrastructure worth investing in.