In order to gain inspiration and ideas for the website, the eROI team did an extensive amount of research, along with a competitive analysis, to see what other green companies were doing on their own sites. Though the team looked at other sites for inspiration, they knew they wanted to differentiate Seven Planet from all the others. What resulted was a well designed layout with a different look and feel than the rest. The team put a lot of emphasis on the overall design of the e-commerce site, paying close attention to ensure that the mission of Seven Planet was evident in the website’s design. Even though the “bones” and overall structure of the site have launched, the team still expects more ideas and feature sets to roll out as the site continues to grow and interest by the community is generated.

The concept of mindful commerce was especially important to the founders of Seven Planet. Specifically, they wanted to bring the supplier of each product to the forefront. This was done by incorporating the supplier’s story above each product page, helping to give them an avenue of online marketing (something that is especially nice if a supplier doesn’t have a strong online presence yet). The site is also heavily focused on inviting and teaching the consumer to “be green,” even if they happened to be prior to visiting the site. Along with having consumers aware of their online presence, the creators of Seven Planet also wanted to have awareness of the physical location of the first store. To do this, the eROI team needed to explain the physical general store and the connection it has with the online general store. Inevitably, the end goal is to have a physical presence on each of the seven continents.

On the Seven Planet site, the design team presented two completely different design concepts to the founders. One direction focused on clean lines, a lighter color palette, and more modern elements. The other, and the one chosen, had an organic feel, comprised of earth tones and lots of texture. The founders decided to go with the latter because it spoke to a more simple life, with people getting back to basics.

This look also echoes the in-store feel that the creators wanted; a space filled with natural fibers and materials. To accompany the layout of the brand, the eROI team developed a strong icon set to match the 7 silos represented in the logo. The number “7” is an important component to the company brand and is seen throughout the website in various ways including the 7 different colors chosen for their color palette. Working with a neutral background, the designers brought the colors in subtly as to not take away from the earthiness, and chose subdued, warm colors. The chosen photography is intentionally authentic and genuine, representing natural elements such as the sky, plants and anything else that one finds on our planet.

Since Seven Planet was one of the first websites to use a powerful new e-commerce platform called Magento, eROI was excited to push the limits and maximize the new abilities that Magento enabled us to do for this site. This included ratings for the products; an elegant, intuitive, and easy one-page checkout process; and the CMS capabilities in addition to e-commerce. There is strong integration of JavaScript on this site: dropdown form fields, the one-page checkout process, homepage slide-show, and dynamic hero graphic. Lastly, dynamic data is pulled in from various parts of the site (including green tips and the latest blog post being pulled onto the homepage) allowing the content on the site to refresh as new information is added.

The Seven Planet e-commerce site demonstrates a beautiful balance of usability and content. The team did a great job in utilizing Magento deep feature set combined with each of their own talents. Props to the eROI team and especially those who worked so diligently on making it happen. Be sure to check it out!!!

Today was the first day of the soft launch of this green general store. eROI designed and produced this dynamic, search-engine-friendly, e-commerce site, so please check out the site (www.sevenplanet.com) and check back in to this blog for a more in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at what went into the thought process for the business model, website strategy, design, and development.

E-commerce site: http://www.sevenplanet.com