Champagne and French Food Gifts Added

This is our first Christmas online and so far the site is going very well. Our retail stalls/shops in Borough Market and Covent Garden are also very busy and together with some staff changes (welcome Edouard!) we have not had a chance to fully stock the site with hampers or gifts.  So see this as a dry run for 2009.

We have however today added some great Champagne and some new foie gras and wine gift boxes from Godard.

New French jams added

We are busy packing and shipping orders but have had time to launch an amazing range of new French Jams. Ingredients include lavender, raspberries, cinnamon and pear. They are all high in fruit and additive free. They will make good gifts,

Adding related items to articles in Shopify

Its been a long time since I posted but that is because the site has started to get busy and we have been focusing on running the business instead of marketing.

This weekend, however, I had some free time and I decided to extend my article pages to include links to related products. This will be a pre-cursor to adding a lot more landing pages that will help with Google exposure.

The key to extending a Shopify store is to understand the underlying module used to represent objects such as pages, products and collections.

You can read about the code here on the Shopify Forum

and here is an example of its use linking Foie Gras products to an article about Choosing Foie Gras.

Contact forms, awards and trade enquiries

I have been busy today adding a new row of promotions onto the front page of the site and adding our new trade partner France Direct. They will handle all our trade enquiries from now on.

I decided that I would use an enquiry form rather than simply adding a mailto link. Shopify makes mashups like this very straightforward and I decided to use JotForms to power this aspect of the site; very powerful drag and drop forms builder, spam filtering and reports.

Finally today we have upgraded the pages for two of our products as they have been awarded Gold Medals in the Fine Food Guild's Taste 2008 Awards.

Finding interesting food sites online

Any new business needs to go out and meet its audience and over the last week I have been trying to find UK food sites, blogs and forums where people interested in The Market Quarter might lurk.

Here are a few of the most interesting

www.foodbuzz.com (community)

a slice of cherrypie  (forum)

the foodie list (blog)

food and drink in London (blog)

ripe london (blog)

food gawker (food photography)

Let us know if you blog about food (especially French Food) or of other food communities who might want to hear about The Market Quarter.

Who sells online at Borough Market?

There is no list - noone has compiled one! So we did and here it is: a guide to London's Borough Market stalls online. Hope it is useful.

Found some great recipes using foie gras

I got asked the other day what you could do with foie gras other than just have it with toast and so I hunted around the web for interesting recipes from popular food sites such as Epicurious and TheFoodNetwork.

Here are my Top 10 Recipes using Foie Gras.