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.

Great wines from France's South West added at last

When we started selling online we used Google Checkout as our payment gateway and this was great except that they do not allow us to sell alcohol and for many of our regular customers from Borough Market we are known as much for our special selections of wines as we are for our foie gras.

So here at last is a selection of red, white and rose wines from Buzet, Gaillac and the Languedoc-Roussillon (in the South West of France) including Irouguy, Domain du Cros and Chateaux Ollieux Romanis. 

We can at last also sell Chateau Belingard Monbazillac, perfect with Foie Gras.

We'll be adding further wines over the next few months but try these for starters.

Added AddThis social bookmarking to Market Quarter

Very nice little tool AddThis that provides a simple way of getting visitors to bookmark sites in social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Stumble Upon.

I set up and AddThis account, did minor customisation to the script and then added it to my Shopify Liquid templates.  I've added it in the same spot on every page (products, collections and the home page). 

AddThis tracks the number of people who use it too, so I will be able to see whether it works. I wonder how many people will bookmark my 10 Great Recipes using Duck Confit.

Market Quarter page set up on FaceBook

You can now find us on FaceBook. We'll be publishing news on there as well as on here and encouraging more people to come to the site. 

I have joined several groups related to food, foie gras and Borough Market to help promote the new FaceBook page.

Luxury Foods include foie gras, caviar and truffles

What exactly is a luxury food?

I set out to try and find a list online of what other people thought of as luxury foods and by combining lists from other sites these are what I came up with:

Caviar, Foie Gras, White Truffles, Kobe Beef, Liqueur chocolates, Saffron, Bird's Nest, Fugu fish, Lobster, Matsutake mushrooms, Oysters, Abalone, Ambergris, Musk, Sea bass, Wild Salmon, Vanilla beans, Balsamic Vinegar

An interesting and eclectic mix with Fois Gras, Black Truffles and Balsamic Vinegar available from us online.

Some of these items are clearly considered luxury because of their rarity or cost but others like Salmon, Oysters and Lobster were traditionally viewed as cheap everyday foods near where they were produced. 

I have never eaten about half of them and I'm not sure that musk, fugu or ambergris are high on my must try list.

What would be in your luxury food list?

When do searchers look for foie gras?

A great revision to Google Trends that allows you to look at the popularity of particular keywords over time. Not surprisingly I looked at foie gras-  our best selling products - and here is the graph.

So it looks like the product rockets in popularity at the end of the year. A nice tool for studying trends in the keyword market.

Experimenting with Oodle Classifieds

Shopify has just added an improvement whereby it is possible to upload and download product data in bulk. This will make it easier to update The Market Quarter when we add new products or change categories.

But there is another big advantage in downloading the data. It means that we can reorganise it and use it as a feed for classified advertising feeds such as Oodle. 

I spent today understanding the Oodle data format and then massaging the Shopify data into the right format. Oodle should handle all the resizing of images and the main job was creating the URLs so that each product (classified ad) has a direct link into The Market Quarter. 

Handles are a nice feature in Shopify and they can be seen in the URLs of products such as www.marketquarter.com/products/3-fine-pates-with-foie-gras. The "3 fine pates with foie gras" are the handle. The handles themselves are exported as part the Shopify product data and to make them useful to Ooodle I had to rebuild the whole URL. It was easy using a mixture of Numbers and Text Wrangler.

Within an hour I had my Oodle feed ready and it has now been submitted to Oodle. Watch this space for news of its success.

Interesting recipe search site found

I have been wanting to find a good search engine specifically for recipes for some time and I think FoodieView might just fit the bill. A search for foie gras produced 1304 interesting recipes including Seared Foie Gras with Apple Sauce and Foie Gras and Onion Confit.  I like the way that you can narrow down your search using a variety of categories although it would have been nice to exclude those categories that would produce no results.

Articles added to boost food and recipe content

The front page of Market Quarter now boasts a new call-out box in which articles can be featured. This works in a similar manner to the Top Sellers and New in Store and shows off the powerful navigation features of Shopify.  The first two articles are about Choosing Foie Gras and Recipes with Duck Confit.

If you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see included in future articles please leave a comment here.

Top sellers and new products added

Improvements in the home page of Market Quarter continue with the introduction of two promotional boxes on the front page to display our top selling products and recent products into the store.

Shopify makes it fairly easy to add these sorts of features but a little bit of coding is required to get the correct products, their links and their prices from the store database. I hope the results are worth the effort and would welcome comments.

A new home page layout for Market Quarter

As we explore the power of Shopify, the ecommerce engine behind, the Market Quarter we make regular changes to the site to make it easier for people to browse and shop.

Today we have completely redesigned the home page to focus more on categories and less on individual products. This should make it easier to see straightaway the range of things we offer and the new products we have added. We would love to have your comments or suggestions.

New smoked fish delicacies from Loch and Glen

We've just started to add some new products from one of our fellow stall holders at Borough Market, Loch and Glen. They do a wonderful range of smoked trout, smoked salmon, smoked eel and my favorite lightly smoked scallops. 

Hope customers like them as much as we do.

Recipes with Foie Gras: Foie Gras Tatin

I am continuing to look for recipes that use the products we sell and came across this unusual recipe for a Tarte Tatin made with Foie Gras. The combination of apples and foie gras is familiar but served in a traditional French apple pie is interesting.

This recipe is easy to make and I would recommend buying bloc de foie gras du canard (duck) for this particular dish.

Discounts offered for Easter

The Market Quarter is offering customers a discount of either £5 or £10 on orders before the 1st of May. To obtain the discounts they need to enter a voucher code during the checkout process. The code easter30 gives £5 off £30 orders and easter50 gives £10 off orders of £50 or more.

The offer is open to UK customers only.

Redesign to provide greater customer information

We have spent the weekend updating The Market Quarter to provide shoppers with more information as they are shopping. 

We have also tweaked the colour scheme and this presentation of products and product images to make the site clearer and hopefully easier to use.

The biggest change is reformatting the collections pages used to present sets of similar products so that they can contain a column of useful information (and links) to help customers choose between the items shown. For example the collection of foie gras now has a column on the right describing how to choose foie gras.

Please let us know what you think of the new design and how we could improve it still further.

Duck Confit, Fresh Mozzarella Cheese and Oven Roasted Tomato Pizza

The Market Quarter is about quality ingredients such as duck confit but sometimes you are going to need some help in finding exciting ways to use them. We'll search the web for you and find recipes that use the things we sell. 

Duck Confit, Fresh Mozzarella Cheese and Oven Roasted Tomato Pizza sounds delicious but if you make your own confit it will be over a month before you can eat it. How much simpler to buy a tin or two and store it until you want to make a tasty pizza such as this.

The recipe combines shredded confit with homemade pesto (made from basil, pine nuts, fresh parmesan cheese and extra virgin olive oil). Top a pizza dough base with mozzarella, fresh sliced tomatoes and finish with the confit and pesto and you have a splendid pizza.

To buy the all important duck confit visit Market Quarter.com.

Photographing new gift items at Covent Garden

Le Marche du Quartier, the Market Quarter has two bricks and mortar shops; in London's foodie Borough Market and recently opened in the rather more touristy Covent Garden. 

Both sell the same ranges of products as on MarketQuarter.com but Covent Garden has a more relaxed cafe atmosphere reflected in a greater range of biscuits, ceramics and chocolates. 

I took a trip up to our Covent Garden location yesterday to check our current items and to make sure that we had not missed any suitable for the online store. 

It turned out that Amy, who manages the store, has found some delightful ceramics and tableware which would make great gifts so I took some pictures and they will be added to the site this weekend.