The Tea Centre

Platform

Shopify

Service

New Shopify Store, Migrate to Shopify,

The tea Australia loves

The Tea Centre is an iconic Australian brand, growing from humble beginnings in a small Sydney store to become Australia's most trusted tea experts. They came to us with a WordPress/WooCommerce store that was clunky, difficult to use (both for customers and internal staff) and no longer reflected the quality of service they provide. It was time to set sail for Shopify!

Creative Team:

UX/UI Design: Laura Gosney
Full Stack Development: Jill Augustus
Project Management: Alex Donaldson

Visit Site

What they said

"BA Creative have been a massive help to our business through their patience and support in the creation & launch of our new Shopify site earlier this year.

We were so impressed in the team's ability to turn our vision into reality. Everything from the design phase up until launch day took our input and requests into consideration, and we felt supported & confident in a successful launch - which we achieved!

A huge thanks to the team (especially Pete, Rosie, Laura, Jill, Mitch, Kirby, & Alex!) for their fantastic work and support on this project."

Bridgette Krause, Marketing Manager

Shape up...

UX Design

Our work kicked off with an in-depth, in-person UX workshop with our strategic creative team at BA and the team at The Tea Centre. Through a series of activities aimed at challenging assumptions and establishing priorities, we identified key changes and improvements that needed to take place.

Since the project scope included a migration from WordPress to Shopify, we had the flexibility to completely restructure the store. This meant transforming how inventory was managed in the back end and how it was presented on the front end.

A key goal of the project was to more closely mirror the in-store experience their customers enjoyed. Additionally, we wanted to improve product discovery, encourage customer loyalty and streamline inventory management through to the warehouse.

Through detailed user journey mapping and a complete site restructure, we introduced a wealth of new features and elements to the website that answered each of the goals.

Some of these structural changes or feature implementations included:

  • A restructure of the website navigation to closely mirror the in-store menu
  • Introduction of weight based variants when buying loose leaf tea
  • Introduction of product delivery variants (loose leaf, tea bag and tea tin)
  • A refined collection filter
  • "Brewing in store" featured collection to show what's available to taste in store that week
  • Tea characteristic icons on product cards
  • Custom gift finder collection and filter
  • Upsell and cross-sell opportunities
  • Custom store locator feature

With these UX improvements locked in, it was time to explore UI design.

Ship out

Shopify Store

The beautiful UI design features soft and elegant features, with a minimalist aesthetic. But it's far from boring! Paired with The Tea Centre's beautiful product photography and hand drawn illustrations, the pared back design is eye-catching, interactive and informative.

As we identified recreating the in-store experience for online customers as a major goal, we introduced several key features to achieve this. We designed and developed custom product cards with feature icons that reveal on hover, such as 'serve iced', 'fruity', and 'caffeinated'. This feature provides a quick understanding of the tea, and mirrors the questions in-store teams use to guide customers. Custom badges also highlight favourite teas and bestsellers to further help users find their new favourite tea.

When visiting in-store, customers have the opportunity to sample 'teas of the week' which are rotated regularly. To represent this experience online, we introduced a 'Brewed in Store' feature.

Another product discovery tool is the custom collections section. This highlights characteristics of the most popular or seasonal collections that can be found in-store. This allows customers to keep up-to-date with new collections such as the Iced Tea collection in Summer or Christmas-themed products in the lead-up to the holidays.

These features are focussed on driving product discovery, and providing a tailored experience for customers. It also takes strategic advantage of powerful Shopify features such as metafields and metaobjects, while remaining functional, dynamic and easy to update for The Tea Centre team.

Alongside these improvements to collections and product discovery, further improvements were made to the user journey by removing friction throughout the journey. We know that tea lovers are passionate and easy to upsell; so we introduced easy upsell opportunities on the product page with like for like recommendations and bundling opportunities.

Checkout friction was reduced by making 'loose leaf', 'tea bag' and 'tea tin' variants of the same tea type, instead of separate products. This reduced unnecessary clicks and product searches for customers. Such a simple and easy way to improve product discovery!

For key information pages such as the Brewing Guide and the store locator page, we improved how information is presented and navigated. We reduced store discovery by three clicks by introducing a search by postcode feature and collating store details into a simple accordion tab. Functional and beautiful, this is powered by metaobjects and has the advantage of displaying Google Maps alongside the store as it's selected.

2025 AWA Finalists

Congrats team!

The BA team and The Tea Centre were honoured to have the new Shopify store recognised at the 2025 Australian Web Awards.

The website was shortlisted for two awards:

Retail / Commerce site
Tech: Shopify

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