Aaron Duffin Lyons Product Designer

Work BWG Foods

Redesigning the daily ordering platform behind SPAR and Londis stores

A cleaner, brand aligned ordering experience built for huge carts, fast browsing and future features.

Retailers ordering on ShopLink
Thousands
Use by store managers
Daily
Line items in a typical order
Hundreds

My role

I led the redesign, from auditing the legacy platform to high fidelity prototypes of the full ordering journey and the design system behind it.

Client
BWG Foods
Timeline
February to April 2025 (about 3 months)
Team
Presidio (formerly Ergo) delivery team, BWG stakeholders

Happy to walk through the full prototype on a call.

The redesigned ShopLink on desktop and mobile. Desktop shows the homepage with the new navigation (Browse Products, Offers, Planogram, Favourites, Past Purchases), a running cart total and an Easter offers banner. Mobile shows product cards with multibuy tags, pricing, stock status and Add buttons.

A daily tool that had outgrown itself

Store managers order hundreds of lines of stock on ShopLink every day, and years of additions had made it cluttered, slow and hard to scan. The redesign had to make ordering faster without making anyone relearn their job.

Before and after of the ShopLink catalogue. Before: a dense purple and grey layout with long text rows, small product images and a separate current order panel. After: a clean blue header with clear navigation, a filter sidebar and a grid of product cards showing price, margin, promotion tags and stock status.
Before and after. Long text rows became scannable product cards, with filters in a sidebar and the cart always one click away.

My role

What I owned

  • Leading the redesign end to end, from audit to build ready prototypes
  • Navigation, product cards, filtering, cart and checkout
  • A BWG branded design system built for future features
  • Running the design workshops with BWG

What the wider team owned

  • Business requirements and priorities (BWG)
  • Delivery planning (Presidio)
  • Build and integration (engineering)

Three decisions that made ordering faster

Navigation built around how store managers order

The tension
The old menu followed BWG's internal catalogue. Store managers think in jobs: restock my usuals, check offers, follow the planogram.
Options on the table
  • Keep the catalogue structure and tidy the visuals
  • Restructure around the jobs managers repeat
What I chose and why
Five areas: Browse Products, Offers, Planogram, Favourites and Past Purchases. Repeat ordering is most of the work, so it gets equal weight with browsing.
What we traded away
A bigger change for long time users, softened by keeping product names, codes and ordering logic the same.
The new ShopLink header: store switcher, Presells, RBP and HHT links and the account in the top bar, then Browse Products, search, Offers, Planogram, Favourites, Past Purchases and a cart showing its running total.
Every ordering job is one click from anywhere, and the cart total is always visible.

A cart built for hundreds of lines

The tension
Consumer carts assume a handful of items. ShopLink orders run to hundreds of lines with multibuys, and mistakes cost real money.
Options on the table
  • A standard ecommerce cart
  • Dense, grouped rows with inline quantities and totals that never leave the screen
What I chose and why
Lines grouped by category with their own totals, inline quantity steppers, multibuy progress on each line, and a summary panel that stays put.
What we traded away
A denser screen. For a daily work tool, speed and accuracy win over whitespace.
The ShopLink cart. Order lines are grouped into Crisps and Snacks, Household and Dairy, each with case and price totals. Every line shows RSP, last ordered date, margin, pack size, price and a quantity stepper, with multibuy progress bars underneath. A summary panel on the right shows savings, free cases, deposit, total and Send Order.
Lines grouped by category, multibuy progress on every line, and savings and totals pinned in the summary.

Answer price, promotion and stock without digging

The tension
Managers check the same few facts on hundreds of products. In the old platform that meant opening stock cards one by one.
Options on the table
  • Minimal cards that link out to detail pages
  • Key facts on every card, with full detail one click away
What I chose and why
Price, promotion and stock on every card, a quick view for everything else, and filters in a collapsible sidebar.
What we traded away
Busier cards, so the design system needed strict rules for hierarchy and spacing.
The ShopLink filter sidebar with collapsible groups for department, brand, promotions with an end date range, show options like favourites and previously purchased, price and margin sliders, country of origin, product size and shelf life. The ShopLink product quick view for Fox's Fabulous Milk Chocolate Cookies: a multibuy tag, was and now price, product details with margin and last ordered date, the active promotion with dates, a quantity stepper, an On Order panel with due date and amount, stock status, and suggested products underneath.
Filters for the way buyers actually narrow down stock, and a quick view with price, promotion, incoming orders and stock in one place.
The full set of ordering screens in Figma. Open in Figma

Learning from other ordering platforms

I audited other retail and wholesale ordering platforms across browsing, filtering and checkout, and reviewed the legacy platform to pin down where it was failing store managers.

The audit that shaped browsing, filtering and checkout. Open in Figma

Agreeing the design live with BWG

High fidelity prototypes of the full journey let BWG’s leadership see the end result before committing budget. We refined them live in workshops with BWG, so feedback turned into changes in the room.

Faster ordering and a system ready to grow

  • Faster ordering, with less searching, scrolling and correcting
  • Promotions and stock visible at a glance
  • A design system ready for new features

BWG’s response was very positive.

What I’d do differently

  • Workshops beat handoffs for tools people rely on every day.
  • Next time I’d capture baseline numbers, like average order time, before the redesign so the impact could be measured after launch.