Welcome to Anderson’s Candy Shop’s brand new website! Our newest endeavour to bring our homemade chocolates to the lives of everyone nationwide in a convenient and user friendly experience. As we dive into this new platform, we want to highlight a couple things you may be curious about with this new site.

Firstly, let’s talk about the elephant in the room…why? Why did we decide to completely scrap our old website for this new system? It all comes down to reliability. Although we loved our old website, things age with time. Our website was no different. It became slower, would completely shut down randomly, users would struggle to log in or even reset their password, and so much more. In short, the old system just wasn’t giving our loyal customers a good experience. 

So now we’re here. A brand-new website, with a brand-new look and feel. And hopefully, a brand-new user-friendly experience. In this post, we’ll cover the functionality and new features you can explore on this page. And we’ll leave the comments open at the bottom of this post so you can submit questions, concerns, or general feedback. Because the goal of this site is to be perfect for all of you!

So let’s dive straight into this. Starting with the brand new category system.  All of your favorite products have been assigned categories that will help you find not only the product you’re looking for, but also products that are similar to them. Giving you a chance to maybe try something new or even go back to an old favorite! There’s multiple ways to take advantage of this category system, but the main way can be found on our home screen. Here you can select one of the broad categories that will lead you to products that match that set criteria.

This feature also makes it a much nicer experience for our newer customers who maybe aren’t 100% sure what they are looking for. 

Additionally, this feature is also utilized in the new and improved “You May Also Like…” section. We’ll be the first to admit that our old website has this section… but it didn’t exactly work. So instead of getting suggestions like brown sugar buttercream when you’re looking at chocolate covered cherries, you’ll instead get recommendations that actually make sense. 

Much like how our old site’s suggestion area wasn’t the best, neither was the search bar. Unless you searched EXACTLY what you wanted, you wouldn’t end up finding what you wanted. So we made sure to fix that this time around too. Unlike the other features, we don’t have much control over how the search bar functions, but we can assure you that this one does work a LOT better than the last. 

Unlike our old site, we plan to adjust and adapt this site with each season. And that’s where the next feature comes in handy. Seasonal products will now be front and center in our “Hot This Month” section. Here you’ll find the products we consider the most popular for each season. As I’m writing this, we’re featuring all of the fall goodies that we offer. From Fall truffles like pumpkin spice to caramel apples and more!

As mentioned, this section will change with time. So, make sure to keep an eye on this area to possibly discover something new!

The next feature we are very excited to share with you is related to all of you who need your goodies shipped. We’re happy to announce that our new site now features 3 options for shipping. You’ll be able to choose from express, priority, and ground. Each option has its own pros and cons so let’s quickly cover them.

Express shipping is the fastest shipping we can offer. In most cases (outside of holidays) orders that utilize express shipping will arrive within 2-3 business days after they leave our store. Because of how quick it is, this is the most expensive option and is only recommended if you absolutely need it there in a short time.

Priority shipping is what we consider our standard option. In most cases (outside of holidays) orders that use priority shipping will arrive within 3-5 business days after they leave our store. It’s important to note that this could take longer as we are still getting adjusted to the adjusted shipping speeds that happened earlier this year. 

The final option is ground shipping. Although it is the cheapest option, it’s also the slowest option. In most cases (outside of holidays) orders that use ground shipping will arrive within 4-7 business days. And we’ll admit, that’s a long time. There may be cases where this option of shipping just isn’t possible. Chocolate is a very tricky product to ship due to its tendency to melt if not shipped correctly. So please bear with us as we try to understand when and where ground shipping is an appropriate and responsible option.

Finally, and possibly the biggest new feature, is our newsletter. For years, we’ve used a program called “Constant Contact” to stay in touch with each and every one of you. And although the system was amazing, it too started to become unreliable for what we needed it to do. Because of this, we’ve converted our system to be built into this website. Which means it’s easier than ever to sign up and save! 

If you’ve already signed up for the newsletter in the past, all your information should still be in our system. However, if you’re someone you signed up and never saw one of our newsletters, you may need to enter your information again. 

With that being said, we are still working out how this new feature works. So please bear with us. We’ll make sure to post an update across our socials and here once all of you are able to get connected with this new feature. In the meantime, please enjoy $5 off of your next purchase by using the count “BLOGSAVE5”.

We plan to continue to utilize this blog space to keep all of you updated. We appreciate all of your patience and encouragement these past few months as we’ve been working on this incredible page. We hope you all come to love it as much as we do.

Until next time,

-Xander, Katie, and the entire Anderson’s Candy Shop Team