B2B eCommerce platform for William Smith
- B2B eCommerce platform supporting discovery and sales of complex products across multiple store fronts.
- Systems Integration with internal systems synchronises online and offline pricing, orders and stock levels.
- Advanced product presentation and rich supporting content delivers an effective user journey.
The ambition
William Smith is the UK’s leading trade supplier of signage and graphics materials, with annual sales of around £27million and an ambition to grow further.
Their existing eCommerce website did a great job of selling straightforward products that customers felt comfortable purchasing online, but many of the products and services sold are highly specialised and require expert input. Historically this has meant customers felt the need to call or email orders through to Williams Smith’s knowledgeable customer service team, to give peace of mind that the products they are ordering are the best fit for their needs.
This creates a heavy overhead on the customer service team, which limits growth potential, and is a less convenient, slower process for customers.
The ambition for this next generation eCommerce platform was to enable customers to confidently self-serve on a much larger range of products - making it a better experience for them, adding scale to William Smith by reducing the dependency on the customer service team to process day to day orders, and freeing up their skills to support wider business growth.
What we did
Content design and UX input
To make sure we maximised the effectiveness of this project, we started by bringing in our content design and UX team to work with the experts at William Smith to understand what information and guidance customers needed in order to find and choose the best products for their needs.
The team then set about re-imagining how the site could be structured and organised, and how content and product information could be presented to deliver the optimum buying journey.
Delivering an effective customer journey
Armed with an understanding of the information customers needed to find and specify the right products for their needs, we set about designing a site structure and customer facing functionality that would best support that.
- Content is organised so it can be searched and browsed by a much wider variety of specialist criteria, including by application, surface type, finish, durability and other specialist search terms, as well as more typical groupings such as product types and categories.
- Tactile ‘inspiration’ panels headline the homepage, quickly visualising the range and potential applications William Smith can support, leading the customer through to a buying journey that suits their specific needs.
- Powerful content management features, including the latest stacking ‘mosaic’ feature, provide William Smith’s web team with the flexibility to signpost and highlight key content areas using a rich variety of imagery, panel styles and video.
- Custom search algorithms, tailored to the specific product types, content and customer needs, were implemented to make it much easier for customers to find what they are looking for.
- Custom product filters were developed to help narrow down products through a wide range of specialist criteria.
Rich supporting content
The way in which the products are presented and supported was also significantly enhanced. A clean layout combined with a large image gallery allows customers to quickly access all the information they need. This is coupled with a powerful variant chooser, and dynamic pricing model, that enables them to quickly customise and specify the exact product version they want.
Products are also supplemented by rich supporting content including blogs, video and access to a training academy.
Technical architecture and systems integration
An important objective for the project was giving customers the ability to engage with William Smith via the whichever channel suited them best. That could be online via the website, offline via the customer service team or a combination of both – the important part was that whatever the touchpoint, it felt like a unified experience.
To do that, the eCommerce platform needed to integrate with internal systems and processes.
To make this possible, our technical architecture team worked with the IT team at William Smith to design and specify integrations that were fast, scalable, future-proof and maintainable.
With the technical architecture agreed, our development team collaborated with William Smith’s IT team to build lightweight APIs that supported the integration with internal stock, order management and customer account systems.
These were then further enhanced through the implementation of additional layers of integration functionality that provided service resilience in the event that any system went temporarily offline.
Additional extensions offered value added functionality such as being able to set-up stock notifications for out-of-stock items or place the order on backorder right away.
Access to online and offline orders
With the data sharing capabilities that the system integration provided, the platform was then able to provide access not only to orders that customers had placed online, but also those they’d previously placed offline.
This delivers a huge benefit for customers, allowing them to quickly re-order previous purchases - no matter when or how they’d made them. It is also a great incentive to encourage customers who had previously only ever dealt with William Smith over the phone or in person to try ordering through the new website.
Customer specific pricing
William Smith likes to reward loyal customers who place high-order volumes with better pricing. These loyalty pricing models are maintained in offline customer accounts systems. Additional system integration allows the eCommerce platform to access these offline accounts, ensuring that customers are provided with the same best pricing whether they order online or go through their account manager.
Multiple storefront support
The new eCommerce platform has capability to support not only the main William Smith site, but also supports the development of other associated sites and store fronts. A great example of this is the dedicated Chevron Kit site for commercial vehicles (Chevrons.WilliamSmith.co.uk)
A centralised authentication system means that customers can now log into both websites using the same username and password, allowing visibility in the account area of a full order history with the business, whether that order was placed via William Smith or Chevron Kits and Signage and regardless of whether the orders were placed on or offline.
This advanced multiple store front capability enables William Smith to cost-effectively establish specialist sites for niche markets without increasing business complexity.
Order fulfilment through streamlined back-end system
The process of order fulfilment both online and offline orders has now been harmonised, making the process quicker, simpler and more efficient. This gives William Smith an advantage in a competitive market by reducing its costs whilst minimising the potential for errors and therefore delivering a higher, more consistent customer service as standard.
Projecting the brand values of William Smith
William Smith is a leading specialist in their sector and their values of ‘treat everyone like family’, ‘make things happen’, and ‘encourage innovation’ were all things we wanted to ensure shone through in their online presence.
Our designers worked closely with the in-house marketing team and their branding agency to incorporate those brand values into each and every aspect of the site. The result is a site that feels customer focused, conveys trust and expertise with a fresh contemporary feel, and the clean aesthetic makes the platform easy to navigate and enjoyable to use.
The Results
The new eCommerce platform is a step change in how this sector operates, enabling William Smith to leap ahead of the competition, and providing it with numerous market advantages.
It provides an added level of convenience for customers, enabling them to engage with William Smith across any channel, safe in the knowledge that they will always be getting the best advice, the best prices and that all orders will be unified and accessible in future.
More importantly, the enhancements to the site structure, organisation and content delivery give customers the benefits of being able to confidently self-serve at any time online on a much wider range of specialist products.
View live project
Commercial impact
The commercial impact of the new platform has already been very encouraging. Online sales have increased significantly and are continuing to grow, the average order value is up, and customer engagement has increased greatly - further enhancing William Smith’s reputation for customer service.
Scalability
It’s projected that as more and more customers become aware of the new site, an increased proportion of sales will be carried out online as a direct result of these enhancements. This adds scale to the business by reducing dependency on customer service team as they no longer are required to be involved in as may routine transactions.
Constant evolution
We’re not finished yet though! William Smith has big ambitions, and this is just the first phase of a development programme that will see the constant evolution and improvements of their digital presence.
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