Challenge & Objectives
This is Vetro Tooling’s 3rd website built by Impact. Over the years as technology moves forward, it was time to begin evaluating the next step for Vetro. The previous website was built on a custom PHP platform back in 2012 and was solely built for desktop and not functional for mobile or tablet devices.
Having a very active sales team, visiting clients and prospective customers across the country, the new website needed to be a tool that could become a useful sales tool for their team as well as become an extended part of their relationship. If the website could show previous orders and make reordering easier, their sales team wouldn’t need to make as many trips and could direct their efforts on winning new business.
This project came with lots of interesting challenges for Impact’s Development team to get their teeth stuck into, as Vetro’s sales team in their offline process would offer personalised pricing to each client, and this needed to be transferred digitally.
Personalising a Solution for their 7-10,000 Products
Vetro’s product catalogue contains 7-10,000 individual products, including high value machinery, and a large array of machine parts.
WordPress and WooCommerce were the natural choice, and even out of the box, WooCommerce could provide features which their old site required expensive development time to add or change.
Then with our custom development and integrations we could create a webstore with some very clever functionality, but simple to manage for Vetro.
Creating A Better User Experience
Given that Vetro sell across the UK and Europe, we decided to add multi-currency options, so that customers can shop with prices displayed in their native currencies.
To aid users searching the large range of products and parts, we added a dynamic search function, to help them navigate to what they need faster.
For items with multiple options available, we created an easy to read table style view, making it simpler for customers to select the right option for them and select multiple options at once, as to ordering the products several times.
We also mapped each configuration to an image (where available) so that users can view what their chosen item will look like in their chosen configuration.
We provided a toolkit that allowed the Vetro Team to change internal adverts from the homepage hero banners aswell as promotion banners on the category and product page templates.
We produced 28 page templates across the site to ensure that content and layout worked in harmony to provide the best experience, but also focused on conversion.
Advanced Personalisation
As a well established niche business Vetro have long term clients who they like to thank for their loyalty with lower pricing. They also have a sales team out on the road, introducing their products to existing and potential new customers, and they needed to have the flexibility to offer them custom pricing.
We implemented individual custom pricing which allows their sales people to create customers as users, and display personal prices just for them.
We then did the same for multi-currency shipping prices, along with custom shipping routes. This allows Vetro to offer a very personalised experience to their key customers.
Implementing Recommended products and a Vetro Recommends area which can be assigned to products, as their sales team would always recommend complementary products, we wanted the website to work in the same way.
Multi-Currency functionality allowing users to switch between Sterling and Euros.
Ensuring users knew which products are available for next day delivery – clearly showing in stock.
Visual countdown timer to highlight extended cut off time for next day delivery.
Dynamic Search for implemented to enable a faster search for users.
Internal adverts were implemented to introduce promotions and offers easily
Key attributes were displayed over product images.
Seamless Responsive Design
Morleys, like all the website we build. was built to the latest best practice standards for responsive design. Each page template we created was carefully wireframed, designed, developed and tested.
Simplifying Website Management
Providing our clients with websites which are easy to manage is something we value highly. Every site we build has an intuitive and simple backend.
For Vetro we added a page builder to make the process of creating new on-brand pages quick and easy.
We scoped Sage 200 integration, to allow a seamless connection between the website and their accounts system.
Technology & Plugins
Aside from WordPress and of course WooCommerce, the website uses Gravity Forms to manage form data and SagePay/Opayo for online payments, the website also features LiveChat and integrates into Campaign Monitor for syncing users data for email marketing.
The website also integrates with Sage200 for ease of integration with Vetro’s accounts system.
Find out more about the plugins and custom integrations we’ve created here.
Results
The new website now being responsive is now accessible across mobile and tablet users for those on the move. With the ecommerce functionality existing customers can now purchase and checkout directly through the website, saving themselves time and also saving many road/air miles by Vetro’s sales team, let alone the time it would take in typical sales meetings.
The website has also been far more widely adopted by customers, meaning more of their existing customers opting to move their account online, this has led to a 38% increase in the number of new users, a 34% increase in users overall, a 17% increase in pageviews per session, and a 60% increase in average session duration.
