MD Thompson is an indiependant electrical wholesaler based in the fine city of Norwich. They stock over 70,000 products in their Heigham Street warehouse, selling to trade customers and the general public via their trade counter and lighting showroom.
Why they brought us in
As mentioned, the client sells to trade customers and the general public, but in their situation their trade customers had to either use an unintuitive and hard to use trade portal provided by their ERP (enterprise resource planner) software, or phone up and place an order by asking what products where in stock or by looking through physical catalogue booklets. General public customers had similar struggles as they had no way of finding out what products MD Thompson stocked, prices, or any other product information.
(Explain here about how you have to have a trade account approved to use the old portal so that means that only approved accounts can see the full selection of products stocked by MD Thompson, general public has no chance of seeing what products are stocked). (Also mention how the website wasn’t fitting for a brand or such a size with around 30 employees. Use the wayback machine and include a screenshot of their old website and trade portal if possible).
Core problms
So, to summarise the core problems:
- Customers have to phone up or use painful portal to place orders
- Customers have to request physical catalogues of products
- Customers have no idea what is and isn’t in stock
- General public can’t see what products are available
Clients requirements
Talk about how the client wanted to be able to make a few different websites and have their stock that they select automatically show up on those websites, so for example they want a trade portal, and then a retail site for the general public, and they also wanted some spinoff sites like one for lighting, but to do this we’d need to build a system, a piece of software that can sync products to multiple websites and keep them all up to date in real time. They also need orders from every website to be pushed back into their ERP so they don’t have to chase orders from multiple sites. They also want trade customers to have their unique customer discounts on the trade portal. They also wanted it so that you can’t see prices unless your logged in – this is because they have trade relationships with their customers and often offer bulk discounts for high volume of purchases. (Map out all these requirements)
Our solution
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How we built
The impact
They now see regular use of their trade portal from both their trade customers and general public customers looking for products. This has given them the confidence to now start outlining new website projects with us such as their lighting website.