CHALLENGE

The commercial, industrial, and institutional products supplier wanted to update their eCommerce site to enable their product, content, and order management teams to easily update and maintain their product catalog and track orders placed on their site.

SOLUTION

Guidance delivered a custom Optimizely Commerce solution that offers numerous eBusiness enablement opportunities for day-to-day operations, through an aggregated view where C&H users can track and monitor different online activities, including, a real-time summary of numbers of orders placed and products in stock.

The site also features multiple promotion opportunities found in the mega-menu, on each category page with “popular products”, and the product detail page (PDP) through “You May Also Like” and “Customers Also Bought” product recommendations.

The PDP is additionally rich with merchandising opportunities through tabbed navigation for product information (specs, description, additional resources such as a selling guide and the corresponding print catalog page), and product videos. The PDP features image zoom, stock and shipping status, and ratings and reviews, as well.

To ensure a positive user experience, each sub-category page includes drop-down filters to easily find one of the 50,000+ products found on the site. With the “compare products” feature, users can now review C&H products side by side, thus increasing sales.

The site also incorporates live chat, order tracking, one-click ordering via “Quick Order”, and links to C&H’s WordPress blog, YouTube channel, and Facebook, and Twitter social profiles to encourage expansion of the Company’s social networks.

Through “My Account”, users can self-edit and update their profile at any time, view past orders, subscribe to the print catalog and/or promotional emails, review their “Shopping List”, and store alternate addresses (for shipping to multiple family members and friends).

Guidance integrated Optimizely Commerce with Scene7 (image management), PowerReviews (reviews & ratings), Tealium(tag management), Certona (product recommendations), QAS(address validation), Cybersource(credit card processing), Exact Target (email marketing), Invodo(videos), PeopleSoft (ERP, OMS, inventory), SOLR (search), and many more.

INNOVATION

• Without the need for IT, non-technical users can easily create new product attributes.  These attributes are searchable and are automatically displayed on their product detail page.
• Contract pricing can be viewed after login by government and distributor accounts. 
• Users can review the pages of C&H's print catalog online, click on product SKUs printed there, and arrive at that product's PDP.