Case Study: Total Tools invests in e-commerce to transform catalogue website

Trade tools specialists Total Tools, has explored various providers of e-commerce solutions throughout its digital transformation journey, moving from a “catalogue website” to an e-commerce driven business.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Brandon Soo, Total Tools e-commerce manager, who discusses the organisation’s experience overhauling its e-commerce strategy.

According to Soo, pre-Total Tools’ investment in digital, the website was not conducive to online sales.

“It was just more about searching for product, and really pushing them into store. That's kind of our pre e-commerce journey. Then we took the leap in 2014 to moving to e-com. So we're fairly young compared to a lot of our competitors out in the market in terms of our e-com journey. But it was a big jump,” said Soo.

The first platform that the business invested in was Powerfront, which was supposed to integrate well with the organisation’s ERP system, Pronto.

“We weren't seeing, I guess a hell of a lot of sales through e-com at the time. We could see our competitors were already doing great things online. And so that's the reasons why we took that opportunity to go out to market and start to look at, what are the other platforms out there that we should really look at utilising in the market?” he said.

The business selected Adobe Magento, and have since seen their conversion rates grow as the business became more agile.

According to Soo, “It's a testament to what we've been able to do with Magento and the flexibility that we've had there, but the ability for us to evolve and change and try new things out and see what works and what works for our customers as well.

“Because it all comes down to the customer experience and delivering there because if you don't have that great customer experience and that great way of working with our customers to get them the products they want, then it certainly won't work.”

As a result of the Magento relationship, Total Tools has also invested in other tech solutions including improving the product search service on the website, working with Unbxd. This has been crucial to sales outcomes because the data shows that conversions are three times higher for customers using the search bar than those who do not. Total Tools has also invested in a customer data platform, with both solutions integrated into Magento.

“One of the great things with Magento is that it's got those capabilities to bring in other services and integrate with other services, and enterprise services at that. So we can do things at scale rather than, not having that capability of being able to chop and change and, really find different ways in which we can do things,” he said.

“So it's that flexibility that was really key for us, and that was part of the reason why we went with Magento in the first place was the flexibility that we had. And it had that capability of doing B2C and B2B as well."