Ballard Industrial

Primary Service: Design & Development

Primary Technologies:

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Ballard Industrial BigCommerce Website Lifestyle Hero

+322%

eCommerce Revenue

+519%

Average Order Value

+210%

eCommerce Conversion Rate

The Background

How This B2B Merchant Tripled Revenue With BigCommerce

Ballard Industrial is an online and in-person business that offers industrial supplies, services and solutions both to businesses and directly to consumers. Having been in business for over 70 years, this client has a vast wealth of knowledge in their industry.

Without a functional eCommerce store, Ballard Industrial wanted to give customers a pathway to purchase products directly online. So, they reached out to our team to help them choose the right eCommerce platform.

The Challenge

Transactions

Unfortunately, Ballard’s previous eCommerce platform, CIMM2 by Unilog, couldn’t facilitate transactions. Only inventory was listed, so customers had to place orders over the phone. This gave our team the perfect opportunity to increase online revenue and average order value.

Consumer Awareness

In addition to the general revenue growth and technical debt reduction goals that all merchants share, this client had a specific list of quantifiable goals for our team to meet. Foremost, they wanted to increase consumer awareness of their high-pressure hydraulics portfolio, safety equipment and services such as gas detection.

Inventory

The team also hoped to double sales of specific products from their inventory that they felt the industry was moving toward as a whole, such as those related to renewable energy.

The team also aimed to increase the sales of items that reflected market demand, such as renewable energy products. Lastly, to streamline their product offerings, the client wanted to reduce the amount of dead and excess inventory through sales.

B2B Order Shopping & Fulfillment

Because so many of Ballard Industrial's customers are B2B clientele, the option to connect the eCommerce store with eProcurement solutions was on the wish list. Additionally, a replacement for manual ordering methods to streamline the order fulfillment process was wanted as well. The Ballard team knew they would need to utilize a third-party integration to make the connection happen in real-time.

Lackluster Site Search

Ballard Industrial relied solely on BigCommerce's native search and merchandising capabilities to convert customers. However, the limited nature of these tools made it difficult to streamline the shopping experience. With the store’s wide range of products, they quickly recognized the need for more advanced features to ensure that customers could easily find the products they were looking for.

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The Solution

User Experience

Along with Google Analytics, we also leveraged our favorite user behavior mapping tool, HotJar. This tool allows users to see exactly how customers engaged with the previous website. By understanding this data, our team was able to reorder, streamline and optimize unutilized website content.

The previous Ballard Industrial site had a strong sense of branding through color, fonts and stylized graphics. Our team wanted to keep a sense of familiarity for legacy customers while breathing fresh life into the user interface, so the updated theme combines the best of the old and new features.

NET30 Payments

Without a traditional online checkout system, a representative from Ballard Industrial had to manually call each customer to confirm order details and process payment.

As is often the case with B2B companies, customers were able to pay over a 30-day period, referred to as NET30.

While enabling standard online transactions, this client wanted to retain the ability for their customers to submit their payment at any time over the 30 days following the order date. Our team of developers easily integrated this payment method into BigCommerce’s signature one-page checkout.

Specialty B2B Pricing

Ballard Industrial bases its pricing models on customer tiers and quantities purchased. Luckily, the B2B edition of BigCommerce offers powerful native features that outpace the existing software, so we set up the correct pricing rules to automate. We also assigned a membership role inside of BigCommerce to each customer account.

Additionally, our client wanted to create a “Junior Customer” option. This role is pre-designated to require an additional layer of confirmation between Ballard Industrial and the ordering customer before that order is processed.

This unique use of BigCommerce’s native memberships functionality ensures fewer issues with incorrect part numbers, shipping and returns.

Real-Time Pricing

The prices of industrial materials can change on a daily basis depending upon raw material cost at that point in time. This presents the time-consuming issue of manually updating pricing to retain a fair profit margin on all goods sold.

Our team assisted in the custom integration of BisTrack, which tracks the price of products to populate that information on the Ballard Industrial website automatically. This enables Ballard Industrial to more effectively use the resources that were previously leveraged to update prices.

Apps & Integrations: TradeCentric & Searchspring

TradeCentric

Ballard Industrial introduced a new purchasing process for its customers by leveraging TradeCentric's B2B Connected Commerce solutions, to optimize operational efficiency. TradeCentric offers two primary solutions: PunchOut and Purchase Order Automation.

PunchOut technology serves as a bridge that connects eProcurement solutions with eCommerce systems, automating critical steps in the shopping process. This integration ensures that business customers can easily navigate through a simplified purchasing journey.

Furthermore, Purchase Order Automation modernized Ballard Industrial’s sales operations, effectively replacing traditional, manual ordering methods. This automation streamlines the entire order fulfillment process, from order placement to final delivery.

Searchspring

With features like autocomplete, search synonyms, and custom filter options to optimize on-site search, Searchspring made it easier—and faster—for shoppers to find the right products. Shoppers could now easily narrow down their search based on specific filters like “material”, “voltage rating”, “horsepower”, “socket type”, and more.

Ballard Industrial also utilized boost rules to dynamically influence product arrangement on-site based on their business goals—promoting products from particular brands to the top of search results and collection pages. Product pinning also provided Ballard Industrial with the flexibility to control the exact layout of products throughout the site, ensuring top products were easy to locate, and ultimately, purchase.