COMMERCE
The Kitchen Yard’s new e-commerce site showcases The Kitchen Yard’s product range, with more 1000 product variations, highlighting Kitchen Direct NI’s role as a leading manufacturer and supplier of kitchen components across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
Background.
Kitchens Direct NI was established 10 years ago, with their primary business being in the manufacture and supply of more than 200 kitchen styles with 1000 product variations, including complete kitchens to complement their range of sinks, taps, appliances, worktops, and handles. The team at Kitchen Direct NI approached i3 Digital with the idea of designing and developing a B2C and a B2B e-commerce website for a spin-out company from the main business called ‘The Kitchen Yard’.
The site needed to be modern, responsive, attractive, and user-friendly and provide a self-service “low touch” environment for the picking, purchasing, and dispatching of key kitchen components to the DIY enthusiast and small-scale kitchen supplier and fitter.
Goals.
Their overall goal was to develop a brand-new integrated B2C and B2B e-commerce website for Kitchen Direct NI’s new spin-out company, The Kitchen Yard. The system had to integrate into the business’s ERP system and seamlessly place orders taken at the web level and update customers’ accounts. The platform also had to generate filtered pick lists which had to be automatically directed to the relevant fulfilment department or third-party supplier.
Challenges.
The major challenge on this project was the integration with Sage 200 for the placement of orders. The Trade Portal had to be able to interrogate the internal ERP system to ascertain the level of discount that a business was entitled to in real-time. The e-commerce engine then assigned the relevant discount to the displayed price for each individual trade customer. The system also needed to track previous orders and be able to display previous order history so the trade customer can quickly place repeat orders.
To facilitate the ability to filter orders placed into a range of pick lists, i3 Digital’s technical team had to create some custom business logic that allowed for the categorisation and tagging of products by division or supplier. The system also had to automatically generate Excel spreadsheets as well as pushing the overall order into the Kitchens Direct NI ERP system.
Solution.
Kitchen Direct NI wanted the site to be highly visual and showcase the quality and range of the products they have available. It also had to provide full self-service capabilities to the end user. They were drawn to the Kentico CMS for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and wide range of e-commerce capabilities. Another deciding factor was the ability to customise and integrate Kentico’s E-commerce engine into third-party systems via the platform’s inbuilt integration bus plus the creation of custom APIs and business logic. The website also had to strongly adhere to their new brand guidelines.
The following key features and functionality were required and delivered:
- A mobile-friendly, responsive interface to work across all browsers and devices
- Ability to catalogue and categorise a range of product types and themes
- Ability to save products to individual wish lists
- Ability to add to a wish list or shopping cart with easy searching, filtering, viewing, selection, and purchasing of The Kitchen Yard’s products
- The Kitchen Yard products are complex in terms of the options and variations available. The new platform had to be flexible, customisable and allow for the association of products to create product bundles
- Ability to sign up for a trade account online. Once signed up the user can then place orders via a secure trade portal
- Ability, once an order was placed, to send the order straight into the company’s MIS/ERP system, Sage 200, via a custom API interface.
- A custom module was also created that filtered the placed order into a range of pick lists (dependent on product type picked) that were then distributed to either the relevant department or supplier for dispatch
- Secure payment capabilities via PayPal
- Email Marketing capabilities
- The new website was to feature full integration with all of the company’s social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), and allow for further integrations in the future
- Ability to showcase unique offers and promotions
- Ability to request samples
- Provide full service and dispatch pick lists to reduce order fulfilment times
Results.
i3 Digital has delivered a new, fresh, clean design which is modern with a contemporary simple feel. The new website is easy to navigate, with emphasis on kitchens and kitchen component imagery rather than text. ‘Call to action’ and ‘hero’ panels have been incorporated to drive prospective customers on specific user journeys on the new Kitchen Yard site. The website reflects the corporate brand of The Kitchen Yard in order to effectively reach B2B and B2C customers online, raise awareness of the company, and promote the concept of Designer Living for Less. The solution is search-engine friendly, highly-usable, and focused on presentation of priority information to key defined and identified target audiences.
The site has only been online six months but, in that time, 24 new trade accounts have been set up. More than £225,000 of online sales have been carried out and the site now receives more than 1100 individual user visits per week.
Key criteria for choosing Kentico Xperience.
Kentico was chosen by Kitchens Direct NI for the following reasons:
- Its highly-flexible, easy-to-use CMS platform
- Powerful E-commerce engine and out-of-the-box capabilities, such as shopping carts, check-out functionality, bundled discounting, product options and variants.
- Integrated marketing and strong SEO capabilities
- Ability to integrate into third-party systems.
