"e-commerce is b*ll*cks."

Is one of my favourity client quotes.

To be fair to the client, he said it way back in the early noughties and whilst the jury wasn’t exactly ‘out’ when it came to business to business e-commerce back then, it could be argued that it hadn’t yet reached a unanimous decision either. This is the story about how we proved the client wrong by building their e-commerce platforms and supporting the growth of their online sales, ultimately to over £100M annually, over 70% of their turnover.

This client was in the clothing sector, a supplier and distributor to the garment decoration trade, and we were in deep in discussions with the commercial director about the potential of e-commerce when the business owner popped into the meeting to make his somewhat damning ‘e-commerce is b*ll*cks’ critique. 

He justified this thought by stating that ‘Most of our customers don’t even have fax machines never mind computers, so it’s all a waste of money.’ 

We naturally thought the deal was dead.

Then there was a change of direction by the owner, which wasn’t necessarily triggered by some great big bright light bulb moment of tech-driven insight, rather his reluctant recognition that: "Our biggest competitor is getting one so I suppose we’ll have to.”

There have been more enthusiastic orders.

That being said, the client’s enthusiasm for e-commerce grew pretty rapidly, coincidentally more or less in-line with the increase in sales. ‘Quelle surprise.” As Del Boy might have said.

When we started to work with the client it was clearly a successful business with turnover in the mid £20 millions. Their e-commerce journey transformed the company into the biggest player in its market niche with turnover growing to over £160M with more than £100M online. A transformation that ultimately led the business to define itself as a ‘dot com’ enterprise. 

The Commercial Director at the time, Paul Shore, outlines the journey:

“Our industry was moving to a more online presence, specifically one of our competitors launched a basic web solution. There was a lot of scepticism within our business as to whether this was the right route forward, however in reality we had to move to an online offering ourselves.

E-commence was completely new to us and we had no experience in the business of any online presence. The way bd2 worked with us was that they came in and helped us to scope out what we needed for an initial online solution. They helped us to build a dot net open source solution and integrated it with our Sage business management system. We developed and launched an initial solution and very quickly we got positive feedback from our customers. We moved on to integrating live stock, customer specific pricing and order integration into the solution very quickly. 

What we saw next was that the customer experience improved ten fold. Information was at the customers’ fingertips, they didn’t have to call in to ask for stock availability or to place orders. We then saw a significant improvement in efficiency within the business itself, reducing manual intervention where our telesales people had to do stock enquiries and key in orders. We were actually able to turn that on its head and use those people for far more proactive outbound telesales.

Our online offer evolved very quickly. We were very close to our customers as a business and listened to their needs, we took these needs back to bd2 who were very responsive and adaptive to these changes. What we actually realised was that they’d built us a very scalable solution.”

The success of the platform and the growth of online sales swiftly stymied the sceptics within the business as we began to prove that e-commerce was not at all ‘b*ll*cks’, in fact it was really rather good. Mindsets changed as the new channel flourished and scepticism switched to enthusiasm - ‘What can we do next? What more can we do?’. Through working closely with Paul and his team, our knowledge of the business and its markets was growing rapidly enabling us to be increasingly proactive as Paul explains:

“What happened next was very much that we grew a partnership with bd2. We worked very closely with them and they built really good knowledge of our business and our markets. They’d even come to industry trade shows to understand what was going on with our competition. They brought some really proactive ideas, one of these ideas was for a ‘white label’ solution which would allow us to power our resellers’ websites.

The white label solution sat on top of our e-commerce solution. We managed all the product data, stock, pricing and all that detail. It allowed our customer to take the solution, brand it with their look and feel and their own colours. It allowed them to add their own pricing, carriage, credit card integration but below that it also allowed them to choose what products and brands they wanted to sell.

So if we had two customers that were in two different marketplaces it allowed customer one to sell one type of product that suited their marketplace and customer two to sell product that was in their marketplace. It was very flexible and allowed our customers to take our solution in a very cost-effective way to go online.

The white label solution took on a life of its own and became a product in its own right within the business. It allowed us to support our customers and help them to grow because they were able to get themselves online and grow their sales which ultimately grew our sales. We also saw a greater retention and loyalty from them within the business. The other big thing, and it’s really important to say, is that we got a revenue stream from that solution on a monthly subscription basis so that it actually became self-supporting. It allowed us to have more shops out there with our customers using our white label solution with our products and their customer audience. We ended up with over a thousand white label stores out there.”

The new white label platform, which was completely bespoke, took on a life of its own building to over 1,000 live customers as its peak. And, with monthly subscription packages costing from £25 to £50 a month, the platform was generating significant six figure licence fees to market and sell the client’s products, with the added benefit of customer lock-in. 

The success of the original e-commerce platform, which far exceeded expectations, was starting to creak at the seams and it was time to look to re-platforming:

“We never visualised how far we would go with our commerce solution. We needed to look forward, but I must emphasise that we had and excellent return on investment on that first solution. We couldn’t have scaled the business to the kind of scale that we did without that system in place. We decided that we would look outside of bd2 when it came to looking at a new solution and to look at the market. We looked at some big players to see what they would bring to the party, but once we looked we realised that we had a very strong and powerful partnership with bd2. They understood our business intrinsically and we decided that they were the partner of choice for the future.

The next phase was that bd2 redeveloped the platform, from the ground up. It had more complexity, more capability and we further integrated it with our Product Information Management system as well which allowed us to drive the product data and imagery direct from the PIM into the website. Again, we worked very closely with bd2 to set out the scope of requirements for that solution - where it was going and what it was going to deliver. So next we then developed phase two of the white label solution for our customers to allow then to keep abreast of their online presence. bd2 continued to support the solution? From that point, bd2 continued to support the system to deliver new functionality and new features for both our new solution and the white label platform. 

At this point e-commerce had become the biggest sales channel for the business with over 70% of sales going through the e-commerce system.”

This was probably the tipping point that led the business owner to add ‘dot com’ to the business name, yes that’s right, the same guy who once said ‘e-commerce is b*ll*cks’’. Paul, the commercial director, summarises the results:

“From a commercial point of view, the e-commerce solutions we developed in partnership with bd2 transformed the business. When we started our online journey with bd2, the business was turning over in the mid £20M. Revenues grew to exceed £150M with over £100M of sales online.”