Tectran Delivers a Payload of Digital Transformation to Customers with New Website
Discover how customizable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.
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Discover how customizable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.
increase in average order value
increase in orders
increase in revenue
Performance metrics compare compare Jan-Jul 2021 to Jan-Jul 2020.
A lot can be said about a company that’s been around for decades. Words like trusted, committed, innovation, durability and quality are just a few that come to mind. They explain, in part, why Tectran has been around for 50 years come 2022.
Tectran is a manufacturer and distributor of air, hydraulic and electrical components and systems for the transportation industry. The company’s products provide maintenance, operating, security and safety solutions to heavy truck, trailer and bus equipment operators. Tectran was founded in Ontario, Canada in 1972 and has since expanded its operations into the United States and China.
The company is known for its 3-in-One ABS AirPower hook-up lines. Think of the cords you see between the tractor and trailer of an 18-wheeler. These cords provide air and power back to the trailer so things like the lights and brakes work.
“While we’re best known for our innovative tractor-trailer hook-up lines, we also distribute a few thousand other parts that go into maintaining and servicing tractor-trailers,” said Tim Burns, Director of Digital and Marketing at Tectran. “In addition to our own unique items, we provide extensive interchanges to popular market brands and are constantly broadening our product offering and working with supplier partners to provide added convenience to our customers.”
Tectran President Bruce McKie, charged Tim with revamping the company’s digital presence. This included transforming its custom, non-transactional, static website into a transactional and interactive one.
“When I first came on board with Tectran the website was more like an online brochure. It represented our brand a little and we had some product information displayed, but it was not set up to handle transactions,” said Burns.
Tim focused his efforts on finding an ecommerce platform that would enable Tectran to build an attractive website that offered a stellar B2C customer experience for the B2B company. He originally came from the world of B2C and knew the space well. He also knew a major challenge of the new website would be getting the company’s sales team and its customers to stop creating and faxing in their orders and use the website instead.
One thing Tectran did was to have numerous meetings with customers to learn what they would like to see in a new website. From there the brand went on a search and find mission to see what platform would be the best fit for its budget, and for what the company wanted to do.
“At the end of the day, BigCommerce was a much easier sell than the dollars required for Insight or the developers that would be needed for Magento.”
TIM BURNS DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND MARKETING, TECTRAN
Insight, Magento and BigCommerce were all platforms considered by Tectran. “At the end of the day, BigCommerce was a much easier sell than the dollars required for Insight or the developers that would be needed for Magento. BigCommerce gave us the best B2B features out of the box and we could build the site ourselves with people already at Tectran,” Burns said.
To further present a B2C feel to its website, Tectran needed a flexible platform that would enable the use of videos and other educational resources.
“On our previous website, we would have a developer put a PDF up on a product page or link a video to a product page. It was very cumbersome. The developer would go back into the custom code, update the page and then send us a bill for the time to do the work,” said Burns. “We needed to be more self-servicing on the marketing side of things. So, we needed a platform like BigCommerce to do that.”
Tectran launched on BigCommerce May 2019, and if you take a look at its website, you’ll notice it has a different look and feel than most B2B websites. And, as mentioned earlier, that was all by design. The company purchased a BigCommerce template and Tectran’s in-house graphics team did the rest.
“We were able to use existing photography and videos that we had and work them into the template. It was super easy,” said Burns.
On the back-end side of things, BigCommerce’s B2B Edition played a major role in building out Tectran’s B2B website.
“I don't think we could've transacted online if we didn't find B2B Edition,” Burns said. “Today we have everything specific to the customers tied into the website. We have a secure login that is tied to specific pricing, and then, we can update that pricing as needed in a reasonable way.”
Highlighted Apps:
Email Marketing: Mailchimp
Technical Features:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP))
Epicor
Content Management System (CMS)
Epicor
Product Information Management (PIM)
Epicor
Order Management
BigCommerce APIs
“We needed to be more self-servicing on the marketing side of things. So, we needed a platform like BigCommerce to do that.”
TIM BURNS DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND MARKETING, TECTRAN
“Certainly traffic has increased a lot by adding the transactional capabilities as well as all the basics that you get with BigCommerce. I don't know that we would have been able to do search engine marketing if we weren't on a platform like BigCommerce.”
TIM BURNS DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND MARKETING, TECTRAN
The ERP system GourmetFuel created also works out the nutritional value of its products. By simply creating enough custom fields within a product, GourmetFuel was able to map all the information rather easily to BigCommerce making it easy for customers to get a better understanding of what they are eating and what benefit it has to their health. To date, this is the only website of its kind offering this extra level of detail.
“A series of API scripts were developed to allow us to push our product information from the ERP system through the scripts to populate all the products within our BigCommerce store. The subscription software then can combine those products in whatever arrangement a customer wants and create future subscription orders,” said Buckley. “I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get the APIs and the scripts produced between the two systems. The real beauty was being able to feed order information back into our ERP system to create accurate and efficient production plans, increasing quality control and reducing waste.”
“Moving to BigCommerce from WooCommerce was a bit of a nervous, scary thing, but in hindsight, it's the best move we ever made for our business,” Buckley said.
The success GourmetFuel has experienced since it launched on BigCommerce has put dreams of international expansion on the company’s roadmap. “As soon as we launched on BigCommerce we saw our sales take off. So we're looking to now franchise our service internationally beginning this year. It would be easy for us to create multiple stores for various marketplaces and connect them into our ERP system,” Buckley stated.
Potential markets for GourmetFuel’s expansion include the United States, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and countries across Europe. Whichever direction the company takes, BigCommerce is on the ready to help GourmetFuel create a recipe for success.
“Moving to BigCommerce from WooCommerce was a bit of a nervous, scary thing, but in hindsight, it's the best move we ever made for our business,”
ROB BUCKLEY MANAGING DIRECTOR, GOURMETFUEL
Published: March 2022