Best-in-class B2B eCommerce Website for Plastics Distributer

North America’s largest distributor of plastic materials engage and empower B2B customers with robust online tools that allow for self-service research, ordering, and fulfillment.

Opportunity

North America’s largest distributor of plastic materials had a problem. Their website wasn’t serving the needs of its two core user groups, their customers and their sales team. A new online presence and eCommerce platform were needed to reinforce and enhance their position as a market-leading supplier of plastic materials to global markets.

Solution

MitreBox UXD was engaged by the company’s digital agency of record to collaborate with their internal creative and technical teams to improve the online user experience of the distributor’s website in order to drive site traffic, increase user conversion, and enhance the 75-year-old brand.

Leveraging the initial research completed by the distributor’s internal marketing team, MitreBox UXD, led interactive content and functionality workshops and poured over 1000’s of pages of product data to further understand the complex needs of B2B customers across a wide range of industries. Two distinct and important scenarios emerged. During a single visit the majority of users were looking to either research or purchase materials; in a much rarer scenario users were looking to do both.

These insights provided the backbone and strategic direction from which MitreBox UXD designed an online experience that provides easy access to extensive product information, their complete range of service solutions, technical plastic data, material comparison tools, and application case studies. An intuitive interface replaced copy-heavy portions of the site with concise content and recognizable, clickable imagery. The online catalog with over 8500 SKUs was completely restructured, to improve ease of navigation and encourage engagement. Allowing customers to “buy now” or “get a quote” on large volume purchases, or if custom-cut materials are needed, visitors can simply select an item, enter the cut requirements, and they will do the rest.

Content hierarchies, user workflows and page wireframes, along with a robust functional specification were created to clearly articulate user interactions, data architectures, and precise project requirements to the agency’s creative and technical teams. Enabling them to efficiently architect and develop a robust, intuitive eCommerce platform that allows internal sales and marketing teams to enable manufacturing organizations, business clients, and material partners across North America.

Results

The redesigned website is a premier online destination for researchers and buyers to get access to detailed plastics product and materials information, technical resources, and interactive comparison tools. In addition to easily obtaining quotes and completing immediate purchases, procurement teams can explore services that offer customers revenue enhancements, expenditure savings, and process efficiencies. Engineers, designers, or maintenance teams struggling to choose material for an existing or new application will find technical information to support decisions and options for any challenging environment or budget. All this is coupled with a performance-based approach to the management of the distributor’s online marketing and customer service activities, which enables them to continuously evolve its online presence and adjust marketing and customer engagement activities based on knowledge gained from analytics data and user feedback.

Services Provided

MitreBox UXD worked closely with the company's digital agency of record and internal marketing, technology, and sales teams to provide the following services: