A new website for BJ Waller - Architectural Ironmongers

The brief

The team at BJ Waller asked us to build them a new e-commerce website that would incorporate a trade-only shop for their range of architectural ironmongery (door and window hardware and other products).

The main features of the site would be:

• The ability to browse a large range of products before login including single items, bundles and kits
• A trade account login that would then display bespoke pricing for the customer, and include a portal for viewing and managing previous orders, quotes, favourite items and the status of their trade account
• All the standard shop features including basket, a checkout process including the options to pay by credit card or against a credit account, save for later, quick order and quick quote features
• A quote management process that automates reminder emails to the customer for any outstanding quotes, and enables the customer to convert the quote to an order easily
• Integration with the order management system used extensively across the business at BJ Waller
• Management of products, pricing, quotations, customers and orders via interfaces in the content management system
• Comprehensive reporting 

The solution

The first phase of any project is about understanding and documenting the customer’s requirements, and really getting to understand their business, its challenges and their operating environment.

During this phase, it became clear that BJ Waller sold a huge number of products, some of which had complex requirements in terms of compatibility and kit selection. We therefore spent a lot of time with the team to understand how best to implement the management of these in the CMS and ensure they we easily configurable for purchase by the customer.

The integration with their in-house order management system was a key aspect, so we also spent time understanding their current processes and the systems that underpinned them, as the website had to dovetail into these processes, and in some cases replace them completely.

BJ Waller also offers bespoke pricing to the customers so we needed to devise a solution that allowed browsing of products before registration/login which then switched to display the customer’s pricing when logged in.

The shop features in Doddle around product management, categorisation, pricing, and customer and order management were a key part of the solution. A bespoke quotation workflow was also developed that would automate the entire quote-to-order process, greatly reducing the overhead for the management of quotes and massively improving conversion rates.