New B2B platform increased Carl Ras conversion rates by 20%

The Carl Ras wholesale company is pursuing its digitalization strategy with a clear vision of being the construction professional’s preferred supplier and providing customers with a totally new online experience.

Carl Ras offers a wide range of tools, fittings, work clothes and safety equipment to construction and industry professionals. The company operates in a competitive market where the industry leader is the best and fastest at helping customers get their work done: These days, this entails ensuring all products are available and searchable via the web, cell phones and apps.

Carl Ras set a target of increasing online sales as a share of business turnover from 4 to 10 percent, with total sales growing correspondingly. The existing web platform was an obvious obstacle to growth, leaving much to be desired in terms of scalability, overview and, most importantly, convenience for shoppers. It was also unwieldy to administer. With more than 40,000 item, the Carl Ras range requires constant changes that took up too much time for employees.

To develop a new B2B ecommerce solution, Carl Ras turned to Impact, an ecommerce specialists and Optimizely Gold Solution Partner in Denmark. Carl Ras was looking for a solution that not only offered a better shopper experience but also made its internal work easier.

In order to create a future-proof solution, Carl Ras decided to modernize its IT architecture. This investment includes adaptation to the cloud, development of applications based on micro-services and a commerce platform built according to the headless principle.

The new architecture makes it possible to reuse services across the entire business and replace underlying systems without the need to revamp shopper-oriented applications. The IT architecture surrounding integrations and data warehouses has been rewritten to enable a consistent omnichannel shopping experience.

Carl Ras had many compelling reasons to choose Optimizely as its ecommerce platform. What set Optimizely apart was its user-friendly content asset management and the fact that the platform is available in the cloud, with good opportunities for integration with Microsoft Azure.

Rewarding to include customer feedback

At the start of the project, customers and other stakeholders were interviewed so that their feedback could be incorporated into development work. It emerged that supervisors spent many hours ordering materials for their employees and coordinating various construction projects, addresses, customers and payers. The solution, therefore, needed to focus on speeding up the ordering process, improving the overview and making it easier for construction supervisors to delegate purchasing to their employees.

Navigation and menu structure have been designed to be more user-friendly and focused. When a customer logs in to the Carl Ras website, it displays their personalized prices, discounts, delivery methods and delivery terms.

The customer is also able to set up multiple construction sites to keep track of the material for different projects. One example is the possibility of simultaneously ordering items for several construction sites, placing them in a common shopping cart and having each item directed to their respective workplace.

The new option for the customer to delegate purchasing responsibility not only helps to make the process more efficient but also makes it possible to customize the shopping experience for different employees. Meanwhile, there is a convenient authorization feature that enables managers to check and approve orders quickly.

Carl Ras now offers ecommerce not only online, but also through apps for mobile users. For example, datasheets for products in use can be downloaded, so that up-to-date safety information is available to professionals on a construction site.

Marketing initiatives are measured in real-time

The new solution includes a reporting platform and dashboard, which collects data from Google Analytics and the business system. This enables Carl Ras to see how its online and offline merchandising is impacting sales, and to measure efficacy based on the cost of each channel.

Previously, it took Carl Ras 24 hours to produce performance-related data, while the new interface displays the information in real-time. This makes it easy to re-prioritize marketing activities and select the most effective channels to generate upselling.

The solution showed promising results in a short space of time. Shoppers have received a lightning-fast website and the number of visitors has increased significantly. Editors can perform their work much more efficiently, which means faster time-to-market for new ventures. Editing work has also been reduced by 50%.

I’ve never been so proud to launch a new website. Despite a complex set of factors, we can live up to our motto that shoppers should always be able to find what they’re looking for.

Morten Jørgensen

Digital Innovation Lead, Carl Ras