Kit Online Ecommerce Case Study

Advanced B2B Ecommerce for Computacenter's online-only division.

A trading division of Computacenter, KIT Online are a manageable, self-service portal for all your IT needs. Focused solely online, they don't believe in having a sales-force working in a commission-led environment, so are able to pass those savings on to their loyal customers. However, as a strictly online-only business, they needed a robust, best-of-breed solution and a dedicated partner for their ecommerce.

"tradeit is an agile platform that we can develop with unique functionality that will help provide the best service to both our vendors and customers, helping to automate some of the normally complex manual processes that are normally prevalent in IT procurement."

Chief Operating Officer, KIT Online

Project Highlights

Product Information Management
Support for the management of over 30,000 SKUs from the built-in PIM
Feature-rich B2B
Specifically designed to support the nuances of B2B ecommerce
Product comparison
User-friendly product comparison tool helps users determine the differences between products with similar criteria
Advanced search
Advnaced search powered by Elasticsearch with huge feature set and results returned in rapid time
Integrations
Seamless integration with distributor stock system, Loqate address finder, Google Tag Manager & Advanced Ecommerce Analytics
Call centre support
Call centre support helps staff manage customer accounts online and assist with any queries via the storefront
Simple re-ordering
Number of quick re-ordering tools. such as quick order form, saved quick order forms and saved baskets
Rich media
Rich product pages featuring images with zoom, video, full technical specifications, downloads and more
Responsive design
Responsive design across four breakpoints from desktop to mobile

Project Integrations

Project Overview

When Computacenter wanted to take advantage of their position as one of the UK’s leading providers of IT infrastructure and target the knowledgeable IT purchasers in the mid and small business market offering their customers easy online access to products and services through their KIT Online brand, they turned to Red Technology. With existing long standing relationships with some of the biggest names in IT including Apple, HP, Microsoft, Lenovo, HP Enterprise, and Dynabook already in place, they wanted to extend this fast access to those products and services to customers online.

A new online-only model

However, unlike other IT businesses with extensive salesforces all chasing orders to secure their commissions, the emphasis for KIT Online was to simplify the buying process by cutting out the sales people and transferring those savings to the customer, whilst still providing great support should customers require it. The new online-only model meant providing the latest kit at the best prices, hassle free, so the tradeit ecommerce platform and it’s class-leading B2B ecommerce capabilities was chosen.

With the site strictly aimed at knowledgeable business IT buyers, everything was geared towards those users with numerous tools specified to ensure a great customer experience including a simple product comparison tool, call centre capability for online customer support, quick order tools, saved baskets, and much more.

Elasticsearch

With an extensive range of products covering thousands of items across the site, it quickly became apparent that ensuring customers can find what they are looking for quickly and accurately was perhaps the most important element to the site's success.

The sophisticated search capabilities powered by Elasticsearch, enable the site to index in fractions of a second and return relevant results to the user instantly. The search functionality extends to configurable fuzziness, language inflections, the removal of stop words, fuzzy suggestions without using historical data, category matches and synonyms, with more search functionality being added all the time through Red’s use of Elasticsearch and its self-healing hosting infrastructure.

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