ENGINEERING SEAMLESS GLOBAL OPERATIONS WITH A B2B ECOMMERCE RE-PLATFORM.
Premier Farnell plc is a high-service distributor of technology products and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. As a digital enterprise, they bring together the latest products, services, and development software, all connected to an industry leading online engineering community, element14.
Premier Farnell planned to implement a new global web platform serving Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific.
With multichannel sales at the heart of its global strategy, Premier Farnell wanted the new platform to enhance the customer experience and improve functionality across its transactional sites.
With the largest WebSphere Commerce practice in Europe and our track record of large-scale integrations, we could rapidly deploy a team to begin this significant programme of work.
The new platform, built on IBM WebSphere Commerce, launched in North America in November 2013, including the US, Canada and Mexico. Plans were put in place to roll out the new platform to its Europe and Asia Pacific businesses during 2014.
Over the two-year delivery, we worked with Premier Farnell on a range of services. These included design and the customer experience, analysis, the end-to-end architecture including front-end, middle-tier and back-end integration.
In addition, we created a custom-built Content Management System (CMS) and migrated legacy data to ensure a seamless transition for customers.
The new website features include:
Express checkout – customers quickly get what they need for hassle-free purchases.
Favourites – keeps a note of customers’ favourite or most frequently bought products
Compare and contrast products – customers can make more informed buying decisions by comparing across a number of ranges.
New “Hover Over” feature – lets customers view the last 10 items added to their cart.
iBuy -– the client can customise and control what individual users can do on the site. This includes managing authorisation levels, limits and budgets, catalogue restrictions, payment and delivery options.
Electronic quotation -– customers buy products at specially agreed prices or those not in the online catalogue.
These improved merchandising tools make it easy for Premier Farnell staff to manage promotional activity throughout the world.
Premier Farnell’s Global Head of Information Systems, Steve Johnson, said: “These types of programmes are always tough and supplier relationships can be difficult, particularly in the latter stages. However, we’ve been really impressed with Salmon’s approach and determination to do the right thing and get the job done. They have been a great partner to us and we are pleased with the results.”