Challenge
Sargent Electrical manufacture electrical components and wiring harnesses for Civil engineering, automotive and caravan/motorhome industries. The majority of sales are B2B with a minority of sales going to amateur van converters. Their factory is based in Beverley and employ over 135 people.
Their existing eCommerce website was supplied by an off-the shelf hosted solution and dealt with around a 100k turnover Per Annum. The website was struggling to perform and was showing its age, causing a number of logistical problems throughout the business, it also was very difficult for the customers to use when ordering some of the more complicated products or services on offer.
Approach
Sargent Electrical contacted Umber Creative to help them design and develop a bespoke eCommerce site to allow them to increase sales, smooth and automate the process of a sale for both the customers and for Sargent’s staff. It also needed to be able to handle complicated order such as their fixed priced repair services on certain items and their own shipping calculations and tie in with back office systems and sage to manage stock.
Umber Creative art directed a photography session of over 200 website products along with factory and staff images with the goal of ensuring high quality photography was in place to reflect the product online.
Outcome
The eCommerce site launched in 2016 and has received hugely positive feedback from both customers and staff. The site achieved record web sales figures for the company and has drastically reduced the amount of admin time required for the order management team.
Since then the system has been augmented with additions for the management of repair orders through the repair process and been adapted to provide a payment API for other Sargent sales outlets including their innovative Swift Command App.
