WHOLESALE
Value Calendars
They took a simple product and made it customizable. Now it out-sells any other competitor on the market — with the help of Drupal and custom integrations of course.
Project highlights
Wholesale companies need more than just UX design; they need bespoke and custom capabilities to excel in the online space.
Organizations in the wholesale sector also have unique operational and business needs. Digital solutions often need to be custom-built to meet those needs and can frequently include:
- Ecommerce platforms that provide the robust and intricate capabilities to market their products to their customers.
- Options for creating direct-to-consumer systems and online marketplace integrations for more revenue streams.
- APIs and integrations for streamlining the wholesale distribution ecosystem.
- Bulk purchasing options for pricing and shipping in both B2B and B2C sectors.
Our work with ValueCalendars.com showcases two of these options: building a customer experience that encompasses everything needed to sell highly customizable products in bulk; implementing integrations that increased operational efficiency and scalable growth solutions in the office and warehouse.
Background
A wholesale custom calendar business serving a diverse group of business, nonprofit and government clients from across the United States and Canada.
Value Calendars offers highly customizable promotional calendar products for organizations across North America. Their digital experience provides step-by-step guidance through the entire calendar production process — from design and layout to printing and shipping. Value Calendars allow clients to supply their own artwork, or offer design services if required. They can even supply carrier envelopes and help with the fulfillment and mailing process.
“We love displaying beautiful photography and artwork in our calendars, and we enjoy helping our clients be more successful through the use of our many promotional calendar products. Our role in helping organizations reach and recognize their most important customers and supporters — while promoting their businesses and fund-raising causes — is a source of great pride for us” - Value Calendars.
Objective
Better user journeys through experience design.
Value Calendars came to Acro Commerce with a website that had an unresponsive design and lacked the customization needed to showcase their product portfolio and grow their business. Their outdated website had become a barrier to success.
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring every visitor to ValueCalendars.com had a great experience. Value Calendars needed their site to be visually appealing, function as intended, and most importantly convert — all while guiding wholesale buyers through the steps of customized purchasing.
With an updated design and a calculated customer flow, users found the new responsive design much more intuitive and easier to navigate through the configure-and-buy journey of custom products. This meant fewer calls through to Value Calendars to achieve their desired outcomes; in turn, allowing Value Calendars to focus their energies on other areas of their business rather than resolving customer-service calls for online shoppers.
Not just a better website, but automated accounting functions too.
Value Calendars also required a custom solution to integrate their accounting software (QuickBooks) into their website to enhance and streamline their business operations.
Wholesale customers need specialty account pricing in bulk, the ability to price shipments in large quantities, generate quotes, tax receipts and track customer data for relationship development.
Backend integrations to automate data across both the ecommerce platform and into their Quickbooks setup allowed for scalable growth in both the office and warehouse without human intervention.
Solution
Harnessing the power of a world-class content management system to improve customer experience and boost conversions.
Thanks to the power and customization of Drupal and its versatile WYSIWYG editor, the team at Value Calendars can edit and manage the on-page calls to action (CTAs) quickly and easily without an agency or dedicated developer.
With a new, modern layout and design, the Value Calendars website can fully leverage rich media banners and content to create strong CTAs that engage, activate, and guide the customer through the buying process. Whether it is showcasing their products, coupons or a special promotion, Value Calendars have the ability to create a compelling ecommerce experience driven by powerful CTAs.
Custom integrations specifically for Value Calendars — this is why we used Drupal for this wholesale system.
Value Calendars identified early on that they needed a customized integration to give their customers the service they needed online. Still, they also needed a way to automate the administrative functions in their accounting system. These were the solutions we custom-built to solve those problems:
- Custom 3-Step Calendar Builder — Value Calendars wanted a feature that many ecommerce stores do not have: The ability for customers to build their ideal product and give them the complete freedom to do so. The solution was the 3-step Calendar Builder that customers could use to custom design their own product.
- QuickBooks Custom Integration — With the new QuickBooks integration, Value Calendars can now set up automatic reports that get pushed from their website right into their online QuickBooks account. It also automated functions for:
- sales & invoices
- quote generation
- refunds
- credit memos
- tax receipts
The online journey should reflect the quality of the business, not be hampered by it.
Outcome
An ecommerce site that improved functionality for highly customizable, bulk products and an integration that streamlined accounting operations.
A clean, simple design, Value Calendar’s new website houses thousands of calendar designs, easily tailored to their client’s needs.
Since the new site launched, web analytics show the average site visitor’s session duration increased by 49.24%. This translates to users spending one minute longer, on average, on the new website.
With the QuickBooks integration, Value Calendars was able to allocate the resources manual data entry previously needed to other uses, like marketing efforts. In a family-owned operation, it can be very hard to find extra hours for the needs of sales and customer service. By building a custom integration, Acro Commerce was able to make this happen for this dedicated operation.
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