PK Safety has been a leader in providing worker safety gear for over 70 years. As a company that takes pride in putting their customers first, they wanted to do just that by improving their website’s user experience (UX). PK Safety started out on the Magento platform, but was looking for a better opportunity to expedite their customers shopping experience and ease their internal processes of managing their e-commerce store. The decision was made to migrate over to the BigCommerce platform – a platform that not only met their needs, but was also much less expensive than Magento.
“One of the things we love about BigCommerce is the lower cost of just about everything… I mean everything. With a partner like IntuitSolutions, we built a site that was one third the cost of our last 2 Magento builds. They also eliminate the hosting fees and attendant optimization hassles. With the app universe around BigCommerce, pretty much any functionality is available.”
– Rick Pedley, CEO
PK Safety hired a marketer to manage the migration process to Big Commerce. They chose a theme and quickly migrated their store over, looking to make iterations on this once the website was live. The results of this migration left them extremely unsatisfied. The third party theme implemented ended up not being fully supported by the platform, leading to several issues. Unfortunately, the theme was void of SEO optimized code and there were also countless onpage issues, which in-turn affected the site’s UX. This was exactly what they were NOT looking for. PK Safety wanted an improvement, but were left disappointed.
Their Needs and Working with IntuitSolutions
PKSafety reached out to IntuitSolutions after their sales declined. Once we started working with PK Safety’s website, we realized there were other issues at hand than just their user experience. Since IntuitSolutions is a company that works to make our clients’ sites better (as opposed to just taking orders), we proposed to start over with a whole new website. They wanted an enterprise solution that would counteract their problems and take their store to a place they had originally hoped it would go when they first migrated from Magento to BigCommerce. PK Safety chose IntuitSolutions because of our wide range of BigCommerce-specific services and solutions that were able to meet their needs. This included:
- Industry leading e-commerce website
- Custom B2B functionality
- UX enhancements
- Integration with Netsuite
- SEO Foundation
- Ongoing website management for future improvements
A Truly Custom BigCommerce Website
In order to deliver PK Safety a website with an enhanced user experience, our Sales Experts proposed a custom site design and development project.This would ensure PK Safety could have a beautifully designed site that fit their brand and a user experience that catered to their customer-base. Our Design team took to the drawing board and presented PK Safety with a custom design that truly showcased PK Safety as the 70 year old company that it is.
“Working with the design team was great. We were under a time constraint, so our designer took the original site design and built off of it. Any issues we had, they would immediately fix. After a few rounds of revisions we found the best site for us.”
– Rick Pedley, CEO
The design team worked closely with our SEO & Digital Marketing team who informed several UX and SEO design features that were able to meet PK Safety’s expectations of an enterprise level BigCommerce website.
Custom BigCommerce Functionality
Our Design and Development teams worked together to build a website that would truly set the standard for PK Safety’s industry competition. Some custom features that we built include:
- Sleek custom header that hides topbar and shipping banner on scroll
- Custom homepage slider with popular brand logos
- “As low as” pricing on product cards
- Kits and Bundles grouping
- Custom Cart page layout more modern – Cart Summary stays on the page during scroll
- Custom Blog Post Search from Blog Page
- Custom Blog Post product cards
- Product page reviews in tabbed description section. Multiple pages of reviews are pulled into the same tab to keep you on the same product page which increases page load speed
- Pulls products from the store and turns them into “options” on the kit page, replacing the need to create individual products for each kit options
- And many more…
Enhancing User Experience with Add-ons
A custom design was not all PK Safety was looking for. Again, they wanted to truly wow their customers and provide them with an undeniably great user experience that proved PK Safety’s commitment to keeping their customers their top priority. We recommended several of our custom add-on solutions for their site in order to accomplish this. These add-ons include:
- Quick Reorder option
- Popup Login Window for users
- Mega Menu with custom call to actions by category
- Image Swap on Hover
- Add to Cart Upsell add-on
- Frequently Bought Together add-on
- Size Guides implementation
- Bulk Pricing Table add-on
- Interval Quantity Cost per Unit
- Custom Product Description Tabs
Building an SEO Foundation
An undeveloped theme led to the need for IntuitSolutions’ Digital Marketing team to delve into the technical side of PK Safety’s SEO. While working with our Design team to help inform the new site design, our Digital Marketing team focused on mitigating the decline in organic rankings. This included the following:
- Cleanup of 301 redirects
- Identifying broken back links and creating additional 301 redirects
- Performing a site audit to identify and correct on-site issues
- Reviewing and optimizing meta content after keyword research
- Customizing the 404 page to mitigate bounces and direct that traffic to shoppable pages
- Minor page speed and code cleanup
The Results
A custom UX enhanced ecommerce website with a solid SEO Foundation.
4%
Increase conversion rate
5%
Increase in traffic YoY
10%
Increase in users
After the website launch on June 27th, 2019, IntuitSolutions kept track of different metrics to insure that our work was successful in helping the client grow their business. The most important metric tracked is PK Safety’s conversion rate. There has been a 4% increase in conversion rate since the new site launched, in only a 3 month time frame the increase is pretty significant. Their website year over year traffic is up to 5% more than before, which in turn leads to conversions or potential future customers. Lastly, the amount of website users is up 10% meaning that more people are interacting with their website and will also lead to an increase in conversions.
In the long run, choosing the quick option as opposed to choosing the best option from the start may leave you with unsatisfactory results. Most of PK Safety’s customer base are other businesses buying bulk quantities of their products. The B2B market is one of the toughest places to thrive. Most clients know exactly what they are looking for, so making the website as user friendly as possible is extremely important. With this being said, the needs, interests and challenges of working professionals who are making purchases on behalf of their organization need to be kept in mind too.
A great brand with a steady foundation will only keep growing. As PKSafety experienced, without a sound website for an e-commerce store, online sales will likely fall. IntuitSolutions’ goal was to give the client what they needed, but they ended up with so much more. Going all out in the beginning will payoff in the long run as long as you can trust the agency who works for you. Don’t wait to start your project, now is the perfect time!
