Lindemann is an authentic, down-to-earth, American company that has become a true force to be reckoned with in the chimney supplies market. Although doubtless most of that success is due to their own hard work and innovation, they also attribute much to the benefits offered by SuiteCommerce.
Here, in their own words, is Lindemann's experience with SuiteCommerce over the last three years...
Lindemann on SuiteCommerce
When we started out over 50 years ago, Lindemann would not have thought that a heating & cooling service company serving the north shore of Chicago could become a chimney supply powerhouse; distributing chimney goods in an ever-expanding and diverse national market. This was made possible because of our decision to use SuiteCommerce.
This is not just a success story not for us [Lindemann], but also a story about the success we have been able to build for our B2B customers through SuiteCommerce. It is hard to overstate the benefits of an eCommerce system that scales alongside your business.
The way we’ve reached out to our customers has been tremendous. Since our launch and first full year using SuiteCommerce in 2017, our site traffic has grown from 610,000 page views & 40,000 new site visitors for the year to 750,000 page views and 100,000 new site visitors for the year in 2020. That has tripled our potential customer base. Our eCommerce revenue has also doubled during that time.
Setup and Customizability of Product Pages
The first advantage of SuiteCommerce that we realized was the ability to quickly adjust our entire inventory to an online space. The item screens [Product Detail Pages] are customizable and give the user a good feel of the product because of their ability to include product videos, specifications, and any details that we would want to feature about our products. As our product offering continues to grow, we’ve found this customizability to be essential. As both a manufacturer and distributor, we’ve been able to market our own products efficiently and quickly through the creation of individual product pages. NetSuite SCA [SuiteCommerce Advanced] has many shortcuts for adapting pages, creating new content, and building options.
Making changes to the site is also easy: Changing menus, enabling and disabling pages, switching options, or just swapping out content can all be done in a matter of minutes and without having to be ‘under the hood’ in NetSuite. You have options: You can use programming or coding if you want, or you can take advantage of the tools that allow you to make changes without being completely ‘tech-savvy’. It is much the same for items, menus, and most content changes we need to make on a day-to-day basis.
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Convenient for Customers
The ease with which you can make changes, log in, and get to any part of the SuiteCommerce site is an asset for us, of course, but it’s convenient for our customers too. Their web portal gives them the tools they need to quickly order and re-order everything they need to keep their business thriving.
We know that our customers have taken advantage of shortcuts and re-orders as we can see the reduction in the number of pages per session as time has gone on. This tells us that our customer portal has been used to help customers to more efficiently navigate to the products they need, and they’ve had to spend less time searching.
We know our customers find the site convenient, because we’ve asked them. Our survey data conducted in 2020 on the SCA site experience gave us tremendous insight into just how our customers are using our site, and what they like about it.
8 out of 10 customers said that they find the customer portal useful. 96% said the site was visually appealing. They’ve told us that they like how there is a “lack of clutter” on the site, which is due in part to the clean look and feel of NetSuite’s customizable templates. Our customers find it easy to order, search, and check out. They also say that the user experience is on-par or above other sites they visit. That includes our competitor sites like Home Depot and even Amazon! We appreciate the compliments and know that with the versatility of the NetSuite SCA site we can remain competitive in the eCommerce space for years to come.
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Data-driven Ecommerce
The data analytics offered by NetSuite has also helped us align offers with what the customer has been looking for. Being able to arrange and display top selling products has been a real advantage in terms of conversion rates. Additionally, we’ve been able to leverage the data we have available from their customer portal – such as past orders – to fine-tune ongoing promotions, email offers, and even our phone conversations with individual customers. We can now easily see if any given promotion makes sense for a particular customer, and then use that promotion as a “prospecting tool” to convert one-time customers into long-term business.
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Custom Features and Forms
There are very few limits to what you can build inside the SCA environment. We’ve created several unique features for our customers in SCA, including a way for them to check on order updates without having to leave our site. This involved constructing a custom tracking page that provides order tracking status at every step of the process. Our customers now have real-time information at the click of a button without having to move to another tracking site like UPS.
Custom forms and tools are also easy to add. If we can save our customer time we do! Because we offer custom products, many of the forms used in the process would usually be a lot of work on both sides to fill in. With SCA, we can create customizable ‘wizards’ that quickly tabulate measurements and key information to create a quote and allow the customer to proceed with their customized product. It’s easy to use, and it takes half the time than our old methods. Everything is integrated and you can tie the information into forms, make sure it’s communicated to your sales team, and automate the follow up – all through customization that starts with a very versatile SCA site.
We’ve also been able to grow a special department of our company that does custom work – the Metal Fabrication Shop – by building a new section on our website that wholesale customers use specifically to interact with the Fabrication Shop. We’ve created digital forms that communicate pricing to the customer and allow us to follow up with these requests directly through NetSuite. With these tools, customers can easily select any finish, type, size, color, etc. – we tell them that “if they can dream it, we can build it.” SuiteCommerce’s configurability (plus a bit of our own brainstorming) has made communicating customer desires directly to the fabricators remarkably efficient, even for highly customized products. It also saves time for our sales and operators by allowing customers to enter requests in real time. In our first year of utilizing these tools on our website, our Metal Shop exceeded its sales and production goals. This part of our business continues to grow in large part due to the added visibility and function made possible with SCA.
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It keeps getting better!
We’re excited for where we will go with SuiteCommerce this year and beyond. The latest SCA updates give us even more versatility and flexibility in design and customization. New design templates will take our business to the next level. Our SEO [search engine optimization] is expected to be better than ever, and we’re investing in a new layout for our product pages, lead pages, and general site navigation. We are certainly one company who will be taking advantage of the latest enhancements in SCA to get our customers the products they need in the easiest and most convenient way possible. The powers of customization, the great customer experience, and the bottom-line returns on investment available through SuiteCommerce continue to help us and our customers grow every year.
There you have it – a real, established company that has found SuiteCommerce to be a boon to its business health as it expands into the ecommerce market. And, as no doubt you know, the ecommerce market is certainly worth capturing. In his book "Ecommerce Evolved: The Essential Playbook To Build, Grow & Scale A Successful Ecommerce Business" Tanner Larsson puts it well:
"I firmly believe that ecommerce is the business. Thanks to advances in technology, online globalization, and ease of access to manufacturers and suppliers, combined with the fact that as humans we love to buy things (and lots of them), ecommerce is one of the best businesses you could ever be in. Everything that was once a major barrier to entry into ecommerce has now evaporated."
NetSuite Commerce Partner
That's all for now, but we hope that this article was helpful and informative! If you have general questions about SuiteCommerce, or specific questions about how you can improve your own SuiteCommerce website, feel free to contact our team at any time. Anchor Group is a certified Oracle NetSuite Commerce Partner, and is equipped to handle all kinds of SuiteCommerce projects, large or small!
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