Ravensden wanted to provide their customers with an alternative method of ordering that was fast and reliable, to showcase its wide product range.
With such a broad range of products in Ravensden’s portfolio, the company relied heavily on product catalogues, personal visits and samples to promote the stock both at trade exhibitions to existing and new customers. Producing specific brochures for different market segments was not only costly but time consuming and didn’t always prove to be successful. The existing website gave a flavour of the range and provided clients with the option of ordering by telephone, fax, email or post. However, with the business having experienced a period of organic growth, the time was right to offer customers an alternative ordering and product search solution.
Michael Papé, Director, explains “Not only did we want to offer our customers the option of ordering online, but we wanted to be able to showcase our extensive range of products to both existing and potential customers. We have looked at a number of ecommerce solutions over the years but critically we wanted a system that linked into our Sage ERP 1000 solution to avoid any duplication of work.”
“We had been thinking for a while about giving the customers a portal to search the products in a more user friendly way. We saw a demonstration of Intellisell at the CPiO Customer Conference and indentified that it would be a cost effective way to display stock and pricing and give our customers an alternative way to place an order. A number of our customers are internet savvy and happy to order online. Furthermore, Intellisell offers us a different way to engage with our customers as we can also log into Intellisell as the customer and create an order as they walk around our showroom or trade show stand.”
Intellisell is a true business to business ecommerce solution and has total integration with Ravensden’s Sage ERP 1000 business software. Customers across the world view the product range, check stock and order securely at any time of the day or night. Within three months of using Intellisell, Ravensden has seen a benefit to the business – 13% of the orders received were generated on line. Those customers using Intellisell completely bought into it and generally increased the range of products that they ordered. Additionally they found that a number of customers were using the site to check stock and search for new products prior to ordering by the more traditional methods.
The Sage based Intellisell product has a powerful content management system which enabled Ravensden to create a product catalogue, complete with pictures which can easily be updated by Ravensden staff.
Orders received via Intellisell don’t have to be manually keyed into the system, saving Ravensden time and improving the level of accuracy.