Ridgid Toolshop
Ridgid Toolshop

Developing a full e-commerce site for Ridgid Toolshop

#Strategy #Technology

RIDGID Tools is famous within the higher ends of the plumbing and heating profession – they are ‘the Mercedes Benz’ of tools’. Although well-known throughout the US, the brand is less established in Europe, especially in the UK, which is currently one of their smaller markets, worth around £10m in sales each year.

RIDGID believed there was an opportunity to grow the market in the UK and Europe. In the last few years they have increased their product range significantly and are now marketing over 7,000 products. They have a traditional network of retailers in place but no digital shopfront and no way in which they could sell their products direct to British tradespeople.

Flourish were the only agency who took the time to really understand our target market. The resulting sales are better than we ever expected, with new customers in industries and locations we would never reach with our sales team.

– Jason – Director

Insight

The major consideration was the size of the site and its potential to get even bigger!

An ever- increasing product inventory meant that the site structure needed to be flexible enough to accommodate product additions and use a CMS intuitive enough for frequent changes.

Additionally, there was also no centralised stock file in the UK, so we would also have to consolidate data from various sources. We needed to have a system in place which could take any order processed through the website and forward the details on to our chosen wholesaler, who would then ship to the customer.

Action

We developed RidgidToolShop.co.uk a full eCommerce site for the UK market.

The back-end of the site was built using PrestaShop, a free, open source eCommerce platform. It was chosen because of its specific ability to scale for future development. Using our new centralised inventory, PrestaShop uses PHP and a MySQL database to hold product and user data, which is then pulled into the website pages when required. Using PrestaShop’s themes for the front-end, meant we could create the RIDGID brand style without affecting the functionality of the online shop.

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