B2B E-commerce and brand redesign

Fabco is one of the largest B2B retailers of building supplies in the southern United States. They historically used a team of salespeople to manage relationships with their customers, and all sales were processed over the phone, via email, or in person. Fabco received feedback from their clients’ younger purchasing managers that they would prefer to be able to transact online, so Fabco used this opportunity to expand their website to address this need.

A major challenge for this project was accounting for variable pricing by client and/or job. This involved analysing a complex pricing database and developing a simple way for a purchasing manager to see the pricing for a specific job as well as switch between the many jobs they may be managing at once. Another challenge was helping users perform the material calculations that a salesperson would typically perform. We created HTML versions of existing Excel materials calculators, ensured that the copy was user-friendly, and visualized results to make sure that users had a good sense of what they needed.

We performed two types of qualitative research for the Fabco website redesign project. Firstly, we surveyed competitive sites in the B2B construction space. These sites mostly had the same style and functionality as the existing Fabco site, so we moved on to B2C home improvement/construction sites. These sites were much more user friendly had contained more affordances that made them more fit for purpose than the B2B counterparts. Once a prototype of the site was developed, we leveraged Fabco’s customer base for user testing, to gather feedback from the actual purchasing managers that would be using the site once completed. This user testing identified pain points that were unique to Fabco’s workflow and allowed us to come up with creative solutions before the final site was launched.