It’s now or never. Saddled with an aging ecommerce platform that delivered an outdated user experience and was difficult to navigate, EcoEnclose LLC, a provider of sustainable shipping and packaging supplies for ecommerce sellers, realized it needed a new, more customized website to deliver the purchasing experiences its customers sought.

The company’s reasoning behind the decision, however, extended beyond just the need to create a more user-friendly website. EcoEnclose realized its ecommerce site reflected its leadership position as a supplier of eco-friendly packaging supplies. Having a dated website created the impression that the company was not at the forefront of the sustainable packaging movement in ecommerce, CEO Saloni Doshi recalls.

“One of our focuses is educating the customer about the advantages of eco-friendly packaging and making it easy for customers to digest that information,” Doshi says “We also wanted to add applications to our new site that created more customized user experiences. Our legacy platform at the time allowed customization, but not at the level of sophistication we wanted.”

Working with its longtime website development agency, Optimum7, EcoEnclose opted to replace its legacy platform with technology from BigCommerce. “Optimum7 recommended the BigCommerce platform, and we decided to install it because it afforded us more opportunities for the kind of customization we wanted,” Doshi says.

One of the biggest drawbacks to EcoEnclose’s legacy website at the time was its multi-page checkout. The company sought to streamline checkout to one page, which Doshi says was important to management.

Next, the company sought to bolster its educational resources pages with content that explained in detail the benefits of various eco-friendly packaging, such as poly mailers and inner packaging. It also expanded information about the company’s commitment to sourcing products through domestic manufacturers and why recycling matters to businesses.

Because such content can be dense and difficult to digest, EcoEnclose opted to add the Shogun Page Builder app to its new ecommerce site, which was available through BigCommerce’s app store. Shogun made it possible to improve the organization, layout and formatting of content on the new site’s resource and FAQ pages. Shogun is a drag-and-drop page builder and visual content management system integrated with BigCommerce.

“We have content-rich pages that can be a 5,000-word article, for example, and Shogun makes it easier to lay out the page in a way that makes the information easier to digest,” Doshi says. “We also have better headers and an FAQ page.”

In addition to improved content presentation, Shogun also provides visibility into page performance and allows EcoEnclose to monitor such critical metrics as sales, bounce rates, and the number of user sessions. Since launching the new site in 2018, the company has used those metrics to further optimize its content, which has helped raise conversion rates to about 7%.

As part of the overhaul of its content pages and to make ordering easier for buyers, EcoEnclose pared down products pages to a single page. In addition, product pages were designed to enable buyers to enter the dimensions of the desired product and see whether those dimensions can be met or not.

Once the desired dimensions are accepted, buyers can enter the quantity to the order and view a price. Options also exist for buyers to add their company logo to the packaging. Buyers can upload their logo or create one on the EcoEnclose site, apply it to the order and see an image of the finished products before clicking the Buy button.

“One of the challenges with a custom app like this is that some companies tend to move slowly when it comes to these types of innovations,” says Duran Inci, CEO of Optimum7. “EcoEnclose wanted to move quickly, and we developed this app in 90 days. One area we work with clients on is how to differentiate themselves from the competition, and we can move quickly on that front.”

In addition to improving content and product ordering, EcoEnclose chose to add an app that allows it to gain insights on visitors to its website and how they move through it. The app, called Lucky Orange, tracks how buyers move through the site and where they hover on a particular page, such as over a link. One advantage of seeing this data: it helps EcoEnclose identify dead spots within its site that need new content to engage buyers.

“Seeing how buyers move through the site and where they hover provides more visibility into the customer, which helps improve decision-making when it comes to presentation of content and links,” Doshi says.

Another key feature added to the new site is dynamic shipping quotes. Dynamic shipping quotes take into account such variables as weight of the order and the distance it must travel. These are included to provide accurate shipping costs. To achieve this goal, the company selected the ShipperHQ app from the BigCommerce app store.

“There are a lot of factors that influence shipping rates,” says Doshi. “Our aim is to calculate the shipping fee, so we don’t make money or lose money on shipping,” says Doshi, who adds the app provides buyers with an option for carbon-neutral shipping. “Having an app that allows us to accurately calculate shipping costs is very valuable to us.”

So far, the customized features EcoEnclose chose for its new platform have paid off handsomely, the company says. Over the past 12 months, EcoEnclose has added more than 20,000 customers. Since the new site launched, the company has increased its B2B leads 90%, its organic leads more than threefold and revenue twofold.

“We are seeing a lot more requests for customization, especially in B2B ecommerce,” says Inci. “We feel businesses are getting smarter about the benefit of giving buyers better experiences in order to compete with the big ecommerce players.”

Adds Doshi: “Without the ability to customize the site [as we wanted], there are a lot of things we couldn’t do to improve the customer journey.”

EcoEnclose would not have been able to improve the customer journey, Doshi adds, “without the ability to customize the site.”