As a B2B business, you may be considering a leap into selling direct to consumer (DTC). If you’re looking for examples of great (DTC) eCommerce sites, take a look at how some of these leading businesses are driving this business model. We’ve rounded up some impressive examples of DTC eCommerce sites, let’s take a look.
Molson Coors
When Covid-19 shut down bars, restaurants and limited retail outlet shopping hours, it significantly limited the traditional sales and distribution channels for the Molson Coors Beverage Company.
Partnering with Shopify Plus, they launched an online store in 10 days, enabling local delivery on their home turf of Toronto, Canada and growing sales by 188% month over month. With the impacts of the pandemic, the company leveraged local delivery and curbside pickup. The DTC model kicked off just in time for summer, centered around Canada Day on July 1.
‘Ship and Sip’ launched with a curated selection of products and customers used Shopify Payments to transact and choose home delivery, or collection from Molson Coors’ brewery in Toronto. Using social media and public relations, they highlighted free delivery to Torontonians. Shortly after launch, Molson Coors ran a promotion in tandem with the National Hockey League (NHL) and the NHL Alumni Association, where famous hockey player alumni surprised consumers with the delivery of limited edition products only available via Ship and Sip’s website.
Comparing similar time periods, sales went up 188%, orders went up 152%, and conversion rates were up 109% month-over-month. They’re now growing their online offerings and are introducing new capabilities in personalisation, conversion, and loyalty by tapping Shopify Plus Certified Apps. In the end, beyond another sales channel to complement its wholesale model, the new model provided a direct relationship with customers. It can now provide samples, test new products, invite feedback, and gain insights on customer tastes and preferences like it never could before.
Krispy Kreme
In 2003, Krispy Kreme opened its first store outside of the United States in Australia. With stores in both Australia and New Zealand and an eCommerce platform for both regions, Krispy Kreme ANZ set their focus on further extending its product offerings for in-store, online, 7-Eleven retail outlets and community fundraising customers.
They partnered with Balance Internet to upgrade their legacy eCommerce solution to an Adobe Commerce platform. The platform needed to include the positive aspects of shopping in-store in a new inventive way, including the welcoming atmosphere, friendly staff, and showcasing the range of core and promotional ranges.
To achieve this, there was a heavy focus on User Experience (UX) reflected throughout the design, usability and function. Additionally, Krispy Kreme ANZ wanted to significantly improve their own team’s day-to-day experiences with the platform. The goal was that the solution should act as a pivotal tool assisting the team in improving customer experiences by providing customer behaviour insights, data and analytics to assist with continual improvement.
Additionally, the Adobe Commerce out of the box content flexibility allowed for creative, immersive product pages with rich content and engaging promotional landing pages. The platform was launched in 2021, feature-rich and ready for action. Since launch, conversion rates have doubled vs this time last year. Also, the average transaction value (ATV) has recovered significantly post the lockdowns of the past 12 months caused by the pandemic.
Krispy Kreme’s eCommerce team are incredibly pleased with reducing the resources required to operate the platform, allowing merchandising and marketing teams to manage onsite content without requiring developer support. The site is jam-packed (pun intended) with a wide range of content to create immersive experiences for customers, e.g. images, videos, product manuals, promotional banners, adjustable page layouts, and find a showroom.
The solution provides flexible fulfilment options, including ship-from-store, buy online pick up in-store, as well as intelligent order allocation based on customer delivery address and much more.
Skullcandy
Skullcandy’s become a global leader in the audio space with its immersive technologies for headphones and earbuds. The business needed an eCommerce platform to reach and keep up with its youthful and adventurous audience.
saaThe platform needed to offer four things: versatility, adaptability, affordability and a superior user experience. They knew that to take their eCommerce to a new level, they needed to explore platform options from every angle.
Simplification, coupled with better pricing and the versatility to enable Skullcandy to control its own destiny, led the company to choose BigCommerce.
Skullcandy wanted to take on some of the management and development of the website in a two-way relationship and be less reliant on third-party contractors. They focused on reducing eCommerce platform overhead and resources to manage their day to day website needs and found that with BigCommerce their non-technical team could configure our global stores’ checkout, taxes, shipping and payment types with simple preset selections. They could avoid four to five months of custom integrations and development costs and maintain focus on ensuring the best consumer experience.
BigCommerce’s scalability also proved a big win too. BigCommerce’s open APIs made it easier to navigate and the platform could integrate whatever Skullcandy needed to ensure its high transaction volumes were processed in time with demand. The APIs allow for connection to product information to synchronise inventory, interface with the credit card companies, calculate taxes, and translate all the information into the ERP system for fulfilment. Skullcandy launched seven international sites in varying languages and currencies in just six months.
In a YoY comparison between Jan–Mar 2021 and Jan–March 2020, Skullcandy experienced a 104% increase in site traffic, a 146% increase in revenue and a 50% increase in its conversion rate.
Social media is playing a significant role in their overall digital success. Using Facebook Shops integration enables customers seamless shopping on both Facebook and Instagram.
Because Skullcandy is built on BigCommerce, an Open SaaS platform, its team no longer has to worry about site hosting and can now focus on the merchandising and growth aspects of its online business. In addition, it is operating within an extremely agile environment that can quickly change to meet business needs — and on top of all that, the company is saving a significant amount of money on development and overall platform costs.
ASUS
Multinational company ASUS specialises in motherboards, PCs, monitors, graphics cards and routers and is recognised globally as one of the top consumer electronics and computer goods retailers. Their Singapore branch is no different.
ASUS sought a way to bring together their customers, resellers and key distributors creating a unified B2B and B2C. They wanted an additional eCommerce site added on top of their existing one, already popular with customers. The new site would track all B2B2C tracking, sales and fulfilment to serve their Employee Purchase Program. This specialist program was designed to allow employees of a client company to purchase from a range of computers, laptops and other hardware at a discount price.
To boost the consumer experience across all their online and offline sales channels, ASUS enabled a seamless, online-to-online shopping journey including product discovery, offered special discounts and promos online and supported in-store sales upselling and product maintenance.
Multiple resellers fulfilled Singapore’s online orders, showing potential for future expansion so they integrated the back end of each of these resellers to pull them into the fold and have one single cohesive distribution network. All B2B tracking sales and fulfilment went directly through the new web store while serving the B2C market simultaneously.
To maintain the B2B2C model they required, ASUS partnered with Adobe, using Adobe Commerce’s readymade B2B features and powerful tools to enable ASUS’s B2B sales and promotion strategies for corporate accounts. ASUS also recognised the need for a scalable platform that would encourage B2C and B2B growth, as it expected continued high returns in both arenas in the future.
Using Adobe Commerce’s built-in features, including multiple buyer sales accounts in varying organizational structures, tiered pricing and customer product catalogues were created specifically for the Employee Purchase Program and the ‘buy in bulk’ function facilitated large orders from B2B wholesalers.
Some of the special purchasing features SmartOSC provided using Adobe Commerce included one-step checkout. They also added advanced reporting, abilities, and an advanced search feature. The Adobe eCommerce system integrated with ASUS resellers and distributor’s MRP systems to create data synching in real-time where previously, the tediousness of tracking inventory, through traditional channels across B2C and B2B markets proved inefficient.
The results seen spoke for themselves with 37% more page views and an increase of one minute and 39 seconds per session duration. When ASUS united their B2B and B2C sales across their online and offline channels, it was just the start of a brand new way of connecting with the customers, and giving them the best service possible.
Story Fresh
When a large distributor Story Fresh worked with, shut its doors on short notice. The company needed a fast online solution. Story Fresh had previously only been taking 10-12 daily orders, but now interacting with hundreds of customers and their daily orders, a web store was the perfect solution.
Partnering with Sana Commerce and using their out-of-the-box, ERP integrated platform provided all the features they were looking for to get up and running quickly. With 24/7 ordering, customers can see live pricing and review their order history.
They now experience increased efficiency because everything is streamlined. Automation means fewer administrative tasks and decreased data entry errors have been a bonus as the web store integrates with Microsoft NAV ERP, keeping everything up to date and live.
Story Fresh found the eCommerce solution particularly valuable through the pandemic as a lot of their customers had been shut down, but demand for their products remained high. They can now reach new consumers while still maintaining their B2B relationships.
Signet
Packaging, safety and warehouse supplies business, Signet distributes leading industrial brands, while also selling an exclusive range of their own products. Signet also manufactures stretch films, marking paints, inks and aerosols, labels and more.
Signet partnered with Overdose to digitally transform their legacy B2C and B2B business.
Overdose integrated the Adobe Commerce site with Signet’s Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP, enabling real-time, bi-directional transfer of product, customer-specific pricing, order fulfilment, shipping, and accounting functions. The site boasts granular AI personalisation through the implementation of Nosto, Algolia advanced search capabilities and email automation with DotDigital.
The breadth of Signet’s SKU mix meant a clear category and information structure was required to showcase the full range. With multiple customers attached to one account, (each with different permissions and roles) a ‘my account’ design and order flow required the ability to switch between uses within the account for administrators, with different permissions. With multiple pricing groups, different displays were designed for each pricing type, and a pricing hierarchy ensured the correct pricing display. Signet’s clunky legacy B2B checkout required an extensive signup process for new customers, so a simplified option was added to allow fast guest checkout on Adobe Commerce, with the provision to create a B2B account with automated ABN lookup and credit approval workflows.
With a variety in product display, specifications and large category numbers, the design was clean, detailed and importantly optimised for mobile, giving B2B customers ease of ordering and the ability for multiple B2B users to enter account info, order, edit and control flow.
