SPRINGFIELD, Mo., Mar 31, 2022 – Classy Llama, the Full-Service eCommerce Agency, has been recognized by the Comparably Awards for Best Marketing Team 2022. This makes the fifth award Classy Llama has won from Comparably.com.
Classy Llama’s Marketing team scored the #36 on theBest Marketing Teams list, alongside companies like Adobe and Google. Comparably’s data sets include more than 70,000 companies, many of which have a significant global presence.
“It’s an honor to find ourselves in the Top 50!” said the Classy Llama Marketing Team.
Comparably’s Best Marketing Teams list is derived from sentiment ratings provided by current employees in marketing departments who anonymously rated their employers on Comparably.com over the past 12 months. Nearly 20 different workplace culture categories were measured, from compensation, leadership, and co-workers to work-life balance, professional development opportunities, and perks and benefits. All ratings were provided from March 20201 through March 2022. Read more about Comparably’s methodology here.
“I’m thrilled, this is a big win for Team Llama!” said Kurt Theobald, CEO. “It’s proof that quantity does not equal quality. Our Marketing team is small and mighty!”
About Comparably
Comparably (www.comparably.com) is a leading workplace culture and compensation monitoring site. Since launching in 2016, Comparably has accumulated 10 million ratings from employees across 60,000 North American companies.
About Classy Llama
Despite our playful name, Classy Llama could not be more serious about the level of integrity, excellence, and commitment we offer. Since 2007, it’s been our passion to bring the combined expertise of our eCommerce veterans to every client and business we serve. Now, with over 125 commerce sites and 400+ customizations and integrations under our belt, our mission continues to provide digital commerce thought leadership to the eCommerce community at large. We help merchants win in their businesses by providing eCommerce thought leadership, expert insight, and solutions tailored to their specific needs.
Contact: Greg Johnson Classy Llama Recruitment (417) 866-8887
Sometimes, no matter your best intentions, a project can be laden with difficulties. That was certainly true for the R&R Products, Inc., company in the early stages of their eCommerce journey.
When the R&R team decided their new goals were to expand from the golf products industry into the landscaping market, all while keeping up their commitment to customer service, they knew they would need a stable website with a great user experience. Unfortunately, they were working with a Solutions Integrator that wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the upgrade their website needed, from M2 Open Source to M2 Commerce Cloud.
That’s when R&R began their search for an agency partner that had the experience and confidence needed to get into the weeds of coding complexities and also the expertise to pull the project out of those same weeds.
CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GROWTH GOALS
R&R Products, Inc., is a name that’s synonymous with quality. As the world’s leading manufacturer of turf equipment replacement parts for the commercial turf industry, their dedication to serving the needs of golf courses, athletic fields, and more with high quality products has never wavered since their founding in 1971.
Not only that, despite their catalog featuring over 32,000 quality replacement parts, accessories, and more, their team takes superior customer service so seriously, they proudly offer a 98% rate on products being shipped the same day their order is received. When you order from R&R, you can be assured that not only will you get a quality product, you’ll also get it in a timely fashion.
Looking to the future, R&R is also pursuing growth into the general landscape industry, hopeful they can bring their brand of quality and service to another market.
But, with a site that worked directly against these objectives, an update with better functionality wasn’t just wished for—it was an absolute necessity.
BLOCKED BY FAULTY TECH
Standing in the way of the R&R team’s goals was an outdated website that wasn’t functioning at a level commensurate with their commitment to customer service. Their M2 Open Source website contained an abundance of archaic, specialty code, making it slow to load and hard to use.
Having a stable website with a great user experience is absolutely crucial to R&R Products’ mission that every shopper gets the same excellent customer service every time they visit their website.
Unfortunately, the complex fixes that would be needed weren’t achievable with the SI they were currently working with. Facing frustrated customers and internal team woes as well, Brian Larson from R&R felt the pressure to fix their eCommerce presentation so acutely it followed him home. He felt unable to disconnect from the stress even in his down time. If the company couldn’t get a better website launched, their eCommerce presentation would continue to stall the growth and expansion R&R saw for their brand. Not only that, their team members would suffer the continued weight of that stress.
FINDING AN ECOMMERCE PARTNER WITH FOLLOW-THROUGH
When the R&R team came to Classy Llama, we knew it would be a difficult project, but that didn’t dissuade us from digging in. Delivering what clients need even through storms of difficulty is what lights llamas up, so we rolled up our sleeves and got to work discovering what R&R needed to achieve their goals, and how we could make it happen for them.
Fitment, UX, and more: Solutions for R&R
Because of the intense level of customization R&R’s M2 Open Source website started with, Classy Llama knew it wouldn’t be a simple process to move them to Adobe Commerce (Magento). Each area of their site that was built with custom code needed to be reviewed and a new—hopefully native to Magento—solution would need to be developed. From shipping to UX to their ERP, Classy Llama began the complicated process of auditing, roadmapping, and implementing each Adobe Commerce integration that would bring R&R’s website from buggy and archaic to functional and technically up-to-date.
One feature that was intensely important to R&R’s user experience functionality and, therefore, their goals of stellar customer service, was the interactive schematics. This functionality, often referred to as, “Fitment,” is designed to make searching for parts super simple for shoppers and is extremely popular among all kinds of parts sellers. Fortunately, Classy Llama’s extensive experience in the automotive industry and dealing with large catalogs of aftermarket parts made us the team with the technical chops needed to create an excellent fitment search solution for R&R.
Lawn mower schematics display with all parts showing.
Hover over the part(s) you want to buy, that part lights up in the schematic and vice-versa.
After identifying that the previous SI’s work on the fitment solution would need to be scrapped, Classy Llama’s UX team got to work rebuilding the code from scratch. The team also implemented a functionality that made it possible for customers to save the models of their machinery (ex. lawn mowers) to a personal login so that when they searched, only parts for the models they own would display.
When customers create an account, they can save their equipment and only shop what they need.
An Ongoing Partnership
After almost two years of working through various problems during the new Adobe Commerce build, the Classy Llama and R&R teams were able to build the kind of trust and connection every brand needs in their eCommerce partner. Shortly before the official launch date, R&R signed on to an ongoing partnership with Classy Llama, to provide post launch support as well as continued maintenance on whatever they need most.
Not only that, during our ongoing maintenance, the solutions team determined R&R would benefit from an upgrade to their Adobe Commerce site. Classy Llama is now working toward kicking off the upgrade project as soon as possible.
R&R’S SERVICE PROMISES KEPT
Now that R&R Products, Inc., has an eCommerce partner like Classy Llama on their side, their brand is primed to achieve their growth goals. Plus, their dedication to customer service excellence has the technical back-up necessary to make sure they always keep their promise to their customers.
Selling aftermarket parts online is a unique challenge. Most parts merchants have incredibly large catalogs with many complex categories. Not only that, most customers now expect an intuitive search experience where they can enter their specific year, make, and model or even a VIN lookup to ensure they’re getting a part that fits.
When thinking about this kind of advanced functionality, one of the most significant decisions that parts sellers and automotive merchants face is selecting their eCommerce platform.
Adobe Commerce (Magento) is a very powerful application that provides a ton of features out of the box. It can also support massive product catalogs and be extended with customizations.
Can all of this flexibility and power really be delivered at speeds the modern shopper expects? Yes!
Adobe Commerce provides two different methods for building the user interface of your site, both of which have unique solutions for speeding up page load times. You can use the responsive theme framework with full page cache, or build your pages with Progressive Web App technology.
Method One: Full Page Cache
When you have a sizeable parts catalog, there can be a large number of product pages being accessed by multiple users concurrently. While many factors contribute to page load times – from hosting and application performance to image optimization – load times can be significantly reduced with Adobe Commerce’s built-in full page cache.
As pages are served the first time, these page files are stored in the cache, allowing them to be delivered to the end user faster the next time they are accessed. This not only speeds up the response time, but also reduces the load on the Magento application, alleviating additional slowness during peak traffic.
Method Two: Progressive Web Apps
The newest way to build the front end of your site is using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Adobe Commerce’s PWA Studio provides a set of developer tools that makes it easier for merchants and developers to build fast and engaging mobile experiences.
Using modern web technologies, PWAs provide much faster load times and more of an app-like experience on mobile devices. PWAs cache most of the assets in your device’s browser and communicate with the site via API to get dynamic data and perform actions, providing an overall faster experience for the user.
This is important in the automotive industry, as many times shoppers are on mobile devices in the shop, at the car show, or on the go, and will return to your site multiple times as they look for that perfect part. With Adobe Commerce (Magento) PWA, mobile shoppers also benefit from app-like features such as native push notifications and limited offline access without requiring the user to install an app.
2) Powerful Attributes
Adobe Commerce and Magento’s Entity, Attribute, Value (EAV) data model provides tons of flexibility out of the box. With the ability to add different types of attributes to your products, you can refine how shoppers find what they need.
Adobe Commerce gives you the ability to set up different types of attributes depending on what data you need in order to identify or describe your products. These include:
Text Field
Text Area
Text Editor
Date
Yes/No
Dropdown
Multiple Select
Price
Media Image
Fixed Product Tax
Visual Swatch
Text Swatch
These attributes allow you to get very detailed in providing specs for your products. Attributes can then be set to be used in layered navigation, which allows shoppers to drill down to the exact product they are looking for. Attributes can also be used for displaying certain details on the product page, or even to power configurable product variations (like color, size, etc).
You can create attribute sets for the various types of products you sell. For example, you can have one attribute set for batteries and another for mufflers, each containing different sets of attributes. This makes managing your product catalog much easier. When you add a new product, you can simply select the relevant attribute set that includes all the attributes you need for that type of product.
3) Fitment
Fitment provides a method for shoppers to “shop by vehicle” and makes the shopping experience more streamlined by only displaying products that are compatible with the vehicle selected.
Rather than clicking through categories and subcategories of products for all different vehicles, fitment allows users to enter their vehicle information when they arrive on the site and review only relevant results.
While fitment is not a native concept in Adobe Commerce, it’s something that many automotive merchants rely on. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to add fitment functionality to Adobe Commerce.
One way is to build a custom solution – a benefit of having an open source platform that’s designed to be customized. A Magento-certified developer or agency can build an integration with ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) fitment data or other data sources to power a year, make, model lookup.
If you want to avoid a custom solution, you can leverage Adobe Commerce’s extension marketplace or third party apps that plug and play to provide shop by vehicle functionality. For example, Classy Llama built an automotive accelerator that includes a fitment extension.
This extension supports various fitment fields, so in addition to the standard year, make, model, you can have fields for the drivetrain, body style, etc. It also allows customers to save vehicles to their “virtual garage” so they don’t have to select their vehicle each time they return to your site, while allowing them to easily switch between multiple vehicles they may own. Classy Llama’s fitment extension also allows you to integrate with various data sources such as ACES/ PIES, vendor data, or a product information management system.
4) Multiple Product Types
A unique advantage of Adobe Commerce is the flexibility it provides for catalogs with different types of products. Adobe Commerce (Magento) starts with the concept of a simple product and then builds upon that. Simple products are a single product with no variations or configurations. Adobe Commerce then allows you to create configurable, bundle, and group products. You can assign simple products to these other product types and allow customers to select from different variations or kits.
Configurable products allow you to create product variations based on product attributes. For example, you may sell a specific product in either a black or chrome finish. This allows the shopper to select from these options on the product page and see an updated image for the option chosen.
Bundles or groups are useful if you want to sell a set of parts for an assembly. You may have a part that requires several nuts and bolts, gaskets, wires, etc. and you can configure a bundle to include all the parts needed for the job. Adobe Commerce also provides the ability to make your bundle products configurable — letting a shopper pick from a list of products to build the kit they need.
5) Flexible Integrations
Many times automotive merchants are working with older back-end systems that have very specific integration requirements, such as an ERP that houses customer data, inventory, or a point-of-sale system. Here are some valuable ways that Magento 2 provides flexibility when integrating with other systems:
Pre-built integrations are available through various software vendors.
The API for Magento 2 provides access to nearly all data you would need in order to build a custom integration if needed.
Custom API endpoints can be developed into the platform allowing full control over how data is sent and received.
With these tools, there really is endless flexibility in how you can integrate with Adobe Commerce and Magento.
Conclusion
While the automotive industry has many specific needs and challenges, a flexible and powerful eCommerce platform like Adobe Commerce will allow you to create a great shopping experience, while also equipping you to integrate with your existing business systems and processes. For these reasons, Adobe Commerce is a great fit for any automotive parts site, especially those with big catalogs and special product categories.
A huge product catalog can make a website difficult to navigate, which leads to customers bouncing and, ultimately, a loss of revenue or even a bad reputation. But for a company like PurposeBuilt Brands, with nine huge product catalogs, customer confusion can become an even bigger problem.
THE CLEANING REVOLUTION
Since 1941, the Weiman family has been pioneering a new revolution they like to call, “So much more than clean,” when they started developing their expansive line of cleaning products starting with Weiman Wood Polish. This product was a first-to-the-market of its kind, formulated specially to preserve and protect fine wood furniture.
Since then, Weiman has continued to develop more first-of-a-kind cleaning products, including pioneering glass cooktop cleaner in the 1980s. The Weiman Family’s dedication to creating products that go beyond simply cleaning and instead beautify and fortify people’s belongings led them to develop a diverse portfolio of cleaning product brands.
What started as Weiman in 1941 is now known as PurposeBuilt Brands, a company passionate about building premium brands that offer safer, gentler, and more sustainable cleaning products: “Our desire is to be better for you, your family, your business, and the environment.”
PurposeBuilt believes in operating with a purpose and passion for creating products that are prized by their users and ultimately better their lives.
eCOMMERCE STRESS AND STRUGGLES
Because PurposeBuilt Brands is dedicated to continually improving their customer’s lives by adding to their portfolio of exceptional brands, they came to a point as a company where they realized they needed cohesion and improvement in their eCommerce presentation.
Their previous Magento 2 websites were extremely buggy and overloaded with third-party plugins that made daily site maintenance so difficult and time consuming the upkeep was virtually impossible for the PurposeBuilt team. Because none of their sites were connected, their team had to play a game of debugging whack-a-mole each time Magento went through an update, fixing issues on one site and then checking through code on the other 8 until they could fix each site’s issues.
Not only that, PurposeBuilt offers a robust library of helpful content available on most of their websites that drives traffic to their eCommerce stores, but their WordPress blog was constantly in danger of going down. Pat Lee, the eCommerce Director for Weiman, and the rest of his team were frequently stressed and worried about the possibility that their number one source of inbound website traffic would be suddenly and unexpectedly non-functional.
Finally, each PurposeBuilt Brand had its own website and they weren’t connected to each other, causing their customer base to be unaware of the full catalog of quality products available to them. Their eCommerce team wanted to find a technical team with the chops to create a single shopping cart for their current brand portfolio that can scale as they add more brands.
With their brand’s websites in such a precarious state and the anxiety of potentially losing traffic (and potentially revenue) looming over them each day, the PurposeBuilt team decided it was time to find a solution.
CONNECTING A VAST BRAND PORTFOLIO
First thing’s first, PurposeBuilt’s team knew they needed a website with a much lower total cost of ownership.
They began to seek a Solutions Integration partner that could debug their Adobe Commerce Magento 2 sites, reduce custom code, and centralize their website features. Pat at Weiman had worked at a company previously that partnered with Classy Llama and felt that our team was a perfect fit to solve their pain points.
After an initial discovery period, the Classy Llama team determined making all the necessary improvements to Weiman’s current site would be time- and cost-prohibitive. We determined that, it would actually take less time, money, and effort to rebuild their Adobe Commerce M2 site from scratch. Not only that, a new build would create a website that was much more maintainable for the PurposeBuilt team providing them with the lower total cost of ownership they wanted — and with a lot less stress.
During the new build, Classy Llama was able to help PurposeBuilt think more holistically about being a multi-brand company.
A frustration the PurposeBuilt team and their customers alike had was the inability to shop all of the company’s brands at once. Because each brand had its own website, they also had their own shopping cart. But since one company owns all of the brands, wouldn’t it be easer if they somehow had a shared shopping cart between all of the PurposeBuilt brands?
The Classy Llama team said yes, it would, and created a brand switcher that would allow customers to add any product from any PurposeBuilt site and add it to one shopping cart. Not only that, we created a header functionality to make it easy for customers to switch from brand to brand seamlessly while shopping.
Now PurposeBuilt has the benefit of each of their brands having their own website, while also offering their customers the convenience to shop all in one place.
In addition to creating a stable, connected websites site with a single cart, our UX team created themes designed to help centralize branding fonts and colors without creating a cookie-cutter brand expression, given that each of PurposeBuilt’s brands are all distinct. Now their team has the ability to make one change to their pattern library and have it apply across all nine of their websites, or just as easily make a singular change to one of their brands.
To solve PurposeBuilt’s problems with their WordPress instability, Classy Llama determined that the third-party extension Weiman was using to connect to their blog would not be stable on the Adobe Commerce platform. Instead, our team recommended implementing an Adobe Commerce (Magento) specific extension from MageFan, a hybrid WordPress and Adobe Commerce (Magento) blog solution. As part of this effort, the team was able to migrate a considerable amount of blog data from WordPress to Magento where it could be more easily stabilized and maintained, as well as customizing the blog styling on the blog landing pages to match the rest of their branding themes.
Now the team at Weiman has stability for their current blog content and what they need to continue to develop an even more robust content library for their customers.
Classy Llama also bolstered PurposeBuilt’s shipping solutions by making sure their preferred shipping partner ShipStation was still the best tool for their new sites. PurposeBuilt uses ShipStation to let customers track their order shipments through their Magento website.
After a quick audit to validate their choice, the solutions team began to integrate the shipping tool on Magento. During this integration, some unexpected bugs and challenges were discovered, but our technical experts were able to rally together, solve the issues, and get the ShipStation integration up and running.
FROM CONFUSION TO COHESION
Thanks to the solutions built by Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt Brands now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 site that’s able to maintain brand differentiation for each product in their portfolio. Not only that, the shopping cart integration allows their shoppers to browse each distinct brand while all of their sites are powered by one shopping cart.
The ease of use for customers to shop all of PurposeBuilt Brands brought cohesion to their portfolio, allowing the company to better connect with their audience and bring them the high-quality products that they’re passionate about developing.
PurposeBuilt’s team has been so happy with Classy Llama’s solution, they decided to sign on to an ongoing engagement with us before the build was even complete. Now that the website has launched, our ongoing services team is in place to provide site maintenance, further relieving the team’s stress.
As PurposeBuilt continues to build their brands, they now have a reassurance that they not only have a website that can expand along with their portfolio but also a partner who can help them with that expansion. Recently, Classy Llama developed a new project that kicks off shortly to add three additional product lines to PurposeBuilt’s website suite.
Since working with Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 build that features multiple sites in one, cohesive yet distinct branding, and an ongoing maintenance partner in Classy Llama. Now that their team enjoys a better experience for their customers and less daily stress, they’re free to focus on what they love: Developing more sustainable cleaning brands that can bring value to their customers’ everyday lives.
Find out how Classy Llama’s rapid response to security threats keeps client data safe …
Mondays are bad enough on their own but imagine this: you barely have a sip of your Monday morning coffee before suddenly being confronted with an intense security threat on the majority of your clients’ websites.
Unfortunately, that kind of Monday is all too likely for Classy Llama’s team. When it happened recently, they knew it was up to them to put the coffee down and get to work doing whatever they needed to in order to protect our clients from the security risk.
eCommerce Security: More precarious every day
In a world where cyber-attacks are more and more common, it’s crucial for eCommerce businesses to have reliable security systems in place.
If you don’t have someone in-house to monitor cyber-security threats, and you don’t have an outside partner to help you, your eCommerce website data, including you and your customer’s personal identifying information and credit card credentials, are at risk.
It’s not a maybe or a possibility — without proactive measures against security threats, your eCommerce data is in danger.
The Threat: Adobe Commerce Sites at Risk of Hacking
On Monday, Feb. 14, Adobe announced a severe security vulnerability known as CVE-2022-24086. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable Adobe Commerce sites, and was rated a 9.8 out of 10 on the severity scale by Adobe.
Not only that, by the time Adobe announced the problem and published patches to correct the vulnerability, some 500 hundred Adobe Commerce sites had already been attacked by hackers using the CVE-2022-24086 flaw.
Given that a majority of Classy Llama’s client sites are hosted on the Adobe Commerce platform, we knew immediately that we had to act.
The Response: Classy Llama’s Client Teams in Action
As soon as Classy Llama’s internal teams were aware of this threat, they snapped into action. Step one was to get everyone together and explain the problem while simultaneously creating a deployment plan to patch the vulnerability.
There was only one issue: Classy Llama’s pledge to our clients is to always communicate when we’re deploying work on client sites and getting the sign-off before actually making changes to their code. That way, clients can prepare for any possible outages or slowed response times on their site or, at the very least, they can be fully aware of what’s going on with their website maintenance.
Unfortunately, as the Security Services Team, the Account Executives and Project Managers, and the Systems Engineering Team discovered early Monday morning, this security threat was catastrophic. If a bad actor exploited this flaw against any of our clients before we got the go-ahead to patch the problem, their entire company and client base could be compromised.
As always, our dedication to serving our clients the absolute best way we can won out. It may have been slightly outside our normal policy, but together, the Classy Llama Team decided they couldn’t wait; our clients needed protection now.
The team started implementing the security patch for CVE-2022-24086 on the morning of Feb. 14, 2022 and had finished patching every single client in less than 24 hours. Because client notices were being sent simultaneously to the patch deployment, many of our clients were fortunate enough to hear about the security threat only after their eCommerce site was no longer at risk.
The Result: Safe clients. Happy Llamas.
By the next day, not one Classy Llama Adobe Commerce site was still vulnerable to CVE-2022-24086, thanks to the quick decision-making and execution tactics of our internal teams.
“Everything was handled great. I received alerts from a number of sources but Classy Llama was the first and had the patch installed right away,” Brian Larson, Vice President and CFO of R&R Products, Inc., said.
Our clients at Weekends Only were especially impressed and grateful about Classy Llama’s response to this threat:
“I can imagine that a vulnerability of that scale and urgency would be a difficult thing to manage across all of your clients, but you guys did a great job responding quickly with solid communication and execution. Before working with CL, it was pretty much on us to keep our eyes/ears open for vulnerabilities like this, and that usually meant we would find out about it several days late after stumbling across an article about it online. It sure is great to know you have our back when something like this happens. You guys were all over it and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.” Scott Antrobus, Product Manager of Digital Enterprises at Weekends Only, said.
Of course, as usual in our world, the unpredictable is the only thing you can count on …
Security Threat 2: The Sequel to CVE-24086
Just as the dust cleared from the CVE-2022-24086 announcement, Adobe dropped another bomb, announcing a new threat known as CVE-2022-24087 on Thursday, Feb. 17th.
The silver lining of the Feb. 14th CVE-2022-24086 threat is that Classy Llama already had a proactive game plan for patching flaws just like this new issue.
As soon as the Classy Llama team became aware of the second threat, they sprang into action.
While this threat and its patch followed a slightly more complex process to deploy, our internal teams followed the same protocol: round up the troops, get everyone in alignment on the plan, and then execute. Due to Classy Llama’s pre-planning and quick action, this secondary threat was neutralized for all our clients by the end of the next day.
“You handled things exactly as I would have hoped. In both cases, our internal security teams were already aware and asking about the risks, but you weren’t far behind with your initial communication. The process you used … led to patching the next day.” Jim Twieg, Vice President of Technology for Suttle-Straus, said.
Conclusion
Here’s the thing: Classy Llama’s dedication to our clients’ security will always be unwavering, and our goal is to work tirelessly to address any and all security threats as quickly as possible.
When a severe security threat such as CVE-2022-24086 is announced, Classy Llama’s teams are now more primed than ever to spring into action to protect clients. The quick response time and execution tactics we can implement managed to prevent any major damage from being done to any of our client sites. Thanks to our proactive approach to security threats, our clients can rest assured that their eCommerce site is safe with us and when clients are happy, Llamas are happy!
If you’d like help with eCommerce security concerns, Classy Llama has a specialized Managed Service for cyber security, designed to create a strategic relationship between you and our expert teams so we can protect your site like we did for our clients in the face of CVE-2022-24086. Partner with Classy Llama and rest assured that someone always has your back when it comes to site security.
Creating an eCommerce website can be an expensive proposition. Not only do you need to pay for the design and development of the website, but you also need to pay for hosting and domain registration.
However, there are ways to save money on your eCommerce website build. By following these tips, you can save money on your eCommerce website build and get a website that looks great and functions well.
Do Some of the Work Yourself
One way to save money on your eCommerce website build is to do some of the work yourself.
There are a number of tasks that you can do yourself, such as creating product descriptions, setting up shipping labels, and creating coupons.
Get Help from an eCommerce Partner
If you have a small- to medium-sized business, there are likely some tasks that your team doesn’t have enough time or expertise to do. When it comes to getting your eCommerce website off the ground or improving and maintaining it, this is where an agency partner can help.
An eCommerce partner will take care of all of the heavy lifting so that you can focus on your core competencies. Plus, if you hire a full-service eCommerce agency, like Classy Llama, they’ll be able to take care of your design, development, marketing, and strategy all in one place.
Agencies will typically offer either a managed solution or an unmanaged solution. With a managed solution, the partner takes care of pretty much everything for you. With an unmanaged solution, you’ll be responsible for more tasks, but the partner will likely help you develop a strategy and lay out a plan to get your eCommerce business up and running.
You can use an eCommerce agency in combination with other tips mentioned in this article. For example, if you create product descriptions yourself, an eCommerce partner can either edit them or write them from the ground up.
The lift your eCommerce agency partner provides you can save money by freeing you up to work on more important tasks, and also help you avoid problems like your website going down, resulting in lost revenue.
Be Frugal With Your Photography
You can save time and money on your eCommerce website build by using stock photography and graphics instead of hiring a professional photographer or taking the photos yourself. Any time you need photos that aren’t custom to what you’re selling, you can find photos to use on a number of websites with high-quality, royalty-free stock photos and graphics. This will allow you to get the same quality as a professional photographer, but for a fraction of the cost and time.
Choose Your eCommerce Platform Wisely
When it comes to eCommerce platforms, there are a lot of providers to choose from. However, not all providers are created equal. Some providers are more customizable than others, some have a better track record of providing quality eCommerce solutions, and some are only the right fit for the right size of business.
Choosing the right eCommerce platform provider will save you time and money on development costs. The provider will have already built the necessary infrastructure and will be able to get your website up and running quickly and efficiently. Additionally, the provider will be able to offer support and assistance with ongoing site maintenance.
Check out Classy Llama’s work with two eCommerce platforms here:
When it comes to developing and hosting a website, one of the best ways to save money is to keep the number of pages on your website to a minimum. This will help to reduce development and hosting costs. Additionally, it will also help your website to load more quickly, which is important for keeping your customers happy.
Remember, you don’t need to include every page on your website in order to have a successful online presence. Focus on the most important pages and leave the rest for later. You can always add more pages as your business grows.
Discover the Wonders of Content Management Systems
A content management system (CMS) is a tool that allows you to manage the content on your website without needing to know how to code. A CMS will allow you to add, delete, and edit pages on your website quickly and easily. This can be a great way to keep your website up-to-date with the latest products and promotions.
There are a number of different CMS platforms to choose from, each with its own set of features and benefits. Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento are all popular CMS platforms that are well suited for eCommerce websites.
When choosing a CMS platform, be sure to consider the needs of your business. If you need a lot of customization or if you have a lot of products, it may be better to use a more customizable platform. If you want simplicity and to get started quickly, then a more turnkey solution may be right for you.
Your Money Saving Future
Running an eCommerce business can be expensive, and the idea of building and running a website for your brand may give you a budget panic attack, but it doesn’t have to. Try these money savings tips and, if you really need some help, reach out to us here at Classy Llama. We’re always here to help eCommerce businesses like yours optimize their strategy and create wins for your brand.
As the largest lumber distributor in the United States, U.S. Lumber’s plans for the future have always included two things: pursuing continued growth while still maintaining the highest standards for their customers and suppliers.
When their previous Solutions Integration partner wasn’t able to help them achieve their eCommerce goals, they reached out to Classy Llama to help get their site launch across the finish line.
DISTRIBUTION RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON TRUST
Founded in 1988 by Lawrence Newton, U.S. Lumber is the largest privately held distributor of specialty building materials serving much of North America.
In the more than 30 years since their founder began their brand’s journey, U.S. Lumber has grown by opening new markets organically, and, in recent years, by acquiring several more Lumber brands in their portfolio.
As a brand, U.S. Lumber’s mission has always been much bigger than simply selling lumber products: they consider themselves a values-based organization, meaning they always seek to serve people first, and do what’s right even when it’s hard.
Over time, U.S. Lumber has been dedicated to consistently enhancing their offerings while remaining committed to maintaining the highest standard of trust with customers and suppliers. Today, their company serves over 15,000 customer locations in the United States and Canada with more than 50 categories of unique specialty building products.
That’s why U.S. Lumber’s eCommerce presentation is so important to them: their website should always be another expression of their commitment to excellence and continually help build trust with their customers. They need an eCommerce presence that ensures their growth goals and excellent customer service mission are never at odds, while also meeting their most important objective: creating a brand that can make a difference in our world one person at a time.
As with anything worth doing, though, achieving these goals through eCommerce didn’t come without its share of obstacles.
STALLED CONSTRUCTION WOES
When U.S. Lumber was ready to push forward with their growth goals through eCommerce, they reached out to a Solutions Integrator to help them build and launch a site that met their brand needs now and had the kind of foundation that could grow alongside their business.
Unfortunately, after almost 2 years, that agency partner wasn’t able to come through for them and their site was still unlaunched. With U.S. Lumber’s eCommerce goals out of reach with their current SI and their team feeling frustrated and unsupported, they knew it was time for a change and reached out to Classy Llama.
MILLIONS OF PRICING INSTANCES? NO PROBLEM
After connecting with the U.S. Lumber team about their frustrations, our team immediately engaged in a paid discovery process. Instead of providing cookie-cutter solutions, our team believes in the importance of discovering what a brand’s objectives are and creating custom road map to help our clients achieve those goals.
With U.S. Lumber, this process was particularly helpful as we were able to reassure their team that all our recommendations and work would align with what their brand wanted to achieve in the future.
Following the discovery process, Classy Llama determined that U.S. Lumber would be best served by a phased approach. First, our team rescued their current build by upgrading from an outdated Magento 2 version to the current version, as well as ensuring the code had the foundation needed to scale the site in the future. Once their current site was launched and functional so their brand could maintain contact and relationship with their customer base, our team moved into phase 2, where more customizations to the Magento code were developed.
CUSTOM PRICING DISPLAYS FOR EACH UNIQUE AUDIENCE
Because U.S. Lumber distributes their products all over the U.S. and Canada, that means their pricing and shipping rates are going to be different depending on where their customers live. In order to make this simple and easy for shoppers to deal with, their Magento site needed a functionality called a that enabled the correct pricing to display to the correct customers based on what U.S. Lumber branch their company is located in.
This may sound pretty simple on the surface, but given the large number of branches and products offered by the entirety of the U.S. Lumber catalog, our team determined that amounts to over 11 million different pricing combinations. The solution built by their previous SI wasn’t able to scale with this pricing increase, which also meant it wouldn’t be able to scale in the future as U.S. Lumber continues to grow.
Classy Llama architected a branch-switcher solution that allowed the site to display customer-specific pricing without causing any loading time issues for the customer, as well as provide a mechanism to update pricing data through the ERP daily. Not only that, the solution built is so efficient, the entire process of updating the 11 million+ pricing differences only takes 45 minutes.
Additionally, the tech team was able to meet all of U.S. Lumber’s B2B requirements through native Magento code, making the website cost less to build and maintain throughout their future scalability needs. Essentially, Classy Llama was able to eliminate entire classes of future cost or risk by ensuring that their B2B solutions were architected within the Magento framework, including the branch switcher solution.
MAKING PROGRESS THROUGH A WELL-CONCEIVED PATH
As Phase 2 of U.S. Lumber’s engagement with Classy Llama was nearing completion, their team decided that an ongoing relationship with us would suit their eCommerce needs best and signed-on to a full service retainer. That means that we get the opportunity to become U.S. Lumber’s daily partner in eCommerce growth as they move forward with their brand and scalability goals.
Currently, our team is working closely with theirs to create a strategic road map for the U.S. Lumber brand in 2022 and beyond, including how to add more branches to their current site, as well as create a new website for another brand they recently acquired.
U.S. Lumber’s team went from feeling let down by their previous SI to feeling supported in both the short and long term with Classy Llama as their agency partner. As their brand continues to scale and provide the lumber needed to build America’s schools, houses, and backyard projects, they can rest assured they’ve got someone in their corner who not only supports their goals, but also their mission: serve people well and do what’s right, no matter what.
When it comes to shopping for auto and manufacturing parts, fitment is the perfect fit.
Fitment provides a method for shoppers to “shop by vehicle” and makes the shopping experience more streamlined by only displaying products that are compatible with the vehicle selected.
Rather than clicking through categories and subcategories of products for all different vehicles, fitment allows users to enter their vehicle information when they arrive on the site and review only relevant results. Being able to find the right part that will fit your car perfectly is essential, and that’s why the Adobe Commerce platform is a great choice for part sellers with large catalogs that also want a fitment extension.
Adobe Commerce, backed by Magento 2, has all the technical capabilities and features sellers need to create a fitment shopping experience that makes it easier for customers to find the parts they want.
While fitment is not a native concept in Magento, it is something that many automotive and manufacturing merchants want to incorporate on their Magento websites. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to add fitment functionality to Magento.
With fitment on Adobe Commerce, sellers can create a completely customized fitment experience for their customers, and that’s sure to improve their shopping experience.
Custom Fitment
One way is to build a custom solution — a benefit of having an open source platform that’s designed to be customized. A Magento-certified developer or agency can build an integration with ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) fitment data or other data sources to power a year, make, model lookup.
Fitment on the Magento Marketplace
If you want to avoid a custom solution, you can leverage Magento’s extension marketplace or third party apps that plug and play to provide shop by vehicle functionality.
Features and Benefits of Fitment on Adobe Commerce
1) Fitment Fields
Fitment fields are various display filters for parts that offer a powerful search result organization benefit. Users are able to filter or sort products by attributes such as price, make, model, VIN, and more, making it easy to narrow down their search and locate the correct part with minimal frustration.
2) Virtual Garage
This fitment feature allows customers to store the type of car or other machinery they own on the website. That way, each time they log in and search for parts, only those that fit their garage will appear, creating the kind of custom experience shoppers love.
3) Data Integration
When you partner with an agency like Classy Llama to get a Fitment extension on your Adobe Commerce site, you can also integrate with various data sources such as ACES/ PIES, vendor data, or a product information management system. This ensures fitment data is accurate and relevant seamlessly.
4) Product Information Management
If you already have fitment data integrated with your product information management system, Magento’s extension manager now makes it easier to create fitment indexes to help boost fitment performance.
5) Improved User Experience
With fitment on Adobe Commerce, customers are able to easily find the correct part for their vehicle or other machinery. That not only decreases shopping efforts and time, but also lets customers get in and out of your site quickly so they can focus on other areas of life.
Why Fitment Fits
Fitment is a great fit when it comes to making the parts shopping experience better, especially for the kind of larger catalogs often found on the Adobe Commerce platform.
“Everyone should have access to nutrient-dense, delicious food, season after season.”
– Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds‘ Philosophy
In today’s all-digital world, your website’s ability to scale along with the size of your business is crucial to your success. If your website can’t grow, then neither can your brand.
When Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds realized the eCommerce solutions they were using had become a huge obstacle to their growth, they decided to do something about it.
BAKERSVILLE AND A SUSTAINABLE MISSION
Down a quiet, almost unassuming scenic farm road in Mansfield, Missouri, you may be surprised to discover somewhat of an oasis for farmers and hobby gardeners. There, tucked in among the fields of wildflowers, you’ll find Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds Farm and Village.
Founder Jere Gettle started Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. in 1998 as a hobby, and though it has since grown into North America’s largest heirloom seed company, they’ve never lost their passion for growing and sharing heirloom seed varieties.
In fact, the Gettle family is so passionate about their mission to preserve heirloom seed varieties, they’ve made sustainable farming a lifestyle. Bakersville, as their property is known, sits on the historical farmland of the longest-lasting homestead in Missouri, where the original owners traded with the Osage Indians, and cared for soldiers during the Civil War.
Now, the land is populated with a beautiful farm and an entire pioneer-style village, featuring a restaurant, old-time mercantile, herbal apothecary, blacksmith shop, and more, standing as a testament to the Baker Creek mission: to create community through honoring our agricultural past.
While the Gettle family’s dedication to their mission has never been uncertain, at some point, the progress of their eCommerce goals definitely became a question.
REAPING WHAT A SMALL AGENCY SOWS
Baker Creek’s Adobe Commerce (Magento) website was built and maintained by a great Solutions Integrator that was simply limited in what they could do for the brand. Because of their small staff, there was only so much attention they could give Baker Creek and once the company decided to pursue a serious growth strategy, they realized they’d need to find a new partner that could get them where they wanted to go.
In addition, the continual addition of product and new functionality to the Baker Creek Adobe Commerce site created a backlog of known issues in coding and functionality their previous agency wasn’t equipped to mitigate.
Because of the Baker Creek dedication to work with local companies and fostering community, the discovery of Classy Llama in their virtual backyard made it clear that our companies were a natural fit. Just an hour away from Bakersville, our eCommerce agency would understand how to balance the historical context of the Baker Creek brand while also looking to the future.
CULTIVATING GROWTH WITH A NEW PARTNER
Given that Baker Creek’s main goal for their eCommerce presentation was growth, Classy Llama proposed a Full-Service Retainer with our agency, giving their team access to our entire suite of dedicated experts, from website development to marketing services.
Rather than providing one-time solutions for Baker Creek, this kind of ongoing relationship meant that Classy Llama was able to be a true partner in their brand’s growth, continually tooling their website and providing strategic recommendations for growth in every aspect of eCommerce.
A Technical and Strategic Road Map
As part of our kickoff with Baker Creek, Classy Llama began a process of auditing various aspects of their eCommerce operations and website so that we can discover what the problems and possible solutions are. During that phase, we’ve been able to provide them with Core Web Vitals and SEO Audits, in order to highlight what can be done to improve their loading times and Google search rankings.
Email Marketing: Dedication and Action
One big problem Baker Creek was facing when they came to Classy Llama was their email platform, Bronto, was approaching end of life. Their team would need to find a new solution for their over-a-million-contacts long email list, or risk losing a huge source of revenue. The Baker Creek team was also passionate about the potential to automate as much of their email marketing as possible.
Karl Brown, our former Digital Marketing Strategist, recommended a migration to Klaviyo, a robust email service provider that offers a variety of solutions, including support for Baker Creek’s automation goals. Since implementing our solution, Baker Creek has experienced significant email marketing growth, including an incident where a single email drove so much traffic and sales to their website, they experienced a temporary outage. Of course, thanks to the ongoing retainer relationship with Baker Creek, Classy Llama was able to resolve the outage quickly, and create a win in the form of boosted revenue from the higher traffic.
Not only that, but when Baker Creek was recently faced with some issues around their marketing automation goals, Karl was able to step in and provide direct support. Rather than just waiting for the situation to resolve itself or have a third party solve the problem, Karl dedicated his time to create a manual email send to make sure their new product items were available to customers.
“When no one else could help, I stepped in. I wasn’t going to leave our client hanging, that’s just not what we do at Classy Llama,” Karl said.
This direct support led to the highest grossing email send in the history of the Baker Creek brand, bringing in more than twice the revenue of their previous record.
PLOWING AHEAD INTO THE FUTURE
When they came to Classy Llama, Baker Creek wasn’t sure how they could best pursue growth through eCommerce. Now, their company has benefited from entire suite of experts, able to step in and provide direct support for their needs, as well as take a high level overview of their brand’s current obstacles and how they can turn them into opportunities and wins, creating a future characterized by growth.
Instead of just an eCommerce agency, Baker Creek was able to enjoy a a full-fledged eCommerce partner dedicated to cultivating the kind of ongoing relationship that will ensure their eCommerce presentation will no longer be an obstacle to their growth.
Now Baker Creek can keep their eyes on the prize: creating a community of farmers and gardeners that can preserve seed diversity and food security for generations to come.
The core of what any brand needs to be a successful online retailer is simple: a well-functioning website that connects to their audience and gives them a great user experience.
Unless you can build it yourself, you’ll have to partner with someone else, but with stakes as high as the success of your online business, entrusting the core of your eCommerce presentation to an agency partner can be a nerve wracking prospect.
For example: What if, despite putting forth substantial time, money, and effort, your eCommerce partner still can’t deliver the website you need?
Schroeder Publishing, the parent company for the American Quilter’s Society, experienced that exact eCommerce nightmare and came to Classy Llama to rescue the site that their previous SI couldn’t manage to launch.
SPINNING UP A COMMUNITY OF QUILTERS
In 1983 Meredith and Bill Schroeder attended a national quilt show and were completely bowled over by not just the numbers of attendees but their intense enthusiasm for the art of quilting.
Within a year, Meredith announced the formation of the American Quilter’s Society. Her goal was to develop a group that gave national recognition to quilters and their work and to set the standard in the industry. In the first year, 1500 quilters became charter members.
Since then, Schroeder Publishing and the American Quilter’s Society have been building community among quilting lovers everywhere through free and paid quilting educational content, quilting showcase events, and selling quilting supplies online.
The American Quilter’s Society’s mission is to inspire, nurture, and instruct today’s quilter, while honoring the creativity and historical importance of quilts and quilt-making. Their goal is to carry this theme through all their relationships, whether those relationships are with customers, authors, vendors or colleagues.
That’s why their eCommerce presence is so important to them, and why, when their eCommerce partner wasn’t able to come through for them, they decided it was time to make a move.
A RELIABLE PARTNER: THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK?
When Magento 1 began to approach its end-of-life date, the team at Schroeder Publishing knew they needed to act in order to stay connected to their subscriber base. Unfortunately, after engaging with another agency for over 2 years (and a significant financial investment), their agency still wasn’t able to launch the M2 version of the American Quilter’s Society website.
In addition to Schroeder Publishing’s site launch needs, they also knew they would need someone who could help them look to the future, especially when it comes to integration support for online event registration through their website. Creating space for quilting lovers to connect and cultivate community is core to the American Quilter’s Society’s mission, so they needed a partner that could create an eCommerce presentation designed to help them achieve their brand goals.
That’s what led their team to Classy Llama.
CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE QUILTERS CAN CONNECT
After communicating the Schroeder team’s level of stress, frustration, and anxiety around their eCommerce goals and objectives, the Classy Llama team felt strongly about the opportunity to save their site launch and create value for their brand.
As an SI, Classy Llama’s most serious and prized objective for our engagements is that we always deliver for our clients. We don’t believe in taking the easy way out or giving up on a project. That’s why our team felt strongly about the Schroeder Publishing site build: they needed someone who could carry their project across the finish line and that’s exactly what we love to do for our clients.
In order to make sure their eCommerce goals were served to the best of our ability—and that we identified all the issues from the previous build—the Classy Llama team began with a full audit of the work that had been done and determined that the majority of the work that had already been completed could be carried over to our build.
During this audit, the solutions team identified Schroeder Publishing’s key eCommerce objective at site launch was improving customer experience on M2 and creating efficiency for backend site management and was able to deliver both for their brand during our initial launch build.
A Full Service Retainer
Because Classy Llama was brought on to this project to rescue the build, our team took the opportunity to connect with the Schroeder team’s pain points over their previous agency experience very seriously. As we pushed their site forward, our goal was to build trust by not only communicating our processes well, but also by taking their concerns into consideration wherever possible. Being burned by a previous agency can cause a lot of trepidation around a project and Classy Llama’s relational approach to our projects meant that the Schroeder team was able to continually build more and more trust with us as their agency.
In fact, during the build the technical team was able to start creating a backlog of items that their website would need after launch. Because of this pre-work, we were able to offer Schroeder the opportunity to sign a full-service retainer with us and get ongoing support from a reliable agency partner. Thanks to our mutual understanding and trust, Schroeder decided to sign an ongoing retainer engagement before their site was even launched.
Since launch, our team has continued to evaluate what would best serve the American Quilter’s Society brand, including moving toward their next M2 upgrade, as well as integrating an event registration extension through Cvent.
A huge part of the American Quilter’s Society’s work is related to providing their subscribers with yearly memberships and the opportunity to attend quilting showcase events. That meant that their new eCommerce site needed a better way to manage these sign-ups.
When they came to Classy Llama, most of their list and event management was done manually, which was not only time consuming but also left room for user error. To solve this problem, our solutions team proposed a custom integration between Magento and the Cvent extension to automate their registration process.
Now that their team doesn’t have to manually manage the events and memberships, their cost of ownership is lower and they have one less thing to worry about.
THE ENDURING ART OF QUILT-MAKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Since working with Classy Llama, Schroeder Publishing and the American Quilter’s Society have gone from uncertainty and frustration around their eCommerce presentation to a place of stability and support.
Not only do they have a partner that’s committed to creating wins for their team no matter what, they also have an ongoing support system that can keep their site and community maintained, while also looking forward to the future of their brand and how eCommerce can foster community and collaboration for quilting lovers everywhere.
