Helping a low-voltage products supplier better connect with its customers online.
In the summer of 2021, Codal partnered with trueCABLE to help disrupt and innovate the low-voltage supplies industry—or, more specifically, make the experience of purchasing low-voltage products faster, easier, and more valuable via eCommerce.
trueCABLE provides ethernet cables, connectors, jacks, couplers, and other low-voltage supplies to both DIYers and commercial technicians. With its direct-to-consumer approach, the brand offers high-quality, low-cost products—designed by networking experts, and tested to exceed industry standards. Plus, customers receive free shipping and speedy at-home delivery with every online purchase.
Establishing a powerful online presence was essential for trueCABLE’s success in the competitive, old-school industry of low-voltage supplies. With many of its competitors still relying on the traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experience, trueCABLE saw an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in the market and better connect with its target audience. Naturally, the business started selling products on Amazon and launched its online store using Shopify Plus.
After some time, it became evident that trueCABLE’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) eCommerce website wasn’t providing enough value to its customers. Sales, conversions, and general user engagement metrics were all underperforming. And with a relatively small team, trueCABLE didn’t have the time, manpower, or technical expertise necessary to enhance its online customer experience. Enter Codal.
When the trueCABLE team came to us in the summer of 2021, they presented a list of web design and development needs, which included:
As an award-winning UX design agency with over a decade of experience building and optimizing eCommerce sites, Codal was a perfect fit for the job. Our team had the technical wisdom, skills, and bandwidth to not only deliver on trueCABLE’s initial list of requirements but also provide a multitude of other UX improvements.
In our initial Discovery stage, the Codal team interviewed trueCABLE’s stakeholders, performed a UX audit of the site, conducted in-depth market research, and analyzed historical business data. With the information gathered from these exercises, we created a roadmap to success—and were ready to start designing, engineering, testing, and deploying new UX features and functionality for the trueCABLE site.
This would involve leveraging many of the tools and capabilities available on Shopify Plus. As a Shopify partner, Codal has utilized the platform to build and optimize many eCommerce sites. Our developers have ample experience integrating the Shopify Plus platform with proprietary software and third-party plugins—from ERP systems, to inventory management solutions, to email marketing tools, and everything in between.
Our most pertinent goal was to increase trueCABLE’s eCommerce conversion rate from 0.82% to at least 2.5%—the industry standard. We also needed to design a superior customer experience to meet the expectations of the brand’s two main target audiences—commercial buyers and DIYers.
The commercial buyer persona represents professional low-voltage contractors—hired to plan and execute cabling, wiring, and networking projects for homes, businesses, and so on. These customers are technical in nature and are mostly focused on purchasing high-quality, low-cost products in high volumes—as this contributes to stronger project results, higher margins, and more work for their business.
To incentivize commercial buyers, we needed to redesign the site to emphasize the quality of trueCABLE’s products. We also needed to create a fast, simple, and transparent process for purchasing items in bulk at a discounted price.
The DIYer—or jack-of-all-trades—persona represents property owners looking to install ethernet cables, connectors, jacks, and couplers, without the help of a professional service provider. Unlike commercial buyers, these customers are not technical and often need help learning how to complete certain projects.
The idea here was to redesign the site so that it—as the old adage goes—not only gives the customer a fishing pole but teaches them how to fish. We wanted the experience of browsing the trueCABLE site to be the virtual equivalent of browsing your local hardware store—where all the necessary supplies are there, as well as direct access to insights and recommendations from low-voltage experts. This would involve revamping trueCABLE’s “Cable Academy”—a section of the site where users can find helpful content on a wide range of topics, from cable management, to fiber optics, to link aggregation.
Our initial UX redesign strategy focused on optimizing—for both desktop and mobile—the following elements of trueCABLE’s online store:
Contact page: We redesigned the contact page to make it easier for commercial buyers to inquire with a trueCABLE sales representative about high-volume purchases. We also made improvements to the site’s live chat integration.
We also decided to refresh several pages on the trueCABLE site with a UI facelift—which is a simple update to the page’s look and feel, without changing any of its inner workings. This included customer account pages, the About Us page, and the log-in/ account creation page.
Finally, the team decided to build out two brand new customer account pages—a “Where’s My Order?” page, where users can quickly check the status of their orders, and a “Project Wishlist” board, where users can save and keep track of items that they plan on purchasing in the future.
Codal’s UX redesign initiatives have created a faster, simpler, and more impactful shopping experience for trueCABLE’s customers. And our collaboration continues to yield positive results.
Codal meets with the trueCABLE team once a week to discuss current website developments, address any UX maintenance issues, and come up with additional strategies to improve customer engagement and sales. We’re also in the process of building a new online store that will operate under the trueCABLE brand.
We’re incredibly proud of the work our team has done with trueCABLE, and are excited to help them continue to shake things up in the low-voltage supplies space.
