M&M Merchandisers is a wholesale retailer that offers a wide range of products, from music equipment, to sporting goods, to electronics.
Services & Technology
The Challenge
M&M Merchandisers was in need of a revamped eCommerce experience. On the front end, the online store was experiencing unsatisfactory customer engagement and sales. And on the back end, legacy tools were producing inefficient workflows and high costs. To drive revenue and improve business scalability for M&M, Codal needed to modernize its front- and back-end systems with superior tools and integrations.
Discovery
Codal kicked the partnership off with a technical audit of M&M Merchandisers’ entire technology stack, from its eCommerce platform, to its ERP system, and everything in between. Through stakeholder interviews, market research, and data analysis, our team was able to create a roadmap to success—which focused on building out integrations between critical business applications and developing custom features and functionality for the eCommerce store.
Development
To architect a truly holistic solution for M&M Merchandisers, Codal’s Shopify experts conducted a theme analysis of the eCommerce platform’s vast library of templates, eventually passing the perfect one on to our design team for customization.
Our designers customized the website’s UX and UI, based on the learned goals and expectations of M&M’s target audience. The main focus here—given the wide range of available products on the site—was making the process of locating and purchasing items as fast and user-friendly as possible.
For the new site, we built out features and functionality that would enable new and existing customers to:
Create a profile and log in.
Track the status of orders.
Receive pricing quotes.
Read product reviews and ratings.
See the quantity of available products.
Search for items by brand, UPC, SKU, VPN, and other filters.
View multiple images for one product and be able to zoom in on those images.
Access a live chat feature for customer support.
Share purchases on social media accounts with a single click.
In addition to a more customized online shopping experience, Codal needed to streamline M&M’s back-office processes to save time, money, and energy—and ultimately provide more value to customers. Our team integrated the business’ ERP system with Shopify Plus to enable:
Automated inventory feeds from the ERP to the site.
Automated order downloads from the site to the ERP.
Automated shipping rate updates from UPS and LTL.
Simple uploading of new product information and images.
Dynamic pricing based on contract and customer type.
On the sales and marketing side of things, we implemented custom features and plugins for recovering abandoned carts, displaying upsell and cross-sell opportunities during checkout, sharing blogs and other helpful content, and processing refunds.
The Result
Codal’s partnership with M&M Merchandisers resulted in a fast, intelligent, and effortless eCommerce experience for both customers and employees.
New and existing customers can enter the site, find what they’re looking for, and checkout with little to no assistance from a sales representative, while employees can automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks—such as updating product information and inventory data—and therefore utilize business resources more efficiently.
Our front- and back-end modernization work for this project has given M&M Merchandisers the foundation it needs to succeed in the rapidly growing wholesale eCommerce space.
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