Shopify brings e-commerce feel to B2B furniture shopping

The big business-to-business (B2B) problem

Ahlering knew Hightower needed a modern B2B website experience for its highly customizable products.

Our previous website was very limited—it functioned mostly as a digital catalog, she notes. It was important to us to evolve digitally, unlock more data and insights, and lay the foundation for a dynamic e-commerce experience.

Moreover, our product is quite complex—our previous experience had multiple layers that complicated even the simplest updates.

Hightower required a state-of-the-art B2B solution, and more than that, it needed both third-party tech support and internal management capabilities (read: peace of mind) if anything broke or the team needed to make a change—and everything needed to work together.

Hightower's business relied heavily on a high-touch customer service experience, in which every transaction happened through a salesperson. The company believed there was an opportunity to simplify and streamline some of the customer journey through an improved website design.

It saw Shopify held an opportunity to reduce unnecessary person-to-person contact but wasn't sure where to start—or what its limitations were.

First up: Wireframing

Bluedge USA's comprehensive approach to e-commerce projects always starts with a wireframe.

To develop wireframes, Bluedge met with Hightower teams to define business objectives and the ideal customer experience, then created a bare-bones blueprint of what the site could look like.

Due to the complexity of Hightower's needs, Nico and his team systematically crafted an extensive array of mobile and desktop wireframes that intricately defined each page's functionality and features.

This process ensured stakeholders from departments across the company had time to state their needs, give feedback, and understand exactly how things would work upon completion.

During this first step, Bluedge USA also created a detailed scope of work and project timeline.

Using a Shopify Custom App for a new quote request process

To create a lower-touch B2B "shopping" experience, Bluedge harnessed the capabilities of a Shopify Custom App that seamlessly combined the flexibility of a private server with AWS services.

A Shopify Custom App was the obvious and secure choice, says Nico, to collect a customer's unique project information and send it to both Netsuite and the Hightower project managers. This type of development also ensures future possibilities for new features as new needs arise for Hightower.

The new quote request process allowed customers to browse robust category and product pages with the ability to customize their order on-page and add things to a quote (Bluedge used an easily recognizable drawer cart mechanism for this).

Customers could also intuitively visualize their quote history and project data details in the cart, mirroring the familiar experience of checking orders on any standard e-commerce website.

The last thing you want when it comes to online experience is friction, and we were able to make everything happen from the drawer cart, notes Nico.

The information collected in the quotes is vital for Hightower's project managers, who receive detailed emails (while customers receive an email confirmation), enhancing both communication and user experience. The process is also designed to auto-populate orders into Netsuite, reducing the customer service team's manual work.

The new process allows somebody to self-serve. They can shop like they're used to doing on Amazon, but also get the same level of service from us they would've gotten before, states Ahlering.

Into the detail (pages) with Shopify metafields and metadata

Bluedge fleshed out Hightower's product detail pages using metafields and metadata, going beyond Shopify Variants' limitations.

Product details like dimensions, shipping, warranty, upholstery, and videos were added to the pages and, along with inventory, were integrated with AltSource's PIM system.

The recent metadata and metaobject features from Shopify help us push the limits and share data like text, tech specs, PDFs, files, and images across different pages of the online store, says Nico.

To further lean into the e-commerce experience, an "In the Wild" PDP section was born, which showcases real-life photos of the product for customers to understand and visualize it in different settings.

We tried to take things we were seeing in traditional residential furniture retailers that we know people are getting comfortable with from a consumer shopping experience, says Ahlering.

Complex modular products using the Shopify platform to its fullest

Unlike the basic customization of home furniture (do you want a left- or right-facing sectional?), some of Hightower's products are modular and robustly customizable.

To make these simpler to navigate, Bluedge designed a modular product section with up to nine thought-starter designs (Hightower knew customers often order straight from the inspiration options).

Bluedge USA then tied the inspiration configurations to the products associated with them in Hightower's Shopify inventory. Upon building a quote with the modular product, both the customer and the Hightower team can see all the child parts that create this parent product.

They then get brought to a Hightower customer service associate to complete their order.

This solution married the complete freedom a customer could have with all of the options while also leveraging the design, the technology, and the data infrastructure that we had created for the site. So it was a nice interim solution that we were really proud of, says Ahlering.

Advanced Shopify content pages

Bluedge USA also ensured the rest of the site's content was organized, easily navigable, and interconnected.

Shopify Backend Blocks and Sections were used to create a custom navigation mega-menu and fleshed-out content pages to expand on Hightower product education.

Those content pages included a Designer page with filters that linked back to specific products so customers could see designer information fetched from that content page on each PDP.

On pages with large images and banners, a "Shop the Look" button was created to link to relevant products, and for content with many layers, Shopify Custom Filters were added to help organize.

Across the site, it's now easier to contact a customer service representative, with multiple pages containing contextual links to a custom form that goes directly to Hightower's project managers.

Our Custom Shopify theme is flexible while making sure it stays on brand. Most page sections can be reused on different pages with different content, says Nico of how Bluedge gave Hightower the best technical options in the backend of Shopify while keeping things realistic and easy to use.

Seeing the change and moving forward

After performing quality control (on the design, features, speed, SEO, and ADA compliance) and training Hightower on the new system, the site was finally live.

Ahlering raves that her team can now understand Hightower customers' behavior throughout their shopping journey and therefore better solve their needs along the way—including being able to give them a new self-service experience while providing the full-service experience at all the right moments.

Plus, Hightower has full autonomy to change things on its own and the support of a tech team to keep it going.

We have weekly if not daily relationships with most of our clients. Online B2B retail is a very dynamic industry, so we answer questions, discuss new projects, and help Hightower grow their online business with new ideas and concepts, explains Nico. Offering constant consulting to our clients is a big part of what makes our job so interesting day after day.