Artcoe

A Magento B2B storefront designed with Retailers in mind

The Challenge

Artcoe Supplies over 20,000 products to the art, craft and graphics trade, they also have the exclusive UK and European distribution rights for many of the leading brands in their product inventory.

Teaching Art, the parent company of Artcoe, are also leaders in the retail of online art supplies to consumers. With a rapidly increasing demand for B2B sales, they came to Absolute requiring a solution for a storefront appropriate for retailers.

Artcoe needed a solution to provide an online user experience tailored to those buying art supplies for business - A relatively new concept for an industry traditionally based offline and one we were happy to get involved in.

A series of discovery workshops were held to establish a feasible time frame for the design, build and launch of Artcoe. Whilst Teaching Art were happy with how their B2C website served customers, they recognised some challenges to overcome to sell B2B. They were also in need of technical and creative input on what would be the main differentiators for their B2B offering. Through effective planning and communication, a realistic timeframe and brief was established.

Through careful planning and the use of tried and tested tools, we took an iterative approach and worked collaboratively with Artcoe’s key stakeholders. The outcome was an intuitive B2B store with a user experience designed specifically to meet the needs of a business purchasing art supplies online.

Artcoe provides an end-to-end B2B solution to process online orders whilst freeing up valuable admin resource. It offers a number of intuitive features for a user experience tailored specifically for B2B. This includes multiple logins for one company, per customer group pricing and payment on account.

We also implemented a UX friendly alternative to infinite scroll (a ‘load more’ button with progress bar). This is a solution to display a large number of products, whilst keeping the consumer in control of how many they’re looking at (and how many they’ve seen). This innovation makes it easier for consumers to engage more, find what they’re looking for faster, and help increase conversion rate. Alongside this, we have also incorporated a sticky LHN collapsed state with an “open filters” button, affording easy access to expand the filters no matter how far down the page you are.

Through market research with Artcoe customers, a ‘Repeat Order’ function proved to be a must-have. Being an early adopter, this functionality on Artcoe will significantly change consumer behaviour when ordering art supplies in B2B.

We also worked in tandem with Artcoe to develop an innovative colour chip variant selector when selecting paint colours. We lent on their expertise to discern what information was critical to show (and at what point) when choosing a colour. This was especially important when resizing to mobile (when space is at a premium).

The success of the initiative will be measured against KPIs of reducing admin time required to manually process B2B orders by 30%. As well as this, the amount overheads reduce by having a more frictionless order process, and reducing the cost of catalogue printing by 25%. It’s also anticipated the improved user experience will increase repeat B2B orders by 25%.