Online Home Improvement Distributor Builds its Foundation for Success

Maggie Miller, Senior Commerce Content Manager

May 22, 2018

When online retailer DIY Home Center(opens in new tab) was getting started, cloud software was in its infancy. Like many other companies, it was using QuickBooks for accounting and had built its own ecommerce(opens in new tab) site and product information system (PIM).

By 2015, DIY Home Center was running on about six disparate systems that weren’t easily connecting -- causing manual work across the company. The business was seeing double-digit year over year growth after it launched, but employees were spending more and more time managing the tools to run the business instead of focusing on innovating the business.

President Michael Anderson knew that something needed to change to sustain the growth and improve the customer experience.

“We had a lightbulb moment when we realized we could have everything on one unified suite without the hairball of disconnected systems to manage,” said Anderson.

DIY Home Center first focused on getting its technology foundation in place. It went live on NetSuite to power its back-end applications, including inventory and order management, CRM and ERP. By consolidating fragmented data into a single source of customer, order and product information, the company is able to make informed business decisions and provide relevant customer experiences.

Selling decking products and outdoor furniture means summer months are especially busy for DIY Home Center. With the scalability and adaptability of a cloud platform, the company can keep pace with spikes in business. Moving to the cloud has also saved on IT costs and removed the hassles of having to manage systems and software.

Innovating the Customer Experience 

DIY Home Center brought in NetSuite Commerce Agency Partner, Intente(opens in new tab), to design a modern and engaging ecommerce site for its B2B and B2C customers. Prior to the new site, the company only supported a desktop experience. Now with a mobile-optimized site, mobile devices account for 50 percent of traffic.

To further enrich the online experience and drive engagement, DIY Home Center showcases a wealth of educational product content and how to tips on its product pages, ranging from videos, blogs and tutorials.

“We want to be the go-to source for information when our customers have questions,” said Anderson.

To support its B2B buyers ecommerce site(opens in new tab), DIY Home Center developed a Preferred Builder Program. Builders get the same rich online experience that individual shoppers get, but in addition, receive product discounts and enhanced account management capabilities to view invoices, make payments, review past orders and easily reorder products. With these account management activities now online, the company sales reps can focus on offering value-add services to their accounts and building brand loyalty.

The new SuiteCommerce Advanced website has led to the following results:

  • 6 percent increase in average order value.
  • 16 percent increase in conversion rates.
  • 15 percent increase in average time spent on site.

Operational Efficiencies to Scale the Business

Another benefit DIY Home Center experienced with the NetSuite solution is optimizing its order management(opens in new tab) and gaining real-time inventory insight. Before, sales reps used to spend four hours a week processing orders. With a single, centralized system to manage orders from all channels, the process now takes less than 30 minutes.

Drop ship and special orders are easily processed with just-in-time ordering to route purchase orders directly to the supplier, cutting down the need to stock everything in the warehouse and being able to better meet customer demand.

Selling on marketplaces has also become lot easier. With a single source of product content from NetSuite, DIY Home Center can use this content to consistently and accurately publish on Amazon, eBay and Walmart.com, saving time and effort of maintaining separate sets of product information for different sales channels.

“NetSuite is the heartbeat of our company,” said Anderson. “Everything starts and ends with it. If we’re looking to add another system our first requirement is that it must connect with NetSuite.”

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.