How Tile Giant Upgraded to an Omnichannel Experience with Magento Commerce 2

The British tile retailer needed to delight their B2C and B2B customers. Magento delivered.

A platform for Omnichannel growth

Established in 2003, Tile Giant offers a huge range of ceramic wall and floor tiles for kitchens and bathrooms, showcased in bright, clean and clutter-free stores across the UK. In late 2007, after an early period of growth, Tile Giant was acquired by Travis Perkins, Britain’s largest home improvement retailer. This enabled them to grow their 29 stores to 108, and develop a fiercely competitive edge. In the process, they also increased their stock range including natural products like slate, stone, limestone and marble, tools and accessories, and even under-floor heating, bringing more customers to their eCommerce site.

Tile Giant had enjoyed phenomenal growth on Magento 1 Open Source, but the website was not built for the next stage of the company’s growth. Tile Giant needed a platform to work with their 108 retail stores while supporting more than 100,000 online customers — including a growing B2B customer base. They needed powerful native features, including visual merchandising tools, advanced segmentation, easy staging and preview, an advanced content management system (CMS), scalability, and high performance. They also needed to offer an omnichannel experience. They decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce 2.

As a longtime Magento customer, we assessed all options when looking to integrate our website with our 100+ UK stores and electronic point of sale systems (EPOS). It became clear that Magento Commerce would give us the scalability, features, and reliability that we needed.

Mark Hilton
eCommerce Trading Manager, Tile Giant

A site for DIYers and professional contractors

Tile Giant worked with their solution partner, iWeb, to integrate their store with their CSY Vector ERP EPOS system. iWeb worked with CSY to develop a proprietary Magento Commerce connector to integrate Tile Giant’s products, stock, orders, and customer data between the website and their physical stores to facilitate more efficient omnichannel operations. They also greatly reduced the number of extensions used as compared to the old platform, and leaned on the native Magento Commerce 2 functionality to increase conversion and customer satisfaction.

The extensions they did use include: M2EPro to extend their sales to eBay; ebizmarts Sage Pay suite to enable smooth credit and debit card payments; Yotpo reviews to add social proof to each product; dotdigital to power personalized, targeted email campaigns; and Crafty Clicks to speed up customer address input. “The extensions in combination with the powerful native Magento Commerce 2 feature set have enabled us to create a stable base to further grow,” said Mark Hilton, eCommerce Trading Manager, Tile Giant.

The Magento Advanced CMS has enabled Tile Giant’s eCommerce team to quickly build creative landing pages with clear calls to action, which the Marketing team use to drive traffic and increase engagement. The powerful Staged Content functionality in Magento Commerce 2 has removed the need for last-minute changes, allowing the eCommerce and Marketing team to plan and prepare content changes in advance. This has resulted in more efficient workflows and higher quality content.

Meanwhile, the native B2B functionality in Magento Commerce 2 has empowered Tile Giant’s trade customers — professional contractors and builders — to negotiate quotes at times that suit the tradesperson. iWeb also implemented a click-and-collect feature with the physical Tile Giant stores, so customers can reserve 100 square-feet of Palewood tiles and pick up later in-store. A Google Maps-powered store locator enables customers to find their nearest store, driving extra foot traffic into physical retail outlets.

Phenomenal growth

The new Tile Giant site was delivered just six months after the contracts were signed. “iWeb has been pivotal in the successful delivery of the new website, and will be key to our future strategies,” said Hilton. The website launch, in January of 2019, resulted in positive feedback internally and with Tile Giant customers. The contemporary look and feel of the eCommerce site, coupled with the enhanced customer journey, has resulted in Tile Giant meeting all of their success metrics, and in some instances, far exceeding them: Mobile conversion rate has nearly doubled thanks to the responsive Magento Commerce 2 storefront. Overall revenue has risen by 28 percent, and conversion rates across the business have increased by 35 percent.

“The Magento ecosystem has allowed us to build a powerful commerce website with B2B features for a fraction of the cost of other platforms,” said Neil Boughton, Technical Director, iWeb. “We chose a finite selection of third-party modules to complement the core functionality, along with customizations such as a tile area calculator with dynamic pricing based on the square meter.” And the proof was in the pudding: Thanks to Magento Commerce 2, Tile Giant has enjoyed a 70 percent increase in time-saving, and they’ve saved a forecasted £22,000 ($28,720 USD) in development costs for 2019.

We have saved significant internal and development costs with the improvements in merchandising and content creation that Magento Commerce 2 has given us.

Mark Hilton
eCommerce Trading Manager, Tile Giant

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Originally published at https://magento.com.