A New B2B E-Commerce Website for Fedai Group

In the end it came together so quickly. After exhaustive testing and in-depth data work we are delighted to announce the launch of a new B2B E-commerce website for Fedai Group.

Fedai Group (formerly Ellen Comms UK Ltd) are major suppliers to the Internet infrastructure industry. If you’re reading this, it‘s likely that Fedai had a hand in it. Based in Swindon, UK, Fedai supply contractors nationwide. Products vary wildly in value – from cable ties to giant cable blowing machines (no, we’re not sure either, but we can still sell it).

It’s a small team powering a big business. The team have, for years, relied on prodigious memories and very hard work to manage complex clients, a large product catalogue and large, large orders. Their need for automation was intense.

Ellen Comms once had a retail e-commerce site but it had ceased trading and, for whatever reason, the existing development team stopped responding to their clients. Progress had been stalled for months.

Although you can go to fedaigroup.com and buy a hammer and nails to help you assemble your shed, Fedai exist to supply major contractors – dozens of hammers and thousands of nails. Any website solution we offered would need to be a B2B e-commerce website.

B2B E-commerce, or Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce, refers to the online transactions and exchange of goods, services, or information between businesses, rather than between a business and individual consumers (B2C). B2B E-commerce streamlines the procurement process, reducing costs and increasing efficiency through automated systems, and is essential in sectors like manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution.

We have experience creating e-commerce sites in both WooCommerce and Shopify, in this case the client was already committed to WooCommerce. Ever flexible, we built our solution on that.

We assembled our trusted WooCommerce toolset and installed an additional application which offered everything that Fedai Group needed, and more. Amongst the features we added are:

• Sub Account Management – rather than a single user account for each client, the client themselves can create child accounts for their procurement teams and manage those accounts internally.
• Purchase lists – to ease the process of placing complex, repeat orders clients can store multiple lists of products (with quantities) and re-order them with a single click.
• Tiered Pricing – major clients frequently expect a quantity discount, we created multiple customer groups each of which have their own set of discount rules.
• Payment by Invoice – rather than paying there and then for large orders, trusted businesses can place orders on the site and settle payment by invoice.
• Trade Account Applications – new business clients can request a B2B account directly from the webssite

… and much more.

• After shopping around for a warehousing and dispatch solution, Fedai Group finally settled upon Orderwise – we helped them set it up.
• We customised and branded each customer’s portal.
• Sure, the site meant for big orders, but users might still want to buy things fast, we enabled Add to Cart from directly within the search results.
• With the best will in the world, WooCommerce product administration is pretty clunky. We added bulk editing tools so the client can modify prices and descriptions across the product range.
• With the best will in the world, WordPress menu administration is pretty clunky. We built a low code hero-menu so customers can drill down, deep into the catalogue with just a couple of clicks.
• Out of the box, the B2B software did not match industry-standard terminology. We used some clever back-end trickery to ensure the site matched user expectations.

A New B2B E-Commerce on the Block

It’s been a large project. A great deal of work has been completed to get all the product data in order.

Despite the large number of proucts the site is super-fast and we’ve installed site Litespeed plugin to bring Lighthouse performance into the 90%s.

It’s a brand new site so we’re supporting the launch with six months’ search engine optimisation.

If you’re wanting to sell to businesses, talk to us, we’re experts.