JT Handtools – B2B Commerce for Sheffield Mesters

Times may have changed, but they’re still there, the Sheffield Mesters – independent workshops making tools. There may be fewer of them, but dotted around the city, they are still to be found: still making noise, still making money. Amongst them are our friends, JT Handtools.

About JT Handtools

JT Handtools make and sell equipment for the autoglass industry. There are fewer of them than you might think. They have been quietly industrious and discretely successful – crafting and sometimes inventing items that are then sold to the kind of national autoglass firms with which you may be familiar.

As you‘d expect, tool making is still a pretty analogue business. There are shelves stacked with heavy metal objects and lots of paper records.

Though JT Handtools have had an e-commerce site for some years – it didn’t really fit. The website was a retail platform when the company’s business is mostly trade and Business to Business (B2B). The site had also aged badly, it was neither responsive nor mobile-friendly, you could access and view it without an SSL and it lacked many features now considered standard.

Its no-one’s fault, back then people didn’t really think in terms of ongoing maintenance for their principal marketing asset.

JT Handtools have automated better than many in light industry. But it’s still a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of manual record keeping. As the company became more successful, it became increasingly reliant on the hard work and long hours of the MD.

So when they came to us to look at the website – we thought we’d set out to see just how many of their problems we could fix …

The Project

First off, the site needed to prioritise B2B trading. By far the largest proportion of the company’s revenue comes from quite a small number of customers. JT rewards those with rapid service and preferential pricing. The website needed to reflect that.

Retail or B2C (Business to Client) still needed to be there but the priority was those big trade customers. As one of the largest e-commerce platforms, Shopify has an extremely healthy application store. This allows developers to create additional shopping functions to extend the core Shopify store. Applications on Shopify tend not to be cheap but some of them are very, very good.

We chose Sparklayer – B2B platform which fulfilled almost all of the client’s needs. Combining it with a small amount of custom code and a couple of smaller applications meant that all the headline requirements were met.

How Did it Turn Out?

Shopify is a remarkable application. It was only as we were meeting to plan the launch that Rich, the client, started to grasp what it can do for the store owner: stock-control, online and offline orders, international shipping codes … all built in.

It was great to see someone becoming genuinely excited about their site. Seeing how much time it would return to him and how much freedom it would give him to get on with running his business.

By the time the site was launched, products were listed straight onto Google Shopping. Within a weekend, the site had gained orders to the value of almost half the money spent on its development.

Need to build your online presence? You need Little Fire Digital – contact us and we’ll get something started.