Launching global B2B eCommerce sales for software company

Zuken’s bespoke software options available to purchase online for the first time with complex product customiser

Zuken is a multinational corporation providing electrical and electronic design solutions that support the development of high-tech products and systems.

The company supplies innovative software for design teams and manufacturing facilities located all over the world. We built an eCommerce platform for their European customers.

What the client wanted

About Zuken

Zuken offers best-in-class software platforms for electrical and electronic engineering, and data management.

The team at Zuken wanted to start selling their software products online for the first time. After testing if there was an appetite for eCommerce with their audience, they asked Atomic Smash to support them by designing and developing an online store.

Uncovering complex technical challenges

At the beginning of our collaboration with Zuken, we ran several hybrid workshops with stakeholders from four countries. We followed our standard workshopping process to uncover all of the requirements for the project.

This project came with complicated technical requirements, such as geo-targeting. With customers from anywhere in Europe, the shop needed to cover half a dozen different territories and show specific information for the consumers in each of those different territories.

Different prices, currencies, order processes, and contact details for customer service were among the details that varied between territories, so the website needed to be able to detect where people were coming from to serve the correct information.

The user journey needed to take into account all of these different variables, creating a complex UX and website navigation planning process.

Geo-targeting and international sales

A crucial business challenge for selling internationally through a website is to cater to both customer expectations and business needs.

Our goal was to create a seamless way to funnel web visitors to the right place. This is a bespoke feature that also qualifies the sales for Zuken.

We worked to identify audience groups from certain countries and direct them to specific territory pages so that when a potential customer lands on the site, the system could automatically distribute them to the correct site.

There is variation with some territories selling certain products and not others. Additionally, the sites needed to have the option to be multilingual, the checkout experience needed to calculate and add local taxes, and elements such as CTAs needed to cater to specific territories too.

Another challenge for selling internationally was multicurrency. The currencies that can be used for different territories can be administered within the dashboard.

We’ve future-proofed these features by making it easy for the team at Zuken to add additional countries, edit a country or stop selling in a particular country, so they can work flexibly to respond to business needs without a technical blocker.

Integrations

Implementing integrations to business processes such as Salesforce.com to track sales, which in turn could feed Zuken’s marketing automation engine, Marketo.

International sales with geo-targeting

We built out bespoke features to enable Zuken to sell across countries and territories, each with their own Stripe account integrations mapping to the regional sales office and company setups, to distribute payments to the right places. Everything is administered from one dashboard, even though these feed into several sites, keeping processes efficient and the admin level and time-investment relatively low.

Multiple methods were explored to cater to geo-targeting requirements, some were deemed unsuitable due to the extra workload it would introduce for the Zuken team, particularly with repeated content across each entity site.

We moved forward with a solution to meet a range of requirements such as:

• Automatically redirecting geo-targeted users to the specified financial entity
• Easy content administration across multiple website entities
• Multi-currency support in WooCommerce including a currency switcher for some financial entities
• Multilingual capability and native language configuration
• International taxation rates and company VAT validation

Product customiser for optimal customer experience

On single product pages, we added a product customiser to give customers the power to create their own configuration for how they license a product. This relates to the license type, length of time licensing the product, and number of seats required, among other things.

Previously, product customisation had been a completely manual process and B2B customers had to call a customer service number to tell them specific business requirements.

This improvement allows the customer to get an instant cost, add it to their basket – or save and download a PDF to carry on the internal discussions, and purchase it online via credit card which they weren’t able to do previously; a game changer for B2B customer experience.

Working with time-based subscription licenses, not against them

A key focus in the project was how to present time-based subscription licenses that don’t auto-renew. An account area was set up for buyers to log in, view their license subscriptions and access their purchase histories.

Users can specify product license durations between 1-12 months, so we configured the site to send out reminders the month before license expiration to help users renew if they choose to.

The Sales Order process also required customers to supply a Mac address when making an order, which ties licenses to devices during the order process. We came up with a process that encouraged this to be supplied at point of order whilst also allowing buyers to submit at a later date, so as not to block the purchase process.

Custom save the cart feature

After browsing Zuken’s products, website users can customise the products they want and, if they aren’t ready to purchase, they can save the cart to their account.

Customers can return to their cart, save and retrieve quotes, download invoices and see purchase histories, using the account area. This also enables users to return and continue with a purchase of a custom configuration of products at a later date.

As Zuken sells B2B software products, customers also have the ability to print out PDFs of quotes or product configurations to help them gain approval for a purchase within a business.

Tracking sales with CRM integration and automations

We supported Zuken to gain visibility of valuable sales data within Salesforce with an automated process sending powerful data to the right teams in a fast and efficient way.

Website data populates to Salesforce, automatically creating Opportunities, Accounts and Contact data and gets distributed to the sales team so they can keep track of what people are buying and who’s buying it. We extended the functionality to deliver further, bespoke capabilities and automation.

This was the first ever automated process connecting with Salesforce for this client, and an example of the effective, streamlined business processes that can be achieved through clever website integrations.

We also set up third-party integrations with platforms such as Stripe.