BuySod's large-scale network of sod farms covers thousands of acres across the Southeastern United States, including the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. With over 15 varieties of grass available for sale, BuySod helps property owners and managers create incredible sod solutions for any project. So, whether it's a golf course, park, cemetery, office campus, or sports field, BuySod's world-class sod and grass provide their customers with a quality product at a quality price.
There are inherent difficulties in packaging and shipping a living plant, especially covering large surface areas. Sod needs to be grown, harvested, and shipped relatively quickly. Once harvested, the clock starts ticking. The sod must be delivered and installed as soon as possible. To provide prompt, accurate, and user-friendly selection and checkout, BuySod needed tools to offer:
Purchase Information - did not provide sufficient information or tools to help customers make informed decisions about turf type, area, price, installation, and shipping.
Checkout Process: Their checkout process was not intuitive. It lacked pricing estimates, delivery dates/times, and different delivery options. Customers had to call BuySod's service number to get this information.
Data Sync and Integration - BuySod's customer, purchase, inventory, and shipping data needed to sync between their new ecommerce website and their back-office operations (Acumatica ERP and Descartes Logistics).
We implemented a new BigCommerce website for BuySod. The improved site gives customers the ability to locate, choose, measure, and price their turfgrass solution directly on the website before checkout. In addition to providing a more customer-centric purchasing solution, we implemented new checkout capabilities through BigCommerce and connectivity to their back-office ERP software, Acumatica.
BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that is regularly updated SaaS and offers nearly limitless integration potential. We collaborated with BuySod and improved responsiveness and overall customer satisfaction by developing custom widgets designed to calculate the answers to the most common customer inquiries.
The new Sod Locator, Sod Selector, and Sod Calculator widgets display front and center on the homepage. These custom-built tools enable customers to answer all their top questions about delivery logistics, product type, and area-based pricing in moments.
Using BigCommerce PageBuilder and custom integration with Google Maps, we built a Sod Locator page. This page allows customers to view the SiteOne retailers in their area and sell the products they want.
Using the Sod Selector tool, customers can narrow down BuySod's products based on filters related to their specific needs. For example, certain turf may be far superior for a golf course that sees a lot of rain every year. In this case, "Water Use" would be a crucial filter. For example, if a customer puts sod in a community park, they need turf that stands up to heavy traffic and use. The Lifestyle filter provides the specific types of grass to handle these challenges BigCommerce's PageBuilder allowed us to add additional content on each product page, including external links to educational documents on each specific turf or grass.
Each lawn and sod space is unique. By creating a tool to calculate the exact area and shape of an area to sod, customers can determine the square footage needed for every project. The dropdown menu allows customers to enter measurements for the different geometries that make up the total area of the lawn. Then the tool calculates the total square footage.
These three widgets combined provide a seamless estimate and checkout process for customers. Once the customer enters the product type, shipping location, and total area they need to be covered, BuySod's new BigCommerce website calculates the total price during checkout. Integrating BigCommerce and Acumatica ERP allows BuySod to ensure inventory availability, purchase information, and shipping information.
As a result, we created a better overall customer and checkout experience. In addition, the customer information, purchase details, and data entered by the custom tools are synced between BigCommerce and BuySod's back-office. To meet BuySod's backend needs, we used the integration between BigCommerce and Acumatica ERP to provide the appropriate delivery date options, product availability, and other options for the customer to choose and place their order. Then, based on the product and options the customer decides on the BuySod website, an order is created on the backend of BigCommerce and sent to their back-office.
A customized BigCommerce - Acumatica Connector identifies the BigCommerce order. It creates a Sales Order in Acumatica, which makes a shipping order in Descartes (BuySod's shipping platform) via REST API. The Connector then syncs all Sales Order and shipping information in Acumatica back to BigCommerce, so the customer can access their purchase and shipping confirmation whenever they need it.
Because BuySod didn't use any conversion tracking set up on their old website, they tracked conversions by downloads of sales materials. When Kensium launched their BigCommerce website, we created conversion and goal tracking for the "contact us" page and the use of the sod locator widget we created. This resulted in 357 goal completions. In addition to the lack of conversion tracking, BuySod experienced a large number of foreign bots visiting their website, causing their user tracking and bounce rate to be extremely high. Switching them to BigCommerce, Kensium was able to nearly eliminate the foreign bot visits and provide real visitor and website tracking, providing accurate numbers for reporting.
Successful collaboration, creativity, and BigCommerce technology made this project a success. Through numerous conversations and brainstorming sessions with BuySod, we learned the significant differences between turfgrass varieties and how critical specific turf types are to customers' needs. We came up with the different widgets BuySod wanted to provide during the discovery process on their homepage. The BigCommerce PageBuilder allowed us to create tools enabling customers to drive their process and obtain more accurate quotes. After all, who knows more about what the customer needs than the customer? We implemented Acumatica ERP for real-time sync between the front and back offices, ensuring that data is collected and provides a single source of truth for sales and shipping. The integration of BigCommerceand Acumatica ERP guarantees that customers receive accurate order information in real-time.
Kensium specializes in BigCommerce implementations and our BigCommerce experts are ready for any project. We offer unique value with our experience connecting ecommerce with Acumatica ERP. Contact us today to get started and see what kind of fantastic ecommerce solutions we can create for you.
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