Confex wholesaler KCS achieved incredible adoption from its customers after setting up online and as Director Chander Singh explains, it was all by design
Hi Chander. Tell us a bit about yourself and KCS
We’re a food, drink and supplies wholesaler, but we have a much wider-ranging experience. Me and my business partner, Kiran, ran a company in a different sector previously and developed a lot of knowledge from there about how to operate a successful online business.
How have you achieved such a growth in online sales so quickly?
The success we've had comes down to how we've done the graphics and executed categories on b2b.store, as well as the overall app format. From our previous experience, we knew it was important for graphics to be clear and attractive, with each listing having a product image as part of the description. We have more than 50 categories, making it easier for customers to find what they want.
We took inspiration from a few wholesale eCommerce websites, but Bestway stood out. We noted how others did their CV classification, tried to implement ideas we had into KCS, mapped out all our products and laid down all the categories and sub-categories. We built it to the requirements we needed.
Is it a constant evolution?
We're testing extensively, so if I put something in a category, we'll always be checking it. As an example, we made all out-of-stock items invisible based on customer feedback and saw a 5-8% increase in order value as a result.
You had 38% customer adoption online within four months of launching. How did you achieve this?
We've created a video that I give to customers that's an idea of how efficient and how quickly you can place an order, and include the link to our b2b.store in our email signatures. We also use WhatsApp and share weekly offers with our customers which gets good traffic – when customers see the offers, they register for the portal. You can see 60% of our online customers are there by recommendation, which we've achieved by asking our customers to suggest the links to any service or promotion we're offering to people in their networks and asking them to place an order with us.
What do your customers love about b2b.store?
For our bigger customers, the b2b.store is basically a time saver for them because they shop our products without coming into the depot – all they need to do is send the order across, we'll do the heavy lifting and they just come to collect it. It's easy to access and gives the customer peace of mind that everything will be taken care of.
Do you have any more plans for future development?
The next step will be to launch a website with good SEO that will link directly to our eCommerce. I've seen big brands such as Hollister, Asos and Asda do this pretty much day in and day out, so I'll take some ideas from them and try to implement that into what we're doing at KCS.
KCS's eCommerce success in numbers
- 15% of KCS's overall turnover was online within four months of launch
- 38% customer adoption in the first four months post-launch
- 742% increase in online sales from end of month one to end of month three
